Bonobos is one of the first online-first built brands. They’re truly a pioneer in the e-commerce startup space.
I spent a year in-house at Bonobos leading brand advertising and skunkworks creative projects.
First Print Catalog
Besides being an innovator in the digital space, Bonobos was one of the first e-com brands to adopt an older form of marketing: print catalogs. I worked on the first four Bonobos print catalog projects during 2013. In the catalog business you can “purchase” mailing list from demographic marketing companies, allowing you to mail to new potential customers. This presented a unique opportunity, how do you introduce to someone an e-commerce brand via an analog catalog? Our catalog projects became 1/2 brand storytelling and 1/2 product merchandising.
Video Spots
Being a startup we were tasked with making the most of every dollar spent. Seasonal photoshoots were catalog driven, the priority was to capture the necessary stills to design the print catalog. We wanted to experiment with some video advertising, so I came up with a concept along with our production company Bindery NYC to shoot slo-motion video clips during the catalog shoot. This allowed us to shoot the same models and situations as the still photography without disturbing the catalog shoot. We turned this short slo-mo clips into :15 instagram videos, that feel like a moving print ad.
Manifesto
Though the brand was years old at this point we had never created a brand book or any sort of guidelines, the creative subsisted on the consistency of the same great copywriter. In the beginning of the FA13 creative process I worked with our copywriter Dane Huckelbridge on developing a manifesto type piece to help lead the creative efforts. After the shoot we cut this video together and had our copywriter provide the voiceover. Though never designed to run publicly, the video was a nice internal guide on the brand attitude and voice. The manifesto text ran as an opening spread in that season's catalog, shown below the video
