Reclothing HanesBrands' sustainability offering with a new brand and website

HanesBrands are a $6.7bn clothing multinational under which sit a family of famous apparel brands, including Champion, Hanes and Bonds. With a global presence comes a responsibility to stitch sustainability into the entire business, from supply chain to store front.

The great thing is, HanesBrands have been doing it for years - they just weren’t shouting about it. And at a time when displaying your eco credentials has never been more important, they needed an agency that could build a sustainability brand and bring it to life on a new website. 

We were more than happy to answer the call.

Tailoring the brand to the audience

You can’t create a brand without knowing its purpose, its goals, and its target audience. So we started with a series of interviews and workshops with the HanesBrands team, from their SLT through to their regional brand managers.

At the same time, we took a look at their market, competitors, and buyer personas so we knew just how we’d make HanesBrands distinctive and relevant to its target audience.

It’s as much about the journey

The success of a website depends on its user experience. A site can look the part, with great imagery, video, copy, and so on. But if the user can’t find what they want quickly and easily, they’ll click off - and not click back.

We undertook user journey analysis to work out just what a typical HanesBrands user would want from this site - the information they’d like to know, the hierarchy of messaging, what next steps they could take, and so on.

This defined the structure of the site, making it eminently usable before our designers set to work making it look modern, fresh, and vibrant.

The result is a site that works as beautifully as it looks and reads - and that, most importantly, presents HanesBrands as a progressive business determined to make clothes the right way. For everyone.

People, planet, product

We wanted to put what matters most to HanesBrands at the heart of this sustainability brand - and that’s their three Ps: people, planet and product.

We used HanesBrands’ existing three-P format to show how they’re improving the lives of colleagues and customers, helping the planet, and reducing product waste. This helped us weave together their good-news stories into three themes with which their customers and colleagues were already familiar.

The people, planet, and product format will run throughout HanesBrands' 2030 goals, including to positively impact the lives of 10 million people and cut all single-use plastics from their operations. The company has a bold ambition. And now, they have a bold brand to go with it.

The results

Following the site’s redesign, HanesBrands surveyed 2,400 people across America, the UK and Australia to determine how well the new site conveys their corporate social responsibility compared to the old site. The results — a few of which we’ve highlighted below — were impressive.

In the US, positive appeal of Hanes (a key sub-brand of HanesBrands) went from 79% to 87%. In Australia, the figure jumped from 74% to 80%. And in the UK, there was a huge leap from 25% to 74% — an almost 200% increase.

The positive appeal of another major sub-brand, Champion, rose similarly: from 71% to 80% in the US, from 47% to 68% in the UK, and from 44% to 68% in Australia.

The results show that the need to clearly (and beautifully) spread the message of a brand’s sustainability efforts is vital in improving its standing in the minds of its consumers.