“Dear man,Your life is your party. It’s time to explore all versions of yourself. Embrace your emotions. Enjoy your contradictions. And cry if you want to. You were born to be imperfect.
Give yourself more chances and remember you don’t need to prove anything to anyone. Except that you’re an awesome human being. ”-Dearmen brand manifest-Our client wanted to create an online store of socks and accessories for men.
He trusted us to create his brand, based on three premises: it had to be a brand for "men of our time", "very masculine" and "build community". Three guidelines that seemed antagonistic to us.
So we revolted against the brief. Sometimes it happens to us and decided that we wanted to rock the traditional definition of a man on its head. Because continuing to talk about "masculinity", as if there were only one way to be a man, is not the way for men to feel represented by the discourse of a new brand.
Nor is it the way to create community. Nor is it a current approach. Instead, it is the way to exclude and perpetuate traditional, unrealistic, corseted and, all too often, toxic masculinity.
During the strategic analysis, we found that more and more men think and recognize that other ways of being a man are necessary. It is around these men that we found our niche market and built our brand positioning: Dearmen gives men the tools to explore and express their own masculinities.
With awareness, freedom, authenticity. No labels, no stereotypes. Simply as human beings. Dearmen is a brand for men. But it doesn't talk like the vast majority of men's brands talk.
Nor like many men. Because the path to creating an egalitarian society begins with the words we speak. Dearmen calls men dear/s and thus establishes, from its own naming, a declaration of intentions.
Because Dearmen aims to "bring out the inner human being" that all men carry inside. Not the man, but the human being. That means showing yourself as you are. Without worrying about whether what he does, says or feels fits in with what "men" are supposed to do, say or feel.
To deliver this discourse, Dearmen has an affectionate, complicit and provocative tone and verbal style. On the one hand, because he invites men to dare to speak to other men in those same terms (it's liberating!).
On the other hand, because his speech is full of winks that, from the male reductionist vision, would be considered "girlish/girlish/womanish". Like certain phrases of Lesley Gore, The Weather Girls or Nancy Sinatra.
But also Freddie Mercury, one of the great antagonists of traditional masculinity. Dearmen could be the heading of one of those letters that were written, by hand, with a nib, long ago.
And that's where the inspiration to create the corporate identity, with all its visual representations, comes from. The logotype is a typographic composition formed by the Alfreda, which has a calligraphic look, and the Albra, which gives the brand the necessary touch of modernity.
While the isotype is built with the initials of the two words that form the naming. The visual universe is completed with the neutral chromatism of the paper and ink, and with a photographic style starring men who are out of the traditional standards.
