NEW YORK — Sexy chic. Sound like an oxymoron?
For Club Monaco, it spells the sensibility underpinning the brand’s upcoming spring ad campaign — the first for the collection of urban-classics-with-an-edge that will move beyond the confines of its 27 stores in the U.S. on a significant scale.
The breakout marketing effort will be a precursor to the anticipated addition of roughly a dozen Club Monaco stores in the U.S. this fall, extending the chain to about 39 locations here, with a priority placed on bulking up the brand’s presence in the country’s three largest metropolitan areas: New York, Los Angeles and Chicago. Over the next two-to-three years, another two-dozen or so new Club Monaco stores are planned for the U.S. There are also 35 Club Monaco units in Canada, where the chain opened its original store, in 1985, in Toronto.
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“Now is the time to raise our visibility,” John Mehas, Club Monaco’s president and chief executive officer, said in an interview. “Our bestsellers are still a black turtleneck, crisp white shirt and black suit, but we’re cutting our apparel with a sexier fit; we’ve expanded into urban, active and casual classifications, and we’ve added color and accessories,” he said of the brand that, as recently as 2002, focused on smart casual basics in black and white.
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While expressing satisfaction with Club Monaco’s in-store effort to communicate its transformation from a range of basics into a lifestyle brand targeting Generation X, Mehas observed, “We need to do a more focused job of telling the Club Monaco story through marketing.”
To that end, Club Monaco has broadened its focus to a national marketing campaign from a regional one and has doubled its spring marketing and media budget, versus spring 2003, Mehas said, but declined to specify. Last spring, Club Monaco’s media budget was devoted to outdoor placements in major metropolitan areas, with an emphasis on New York; newspapers, and direct mail.
This time around, Club Monaco’s spring ads are slated to appear in the May and June editions of various fashion magazines, a roster that tentatively includes In Style, Lucky and Vogue, as well as outdoor media, online and at various public relations events. The small scale of the brand’s magazine advertising efforts in 2003, in contrast, is reflected in the $52,860 it spent on the medium for ready-to-wear ads in January through September 2003, according to Taylor Nelson Sofres Media Intelligence/CMR.
Another departure will come in the use of color photography in accessories ads for a brand that has favored black-and-white images in past campaigns. Not surprisingly, the color ads highlight a Club Monaco classification that saw sales double in 2003 and 2002, as reported, and will be highlighted in departments such as the 600-square-foot accessories area that opened in the Club Monaco store here at 160 Fifth Avenue last November. The new color images will unfold roughly 18 months after Club Monaco began evolving its once predominantly black-and-white merchandise palette to an assortment evenly divided between those shades and color.
Further, the spring campaign is expected to help maintain the momentum of the brand whose same-store sales growth was in the high 20 percent range in the third quarter, ended Dec. 27, Mehas noted. That was the third straight quarter in which Club Monaco’s sales in stores open at least one year advanced at a double-digit clip.
The target consumer of the brand, acquired by Polo Ralph Lauren in 1998, remains 25- to 35-year-old men and women, but its customer is increasingly fashion-forward, Mehas maintained in his office in Manhattan’s Chelsea section, whose airy ambience and minimal design mirror the chic, clean lines of Club Monaco’s apparel.
“We wanted the brand to look sexier, but still have a healthy, cleaned-up look, and sharply focused images, rather than a more spontaneous, gritty, grainy feel,” Douglas Lloyd, president and creative director of Lloyd & Co., the SoHo-based ad agency handling the brand’s creative assignment for the third straight season, said of the spring ads.
Patrick Demarchelier photographed the spring campaign, which features models Julia Stegner and Jamie Strachan.
Simply raising its marketing profile may not be enough, though, to convey Club Monaco’s emergence as a lifestyle brand, asserted Jonah Disend, president of Manhattan-based strategic marketing consultant Red Scout. Despite its three straight quarters of comparable-store sales gains, Disend claimed the brand has clung too long to a designer-wannabe image. It would benefit, he contended, from creating a more distinctive identity, leveraging “the halo effect of its clean looks and credibility for being hip.”
“There’s more of a sense of humor and fun about H&M and Zara,” Disend said of the chains that offer designer takes at prices which generally are lower than those at Club Monaco. “Club Monaco seems to take itself more seriously. It uses the same high-end fashion photographers as the Pradas and Guccis of the world. H&M does the same type of thing,” Disend acknowledged, “but there’s a more playful sense about it — in part, because there’s a $19.99 price tag next to Naomi Campbell’s photograph.” (Club Monaco’s campaigns have featured the work of such photographers as Richard Avedon, Walter Chin, Nathaniel Goldberg and Terry Richardson.)
For his part, Mehas said, “Club Monaco has a distinctive point of view — urban, chic and sexy — and we’ve stuck to that.” And the Club Monaco ceo was unapologetic about the better-price brand’s use of high-fashion photographers. “It is critical for us to use the best of who’s out there. To use credible, established fashion photographers,” he said simply. “It is important to establish our own identity but equally important to achieve credibility in the world of fashion marketing.”
“We’ve tried to create simple, strong images with some sexiness to them for spring — images that show the sexy-preppy personality of Club Monaco’s American fashion,” Lloyd related. “We are trying to reflect the hipness of the customer who buys Club Monaco.”
Indeed, Club Monaco’s best platform for differentiation is its well-established, sophisticated-yet-youthful urban style at a price, contended Peter Levine, executive creative director at brand-image specialist Desgrippes Gobe Group. “Nobody in the [moderate-to-better] specialty store sector has claimed the chic, sexy, young fashion customer,” Levine said. Although H&M has created a lot of buzz, Levine said, “H&M is like Lucky magazine — it’s about chasing an item, rather than catering to a mind-set.”
This fall, in sync with Club Monaco’s dozen or so store openings, Mehas projected, “We do anticipate taking up our marketing campaign another notch or two. We may do something more avant-garde,” he added, leaving the specifics of nascent fall projects to the imagination. “I believe in marketing in nontraditional ways.”