Vineyard Vines Grows Lifestyle Brand
So, do you “reek” your brand?
That’s the goal of Vineyard Vines, a purveyor of Martha’s Vineyard-styled clothing and goods.
The company’s founders, brothers Ian and Shep Murray, spoke at the New England Mail Order Association’s annual conference here in Boston today about their philosophy of building a “lifestyle” brand.
The Murray brothers started the company in 1998 by selling ties featuring icons symbolizing the “finer things in life,” like palm trees, sea life, planes and the like. At the time, the casual workplace was all the rage—not the best time to go into formal wear. But the brothers reasoned that today, if a man wears a tie he wants to make a statement, so he might be willing to pay a little more for something of quality. So much to their parents chagrin, they quit their New York advertising and PR jobs, opened several lines of credit and started the company.
To save money at launch, the brothers used friends instead of professional models. That practice has been continued to this day, as a way to present the products as being used by “real” people.
Today, other than things like Google Ad Words, Vineyard Vines doesn’t do any advertising. The catalog is viewed as the main Web traffic driver.
As for the future, the brothers say they are working to make the brand experience ever more consistent across channels, from Web to catalog to retail. Plans are also in the works to start blogging to extend the lifestyle content, and employ Facebook and Twitter in a more meaningful way.
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