After more than two decades with Cotton Incorporated, former president and chief executive officer J. Nicholas Hahn is still a cotton guy.
Everything he is wearing in a recent photo, where he casually leans against a truck in jeans and a red shirt, is 100 percent cotton, he is quick to point out. It’s a scenario that 40 years ago was not a certainty.
“In the late Sixties and early Seventies, the cotton industry was getting their lunch eaten by the synthetic fiber industry,” Hahn said.
Over the next four decades, Cotton Inc. would stop and then reverse cotton’s loss of market share and establish itself as the front-runner in agricultural commodity marketing, funding and researching in the U.S., he said.
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Many of Cotton Inc.’s successes can be attributed to its innovative marketing and advertising push to rebrand cotton as more than just a commodity, a vision laid out by the organization’s first president, J. Dukes Wooters, and carried on by Hahn and other successors.
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During Hahn’s tenure from 1982 until 1997, when he left the organization to start a consulting firm, Cotton Inc. rolled out some of its most memorable programs. Hahn said he is particularly proud of the iconic “The Fabric of Our Lives” advertisements that launched in 1989 and a marketing partnership with Procter & Gamble Co.’s Tide, Cheer and Ivory Snow brand laundry detergents that started in 1993.
But it is “The Fabric of Our Lives” campaign, conceived with the help of the organization’s creative agency Ogilvy & Mather, that most people remember, Hahn said.
“Even today I’ll bump into people and they’ll sing that song. It’s imbedded itself in their memories,” Hahn said of the campaign, which produced Cotton Inc.’s iconic “The touch, the feel of cotton, the fabric of our lives” slogan.
Wooters brought Hahn into the organization in its earliest days, hiring him in 1971 to establish the group’s offices in Los Angeles and Houston. Later Hahn would return to New York to serve as vice president of marketing and briefly as chief operating officer before eventually becoming president and ceo.
Natural fiber and textiles were in Hahn’s DNA: his family had been in the woolen industry, and when he was hired by Cotton Inc. he was working with Dan River Mills in New York.
The early days with Cotton Inc. were exciting because the organization was run like a start-up, Hahn said. There was a board made up of cotton producers, but the organization enjoyed a fair amount of independence, he said.
“None of this could’ve happened without the support of the farmers,” he said. “If they’d tried to micromanage this thing, if they’d tried to shackle us, none of this would have happened. The farmers fundamentally get the credit for giving us the freedom to put the program on the map.”
Communicating successfully with the farmers about what Cotton Inc. was doing was important, he said.
One of Cotton Inc.’s strengths, Hahn said, lay in its willingness to take risks and the ability to use its marketing budget as creatively as possible. The organization had a long association with the “Today” show as an advertiser and sponsor of Willard Scott’s weather segments. Cotton Inc. executives got to know the talent on the show, like hosts Barbara Walters and Katie Couric, as well as Scott.
Hahn said Cotton Inc. did some custom tailoring to outfit Scott in cotton and he would often talk about the garments on-air.
“Editorial mentions are always more powerful than paid advertising,” Hahn said. “You can’t buy that.”
Those days with Cotton Inc. were high energy and fun, Hahn said.
“It was wild and wonderful, and we got some good stuff done,” he said, calling his tenure with Cotton Inc. the most exciting period of his professional career.
“Cotton Inc. set the standard for agricultural commodity marketing,” Hahn said. “Its legacy is the fact that people see that trademark [the Seal of Cotton] on a towel, a shirt or a pair of jeans and it resonates with them. They know what it means. They remember ‘the fabric of our lives.’ That’s my legacy, that’s what I’m most proud of and it will live way past me. I’m proud of the whole organization.”