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Why Singapore founders keep mixing them up
Countless times, we've seen a company's Instagram page issue an apology for something a founder said, liked, or posted in their own personal capacity.
The opinion was never the brand's but why did the apology have to be?
The moment a founder's face becomes indistinguishable from their company's logo in most people's minds is exactly where most founder-brand disasters actually happen.
This mix-up is notoriously common in Singapore, and it's not really a discipline problem—it's structural. Most founders outside the big big companies don't have the luxury of a separate spokesperson or a communications team standing between them and the public. Long before they could decide if that's a good idea, they are the brand's face. In a market this small—where a founder's personal life and business life are often the same social circle, a founder's personal account becomes the business account in everything but name.
Source: @beyondthevines
The 2023 backlash faced by Beyond The Vines, the Singapore fashion label known for its Dumpling Bag totes, shows exactly how this plays out when it goes wrong. Husband-and-wife founders Daniel Chew and Rebecca Ting, who built the brand into one of the most recognisable in Singapore fashion since 2015, came under fire overnight after followers noticed Chew's ties to a pro-Israel account during the Israel-Gaza war.
A day after Chew addressed the matter on his personal Instagram, Ting hosted a livestream on Beyond The Vines' page to launch their brand's new bag and apparel collection. Partway through, she turned to address the controversy directly: "This is me. I am here. I am going to address it, but I don't wanna hang around that point for too long. I know you understand it. Because I do wanna move on. I do wanna talk about this collection. We do want to launch this thing!"
Ting wanted to move on but obviously the audience didn't. In a world where what you eat for breakfast, who you're meeting for coffee, and what you privately follow online are all there publicly, there's no real line left separating who you are from what you do—so how is an audience supposed to move on that easily? Commenters criticised her light, jovial tone as inappropriate given the subject, some accused her of speaking from a position of privilege, and others called for an outright boycott of the brand's products.
Not a week later, Ting and Chew issued a formal statement on Beyond The Vines' Instagram page, acknowledging that their earlier words and manner had been insensitive and inappropriate, and apologising properly for how the matter had been handled.
"Your brand is what people say about you when you're not in the room."
—Jeff Bezos
So what actually separates a personal brand from a company brand, if the same person is running both? The trouble starts when nobody, including the founder, is entirely sure which "you" is actually being discussed. A personal brand is what people think of you—your judgment, your values, your mindset, built over years of how you show up, on and off a company payroll. A company brand is what people think of the business—its product, its pricing, its reliability, its values as an institution, which are supposed to outlast any person's mood on a given Tuesday. The two can absolutely overlap; a founder's personality is often exactly why customers trust the business in the first place. But overlapping isn't the same as being identical, and treating them as one with one set of rules.
None of this means founders need to build some sterile, fully separated persona, scrubbed of anything personal, posting only product shots and quarterly updates. For most small businesses here, that's neither realistic nor actually good for the brand. Even I, writing this article right now, know my own opinions will become my brand. And I have to say, I'm ready to be judged. People like buying from a person, not a faceless entity. The fix isn't separation but it's knowing, before you post, which hat you're wearing, and being honest with yourself about who's actually going to read it that way regardless of your intention.
The founders at Beyond The Vines weren't wrong to post it. After all, it was their own Instagram Story. The mistake, if there was one, was assuming a personal account stays personal once enough people that ain't your friends are watching.
I was left wondering, in a market as small and connected as Singapore's—is your business branding really about your business? Or is it more about you?