When Underwear Becomes Art with The Hallway and Boody

LBB’s Casey Martin spoke to Boody’s global head of brand and marketing, Ruth Haffenden and The Hallway’s creative director, Jessica Thompson on taking the courage to look beyond Boody as a product in order to make an impression instead. 

Ruth> Quite simply, we just wanted women to stop and feel understood. Underwear advertising can be SO samey and, dare I say, shallow? So much it’s just wallpaper in the thousands of pieces of content our brains process everyday - happy people frolicking in their underpants. Yet at the same time we knew that 50% of women were ripping off their uncomfortable bras the moment they got home, every single day; wearing undies that itch, dig and rub, and taking it as an accepted fact that this was the best they’ll get from their underwear drawer. Those two things felt completely incongruent. This campaign needed to be deliberately emotionally provocative if we had any hope of driving any meaningful reappraisal of these long standing behaviours. 

Jessica> The experience described in our work for Boody isn’t an exclusively female problem, but it is a problem experienced by pretty much all women. So, it was so important to us that from the agency and client teams working on it to the crew on set, this was a very, very female-driven project. We wanted to say something meaningful and relatable, to make women feel understood, to be honest and empathetic about their discomfort, and to really mean it when we said we had a solution for them. Authenticity is a word that gets bandied about a lot, but in the case of our work with Boody, achieving authenticity was a very compelling ambition.

Ruth> “Make Yourself Comfortable” is such a hard-working brand line. Whilst the campaign focuses on the physical comfort of organically grown bamboo and the importance of being comfortable, the statement also enables us to seamlessly talk, about our considerable sustainability credentials and continued innovation in the apparel industry.

Whether it’s the marine safe, water-soluble packaging we’re developing, the pilot program underway to deliver Australia’s first underwear recycling program, or simply the mindful way we design and order our products to ensure nothing goes to landfill out of season, the line also provides a consistent invitation for consumers to ‘make themselves feel more comfortable’ with the decisions they make about who they are choosing to buy from. 

Ruth> You are right, that was a tricky one to pitch to the board! Whilst we had this compelling and widely acknowledged consumer truth. This could have been a very boring, functional ad-cue of more people frolicking in their comfy undies.

The inspiration behind the piece was really, throw out what you know about underwear ads. The brief is to make people stop and feel understood. Is it a risky move to not show them the immediate solution is your product? No, not if the rest of your marketing funnel is working it’s little bamboo socks off. 

With this in mind we got to the creative solution pretty quickly, the discussion really focused on the photographic treatment. How do we show these marks in a way that doesn’t overstate the problem or feel alarmist?  How do we ensure the women look powerful and not vulnerable? How do we create close ups that attract attention, but don't look, on first glance, like a skin cancer ad? And how do we do all of this and still celebrate women's bodies as the work of absolute art that they are? 

Jessica> With the dual mission of launching a new brand positioning and increasing brand awareness, it was important that our work for Boody did something that the competitors weren’t doing. And so often in advertising, where we sustain industries by selling solutions, that ‘something’ is shining a big spotlight on the problem. Turning this brief around and around in our heads, we kept coming back to discomfort as the most powerful way to articulate Boody’s positioning, “Make Yourself Comfortable”.  During our first concepting session for this project, we wrote on a bit of paper, ‘Sometimes, the best impression you can make is no impression at all’ and stuck it to the wall. And, coming back to that thing about empathy and authenticity, we felt the most striking way to show that was to show the marks so many women come home to at the end of the day and say, you don’t have to feel this way anymore.

Ruth> It’s so great to hear that. ‘It needs to look like art’ was the thing we kept coming back to again and again in the planning stages of this campaign. It informed everything from our casting to our choice of photographer. Hannah Scott-Stevenson was the best decision we could have ever made, she just ‘got it’ so deeply from day one and was so aligned with what we wanted to achieve, provoking beauty and power in an environment where the models could have felt quite vulnerable in their nakedness.  

