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The e-commerce team beat its revenue goals by 50% in 2022 and roughly 20% last year.
FTB—For the Boys. It’s not just a rallying cry; it’s also a strategy to rope in a potentially dedicated set of customers.
Mizzen+Main is a digitally native menswear brand that has matured in the TikTok era and is using all the online tools at its disposal. The company, founded in 2012, has a social media strategy of not explicitly promoting its products but rather creating content that appeals to its target demographic: men.
- Specifically, dudes with white-collar jobs in their late 20s and early 30s who don’t want to wear Peter Millar because “that’s [their] dad’s brand,” or don’t want to wear Chubbies because they’re past their college days, Bethany Muths, the company’s chief marketing officer, explained to Retail Brew.
- Mizzen+Main’s recent social media success has also coincided with a retail expansion that led to four more physical spaces opening last year, bringing its total to 10.
- In 2022, Muths said the e-commerce team beat its revenue goals by 50% and then roughly 20% the next year.
“It’s great that we can bring a new customer into the brand, and it’s great that they purchase from us once, but I think the key is, ‘How do you get them to continue doing repeat purchases, continue to engage with the brand, open our emails, [and] correspond back and forth with us?’” she said.
Hook ‘em in: Many of Mizzen+Main’s new customers these days are coming from social media as a result of the brand’s viral skits and clips. It’s not exactly unusual to see podcast or skit content on Instagram and TikTok, but a viral post that catches the algorithm with the brand’s name sprinkled into the background is all Mizzen+Main needs to start converting real customers.
The brand’s latest viral hit called “Thanks for the Time” is a 90-second podcast-style clip of three of their employees talking about the tricks they deploy to do simple math.
- Simple premise, fairly low effort, and not a word about the actual product, but it’s relatable, which is why it quickly became the company’s most engaged video to date with 26 million views between TikTok and Instagram as of Jan. 9.
- That has translated to 16.5 million unique accounts reached and Mizzen+Main has gained 63,500 followers in the month of December.
- Within the first week of posting, Muths said 30% of users coming to the site were new customers, and looking at revenue coming from organic social media, she added that 2023 figures outpaced 2022, which means some of that 30% has translated into new purchases.
“Now, if they viewed us on the website, now we kind of got you in our marketing funnel,” she said. “And so I think we’ll probably see the impacts of those in January and February of next year—what happens with our revenue 30, 60 days after this happens because now they’re starting to get all our marketing pieces.”
