How one Trader Joe's superfan amassed over 1 million Instagram followers.Beneath the sea of TikTok dances, Fashion Nova sponsored content and the Kardashians, there is a subset of Instagram dedicated to hardcore Trader Joe’s fans.Natasha Fischer, the woman behind arguably the most popular Trader Joe’s account, @traderjoeslist, said she started posting long before Trader Joe’s started its own Instagram account in 2017.
.“I started the account in 2008 or 2009 when I was working as an accountant and I was just not happy.
I lived with some girls in a duplex and we’d all go grocery shopping together," Fischer told In The Know.According to Fischer, her friends had no idea what Trader Joe’s was at the time and were intimidated by the store’s lack of familiar, go-to brands.
.“Then in 2008, the world basically fell apart because of the financial crisis and I got laid off and was unemployed for six months,” Fischer explained.
.Fischer stopped posting updates to her Trader Joe’s blog in the meantime until she logged back into her Twitter account months later and saw she had 6,000 followers.After hitting 400,000 to 5000,000 followers on Instagram, Fischer started getting offers for partnership posts.“I started integrating myself more into it and more brands started reaching out,” she explained.When the pandemic hit, she was laid off from a job she loved: location scouting for a pizza chain.“It was the right thing to do for me,” she said about losing the job.
“I wasn’t putting my heart and soul into what I loved.
It pushed me out of the nest and I’ve been doing this on my own since.”.With her brand now at more than 1.4 million followers, Fischer knows how to run what started as a fan account like it’s a proper business.