Andy Dunn is one of the new do-it-yourself-ers. Mr. Dunn is chief executive of Bonobos Pants, an online clothing company that says it makes “pants for real guys,” aimed at men who want well-tailored and fashionable clothes but hate to shop in stores. The company, which the 29-year-old Mr. Dunn launched last fall with a classmate from the Stanford Graduate School of Business, initially didn’t do much to market its wares. “We think advertising is pretty wasteful for a company like ours,” Mr. Dunn said. But for a pants line aimed at Chicago Cubs baseball fans, Bonobos took a chance on Facebook’s new self-service ad system. In less than five minutes, Bonobos created ads that would be seen only by young men in the Chicago area who identified themselves on their Facebook profiles as Cubs fans. With a picture of the “Cubbie blue” pants — named Clarks, after one of the streets surrounding the Cubs’ home of Wrigley Field — and simple ad taglines like “pants for Cubs fans,” the ad was seen more than 250,000 times. Quickly, Bonobos sold out of Clarks, at $120 a pop. Total cost for the ads: about $63. Mr. Dunn said that next time, he may spend thousands of dollars more on the Facebook ads. “It’s so economically compelling that we can’t ignore it,” he said. “This was five minutes of our time, and we sold through these very specific pants that otherwise we’d have a hard time finding our audience.
Bonobos was featured in the WSJ, and it’s a cool story about what you can do with ads in this new tech world.
