DTC Briefing: How Bonobos and MeUndies are finding ways to reach new audiences through brand refreshes

The intimates brand MeUndies recently rolled out a new campaign called “Welcome to the Underworld,” which hones in on the idea that MeUndies is a brand that helps people express themselves. Meanwhile, menswear brand Bonobos — which has cycled through a variety of owners over the past five years and is now owned by a group that includes WHP Global, Simon Property Group and Brookfield Properties — last month rolled out its first major brand campaign in two years called “Fit is a Feeling.” Other companies at a similar lifecycle, like Allbirds, have also been rolling out new brand campaigns over the past couple of months, ahead of the all-important holiday season. 

All of these companies are at a similar inflection point. In the 10-plus years since they launched, the market has gotten more crowded. In turn, executives at these companies say they are focused on raising brand awareness and finding new ways to communicate their value propositions to different sets of customers. It’s a challenge that every brand undergoes at multiple points in its lifecycle. 

But successfully navigating these challenges is also key to determining which companies are able to transform from being a young digitally-native startup into simply a brand. To introduce themselves to a new set of consumers who didn’t have purchasing power when these brands were first founded.

Refining the brand voice
MeUndies, founded in 2011 as a subscription underwear service, has sold over 30 million pairs of underwear since launching. It is known for selling funky prints with different emojis, as well as collections with different seasonal themes like fall faves. In turn, Ariel Stoddard, chief revenue officer at MeUndies, said that the brand “has always been rooted in this idea of self-expression.” 

Stoddard joined MeUndies in March, and broadly, she’s responsible for helping MeUndies drive growth and revenue and figuring out what levers to pull in order to achieve that. 

One of Stoddard’s priorities, she said, was fine-tuning MeUndies’ brand platform: that is, coming up with a defining message for what the company stood for and figuring out ways to iterate upon that over time. “It’s not to say that we haven’t had a platform in the past, but I will say I don’t think that we have internally verbalized it in quite this way,” Stoddard said.

Working with the creative agency Unentitled, MeUndies came up with the campaign “Welcome to the Underworld.” The hero images for the campaign consist of split-screen imagery. The top half of the image showcases people out and about: someone hiking or a couple posing together. The bottom half of the image then showcases the models in their MeUndies underwear. The idea of the campaign is centered around how MeUndies helps people explore “what’s beneath the surface,” according to Stoddard. The campaign will live across organic and paid social, direct mail and out-of-home, among other channels. 

“What we love about it is that it is actually quite broad, so that gives us the room and flexibility to stick with this brand platform of the ‘underworld’ over time and bring it to life in lots of different ways,” Stoddard said. 

She added: “I think, in this current moment in time, the market has become increasingly crowded.” In turn, MeUndies is focused on resonating with its current customer base while also appealing to new customers and thinking through, “how do we cut through the noise of everything that’s happening in the market right now?” Stoddard said.

Finding new ways to reach younger consumers
Krissie Millan, chief marketing officer at Bonobos, acknowledged that the brand has “been a little bit quiet for a while.”

Bonobos’ last major brand campaign was in 2022, when the menswear brand tapped comedian Nick Kroll for a series of ads. Over the years, Bonobos has changed hands — the menswear brand, founded in 2007, was bought by Walmart in 2017. Then, in 2023, it was sold to Express and WHP Global. Finally, after Express filed for bankruptcy earlier this year, Bonobos was bought by a new consortium of owners. 

The newest brand campaign, called “Fit is a Feeling,” was born out of a brand refresh Bonobos did last year, Millan said. That brand refresh, she said, entailed “honing in on the specifics of our positioning and our target consumer.” 

Bonobos’ value proposition has always been around fit and the idea that it offers a better, more modern fit than staid menswear brands. But what Bonobos specifically wanted to do was figure out how to communicate that value proposition to younger consumers who were just kids when Bonobos first burst onto the scene in 2007. The task then was to figure out “how to make the brand relevant for that cohort.” 

Overall, Millan said, “We knew that our target consumer is the ambitious guy and the guy who’s driven and really wants to always achieve well in their lives.” But reaching that younger demographic entails tapping different channels. So Bonobos is doing more on YouTube and Reddit, she said. As part of this new campaign, Bonobos is also running newsletter and podcast sponsorships with Morning Brew, she said, and doing an event with them toward the end of the month. Bonobos is also running out-of-home activations in markets it hasn’t traditionally tapped, like Atlanta, Nashville and Washington, D.C. 

Although Bonobos’ value proposition is centered around fit, the brand also needed an emotional hook for this campaign. So, Bonobos coalesced around the idea of “fit as a feeling.” That is, finding the right fit will help men be more confident and achieve more. 

Millan said that Bonobos will continue to iterate on this campaign over the next year. Overall, what Bonobos has identified, she said, is that “there is a new crop of target consumers that is just there and that is waiting to kind of hear from us.”

“There is a lot of opportunity for the brand to be further known out there, and the path to growth is really trying to reach new audiences for us,” she said.

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