The photography treatment was one of the most empathetic I have ever encountered, a closed set beyond the model and Hannah, a small, female support cast, positive guided uplifting direction. A stark contrast to your average brand shoot with hundreds of people milling around eating bagels. Although this insight came from a fairly universal female truth, the resulting shots came from a 1-to-1 human connection on set and models who had been cast because they believed in it. 

Jessica> All the time we were working on this project, we were aware we were walking on tightropes that separated something very good from something that could fall completely flat. How could we make an impactful underwear campaign without showing underwear? How could we show flesh, up-close, reddened, painful and harmed, without descending into what our design director, Genevieve Read, called ‘bodygore’? We had to treat it like art. Women’s discomfort and pain is already hushed and swept under rugs at best, and at worst, completely disregarded. We couldn’t let this campaign add to any feelings of shame women might already feel about their bodies. We knew that to do this right, we had to look at women through the lens they deserve to be seen through all the time: as valid, present and beautiful. Full credit goes to our photographer Hannah Scott-Stevenson for completely getting this imperative from day one and bringing it to life more exquisitely than even we could’ve hoped for.

Ruth> Absolutely. In my mind, good insights resonate, a good communication of that insight sparks a conversation and that’s really what we were looking for. This impacts such a range of women and is also intergenerational. When did we all come to accept this being ok? 

Jessica> Yes! This campaign is by women, for women. Unlike so much of the underwear advertising that’s out there now and has been out there since time began, this work for Boody is unequivocally not for the male gaze. The whole point was to say to women like you and me, this sucks, we get it, we hear you, and we have something that might help. It’s so great to hear you say that it gave you this feeling of camaraderie. I hope lots of other women felt it too.

Ruth> So much! I sat on the agency side of the fence for over a decade, where retrospectively, now, it felt easier to rant about the importance of brave ideas, but sitting on the brand side, that bravery isn’t so simple, it has huge commercial and corporate impact as well as personal accountability. The data, the story telling, the stakeholder campaigning required to unite people around an idea shouldn't be underestimated. It feels easier now to see how good ideas can get watered down in the process. 

 

The biggest hurdle though probably came in the shape of advertising standards. JCDecaux and our media partner, SPEED, were fabulous in guiding us to a creative outcome that would be approved, but it did flag some really startling injustices. I can walk past imagery of women bent over in stockings and nipple covers, in the mall whilst out with my young children, and yet a hint of sideboob will have people clutching their pearls? What we deem “sexual content” needs a pretty quick re-dress if we want to do a better job of normalising female bodies and gender roles in the media. 

Jessica> This was a real exercise in trust for all of us. A lot of marketing teams would’ve said no to this work, but since the day we met Ruth and her team, we knew there was magic brewing. It was there throughout production with Hannah and the models. It was in the collaboration with our media partners, too, who advised on the best way to treat our images to get them to go live without diluting our message. By trusting each other to make the right calls, to act in each other’s interests and the interests of the work, we’ve produced something that we’re all especially proud of, that I think is going to have a real impact on Boody, and that I hope will make a difference to the women who wear it.

Ruth> We’ve been flooded with messages from our Boody community as well as those that are discovering the brand for the first time, just reaching out to show their support or to say “Yes!! finally!!”  If the objective was to get people to stop and feel understood and even spark a conversation we’re certainly on track.  

What’s next for Boody? Well we’re on a mission to become one of the most loved sustainable underwear brands in the world, so a fair amount. In the next 12 months that means the roll out of  a national first underwear recycling initiative, working towards our B-Corp recertification, super charging our presence in the US and UK markets, a number of key product launches which double down on our ownership of comfort, strengthening our global retail footprint, all underpinned by a continued commitment to build the Aussie brand with customer first thinking.

Jessica> You know, I was nervous the day before the campaign launched. Even though I felt so assured about the decisions we’d made as a team and for the brand, I worried that the public would find something about it offensive - too much skin, the wrong kinds of bodies, maybe. But we’ve been overjoyed by the way it’s been received. People are embracing it in exactly the way it was intended. And as for what’s next for Boody, whatever it is, we’re just really looking forward to being a part of it.