Duluth Trading ads win eyeballs

Duluth Trading Co. has nearly doubled its sales in just two years, thanks in no small part to a giant angry beaver and an animated buck-naked underwear guy.

In an unforgiving environment for apparel retailers, the Wisconsin-based designer of casual clothing and rugged workwear stands out from the crowd like one of its quirky commercials.

With headquarters about 20 miles south of Madison in the little village of Belleville, the company, which sells primarily online and through catalogs, took in $304 million last year — up from $163 million in 2013.

The raw dollar increase alone would be the envy of many much-larger clothing retailers. In percentage terms, Duluth’s growth is positively stellar.

And a key factor in that success is an offbeat marketing style — simple, direct and amusingly self-aware — that is widely applauded by industry experts.

“Doing a great job of building their brand,” said Neeraj Arora, University of Wisconsin- Madison marketing professor and executive director of the school’s A.C. Nielsen Center for Marketing Research.

“It certainly stands out,” said Ned Brown, group creative director at the Cramer-Krasselt ad agency.

“One of the best marketers around,” said UW marketing professor Thomas O’Guinn.

“What they’re doing,” said Dave Hanneken, incoming executive creative director at Milwaukee ad shop Hoffman York, “is fantastic.”

And just what is it that Duluth is doing?

The essence, according to John Talbott, a longtime retail executive turned educator (Indiana University), may be that the rapidly growing retailer is tapping into “the construction worker in all of us.”

Duluth’s roots are in the building trades. The firm was started in 1989 by a pair of carpenters in Duluth, Minn., who invented a tool organizer they dubbed the Bucket Boss.

The company still sells hardgoods — an eclectic assortment that ranges from ratchet drivers to books such as “Outwitting Squirrels” — but its main focus is on apparel.

Designed to meet the demands of construction workers and the like, the great majority of the clothing actually is purchased by customers who have nothing to do with the building trades.

But even if we aren’t much good at using a speed square or toenailing a stud, many of us admire those with such skills. And as we putter around the house, we just might want a pair of high-quality carpenter pants with lots of pockets for all those tools we sort-of know how to use.

“They sell to the real authentic trade guys,” O’Guinn said, “but they also sell most of their stuff to people who want to take on the quality of the authentic trade guys.… It’s brilliant marketing.”

The appeal to our respect for “real guys, people who are out there working” reminds O’Guinn of one of the most famous ad campaigns ever — the Marlboro Man, who hitched the fortunes of a cigarette brand to the mythology of the American cowboy.

But that was all image; Duluth’s work clothes are in fact vetted by and designed for the demands of people in the trades. And the firm’s marketing draws added strength by anchoring itself to specific attributes of the clothing — the toughness and flexibility of Fire Hose Work Pants, for example, or the sweat-wicking, odor-fighting capabilities of “Buck Naked Underwear.”

“What’s nice about it is it’s locked in to something real,” Brown said.

That doesn’t always happen in the creative fervor that produces advertising.

“It’s easy for marketers to forget about the real benefit of what you’re selling,” Hanneken said, “and they (Duluth) keep that front and center in every concept, so as a marketer I look at that and think, ‘Yeah, these guys are absolutely doing it right.’”

Duluth, whose parent company, Duluth Holdings, went public last November, has been combining specificity with humor for years. It introduced its “Longtail T” shirts in 2002 as the cure for plumber’s butt. Following that innovation came “Ballroom Jeans” (a gusset in the crotch provides comfort when crouching) and Buck Naked Underwear (supposedly how they feel).

About five years ago, Duluth began advertising on television, using spots created by Madison’s Planet Propaganda agency.

The ads are mostly line drawings that look like they could have been sketched by a fifth-grader. Among them: a “giant angry beaver” who breaks his teeth trying to bite through Duluth work pants, and a hefty guy who feels so happy in his Buck Naked Underwear that he pole-dances to a polka.

Like the humor, the minimalism, of course, is deliberate.

“All their key products solve a problem, and because it’s such a simple reason for someone to want this pair of pants or that shirt or what have you, our goal was to just communicate it as simply as possible,” John Besmer, a partner at Planet Propaganda, said.

The ads also subtly poke fun at the gritty manliness seen in, say, commercials for pickup trucks, while simultaneously embracing it.

“They’re winking at themselves…and I think consumers appreciate that,” Hanneken said.

Scott DeRuyter, director of marketing at Duluth, said the company never wants to take itself too seriously.

“We’re not fighting wars here,” he said. “But we’re making the daily lives of our customers more comfortable and more productive through some of these fixes.”

O’Guinn described the Duluth approach as “practical hip — hip messaging about very practical solutions.”

In it, he sees the influence of legendary ad man Bill Bernbach, whose “anti-advertising advertising” work for clients such as Volkswagen acknowledged consumer intelligence and didn’t pretend the product was something it wasn’t.

“He was responsible for a type of advertising that says, ‘Look…this is a good product, but it’s not going to get you sex or not going to make you wealthy. It’s a pretty decent car for a pretty decent price.’ And Duluth advertising is very much inspired by Bernbach,” O’Guinn said.

Duluth does wrestle with questions of appropriateness. Not everybody wants to hear about buttocks or sly references to male genitalia. And sometimes people complain, DeRuyter acknowledged.

However, Arora thinks Duluth does a good job of not straying into bad tastes, which he said is important for a firm that uses an edgy style to try to break through commercial clutter.

O’Guinn agreed.

“They aren’t offending many, and the ones they offend they aren’t targeting anyway,” he said by email.

Duluth did offend one noted person, but not because it joked about butt cracks. Rather, in a rare marketing misstep, the company’s copywriters got a bit too clever and urged potential buyers of its three-button pullover to “DON A HENLEY and Take it easy.”

That wordplay alluding to a founding member of the Eagles and one of the group’s best-known songs prompted a lawsuit from singer and drummer Don Henley. The two sides settled, with Duluth posting an apology on its website.

Not surprisingly, Duluth takes a different marketing tack with its women’s business, which accounts for about 20% of sales but is growing as a share of the total.

No body humor there. And where Duluth’s men’s catalogs use retro-looking illustrations rather than photographs, the women’s books do just the opposite. The retailer tried illustrations with its first women’s catalog, DeRuyter said, but quickly switched amid immediate female feedback: We want to see actual photos of what we’re buying.

That was a decade ago, before Duluth had stores. Now the firm has 11 brick-and-mortar locations, with three more expected to open in the coming months. Nationwide, Duluth has identified about 100 markets that it believes could host a store.

The company’s stores emphasize visitor experience — a tool museum in the Mount Horeb flagship, nautical gear in the Port Washington store — and a further build-out could help boost consumer awareness of the brand, said research analyst Jonathan Komp, who follows Duluth for Milwaukee-based Robert W. Baird & Co. Inc.

That awareness is relatively low now, Komp said.

“The real opportunity is to keep growing the customer base, and they’re doing that effectively with the television and in print and other advertisements,” he said.

In other words, there are lots of potential shoppers yet to be introduced to giant angry beavers and buck-naked underwear guys.