On a Mission to Banish the Saggy Bottom
WHEN women try on pants, the first thing they do is turn around and look over their shoulders into the mirror. If Andy Dunn has his way, men will soon do the same.
Mr. Dunn, the co-founder and chief executive of Bonobos, an e-commerce company that sells men’s pants, is on a mission to give American men a complex about their backsides. The pants’ distinguishing feature is that they eliminate the sagging bottom of ill-fitting trousers.
“It’s like a shame campaign,” Mr. Dunn said.
As much as he is trying to improve the way men’s clothes fit, Mr. Dunn may be having more impact on the way men buy clothes. Bonobos, which is based in New York, has no stores in which people can try on the pants, even though its pitch is superior fit. Instead, it aims to use various Web technologies to make clothes-buying less of a chore.
Bonobos would not have broken even last year on $1.6 million in revenue if it had to pay for stores and sales clerks, he said. And the men it is focusing on — those who hate to shop and have not given much thought to the way their clothes fit — prefer the ease of going online and choosing from few options.
Most men have been brought down by “the revenue-maximizing Gap or Banana Republic cut,” made to fit the widest group of people, Mr. Dunn said. The secret to the fit of Bonobos pants, which start at $88 for basic khakis and go up to $188 for silk-lined wool, is the curved waistband, said Mr. Dunn, whipping off his belt to demonstrate how a properly fitting waistband arcs in the back. The $50 Gap versions do not curve.
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Bonobos’ other co-founder, Brian Spaly, started making the trousers in 2007, while he and Mr. Dunn were housemates at Stanford Graduate School of Business. Mr. Spaly, a former athlete, could not find pants with both a slim waist and enough room in the rear and thighs.
The Bonobos pants, which come in straight leg and boot cut, are best for those with athletic builds, although it is developing pants for slimmer and bigger men.
Mr. Dunn is well aware that manufacturers could easily replicate Bonobos pants, so he is trying to distinguish the company with customer service, convenience and technology.
Many shoppers still prefer going to stores over shopping online because of the in-person help. But some unlikely online marketers have succeeded, like Zappos.com, the shoe seller that was acquired by Amazon.com for $1.2 billion this month. It offers free shipping both ways, allows returns for a year and answers customers’ questions on the phone and online.
Bonobos also offers free shipping both ways along with lifetime returns, and encourages people to buy and return several pairs of pants to find the right fit. Its so-called style ninjas are available by phone, e-mail and, soon, video chat, where they will assess fit and give style advice.
A few other online stores also sell men’s pants, with different marketing strategies. One, Cordarounds, is a two-man design shop that makes a rare item: pants made of corduroy with wales that run horizontally, instead of up and down. It manufactures a couple of hundred of each style and then moves on to the next. Another, called Bills Khakis, is more concerned with durability and comfort than the style and fit that Bonobos’ customers seek. It also sells in stores.
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Bonobos, named after a promiscuous species of primates, is now preparing to pitch the pants to women with advertisements on Web sites including Refinery29.com and Jezebel.com and in magazines like OK! The ads urge women to “give the gift that fits” to husbands, boyfriends, sons and fathers. “Let your man wear the pants this holiday,” proclaims the ad copy in the internally produced campaign.
Men are being pitched too. An ad for Bonobos that appears in the November issue of Men’s Journal features a photo of a male from the waist down, modeling pants under the headline, “Here’s your chance to tell women, ‘Hey, my eyes are up here.’ ”
The ad, by the New York office of the Gate Worldwide, continues, “When you wear the world’s best-fitting pants, women tend to stare. Even gawk. If you can handle being seen as a sex object, visit bonobos.com and order a pair.”
During Bonobos’ first year it advertised only on Facebook, aiming at affluent men in the financial sector; it now casts a wider net. “We have tons of customers who are school teachers, because they have to wear a comfortable nonjean every day, and those finance guys are actually wearing a suit four times a week,” says Scott Peterman, vice president for marketing.
One advantage online stores like Bonobos have over those in the mall is the ability to track exactly who buys things, which sizes and styles they prefer and whether they return them.
Eventually, shoppers on the Bonobos Web site will have a personalized home page, based on what they like and their size and body type. Bonobos is also planning marketing campaigns that will include surprising pants customers with a free dress shirt.
Bonobos, which could bring in $4 million this year, plans to stick to the few types of men’s clothes that have fit problems, a lesson learned the hard way when a swimsuit line sold poorly. Men, it seems, do not have a problem with swimsuits that cling or droop. Bonobos makes shorts and polo shirts and is working on dress shirts that do away with the “muffin top” created by excess fabric around the waist. And it plans to make suits.
Bonobos is “crowdsourcing” the design of the dress shirts using TweetSwell, a program for conducting surveys on Twitter, to figure out what people want. This has provoked heated debates over things like whether there should be a placket and whether cuffs should have one button or two. Even men who aren’t sure what a placket is (it is the vertical strip of fabric sewn onto the front of the shirt to reinforce the button holes) seem to care whether or not their shirts have one.
Only about 10 percent of men can be classified as fashionistas, said Marshal Cohen, the chief industry analyst at NPD Group, though that is up from 3 percent two decades ago. “I can’t tell you how many times I stop a guy in a store and say something doesn’t fit right, and he says, ‘I don’t care,’ ” Mr. Cohen said. “So he’s got a big hill to climb.”
Ray Kramer, 27, a debt researcher at Bank of America Merrill Lynch who calls himself a fashion novice, has already started the uphill trudge. His wife, Dominika Smereczynski, often complained about the way his trousers fit, and was relieved when the seat of his pants tautened, with Bonobos’ help.
On a recent morning, Mr. Dunn visited Mr. Kramer’s closet, and took out a pale blue Brooks Brothers dress shirt. “Billowing. Billowing!” he exclaimed. “You should throw this out.” Another, blue with black checks, was deemed as a source of muffin top.
Mr. Kramer began to nod. “I see most guys at work, even the skinny guys, with this big puff coming out the back,” he said. “It’s kind of embarrassing, I don’t have shirts that fit well.”
Mr. Dunn had succeeded at his goal of giving another guy a fashion complex. “Oh man, we can help him so much,” he said on the way out the door.
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