How Chubbies built a $50M business with memes
Building a community around a passion for the weekend
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While most premium clothing brands have carefully curated, aesthetic-looking Instagram feeds with models, beautiful locations and fine lighting, D2C shorts brand Chubbies’ profile looks like a meme page. Because it is. And it works.
By primarily using a strategy that is rooted in branded content, Chubbies has been able to develop a loyal and dedicated fanbase of more than 500K on IG (with a 1.1% engagement rate) and generate approximately $40M-50M in yearly revenue, and 50% year over year sales growth.
This made the company extremely valuable, leading to its recent acquisition by Solo Stove for an “undisclosed amount” — we’re sure it’s a good amount.
This kind of success didn’t happen accidentally. From the very beginning, the company was sure that it wanted Chubbies to be for the weekend, what Red Bull was for extreme sports.
That is, they didn’t just want to be a premium clothing brand, they wanted to be a full-on media organization that churns out content, and uses it as the base of their e-commerce strategy, much like the way Red Bull does for its drinks.
"As we envision the future of what we're up to, it is a full-on media organization that's rooted in content," said Tom Montgomery, co-founder and head of marketing of Chubbies.
"In the same way that the Red Bulls of the world have made that association with extreme sports, we want to align ourselves with the weekend."
How did they achieve this? Let’s find out.
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Chubbies’ Instagram Meme Page
“We wanted to sell our lifestyle to people. When we decided to start this business we wanted to sell the notion of fun and embody that in every pair of shorts we sold.” — Tom Montgomery, co-founder Chubbies
Chubbies uses its Instagram account to poke fun at itself and at its style in a way that is meme-worthy and inspires users to tag their friends in the comments, leading to greater visibility as well as potential virality.
One of the main messages they’re trying to drive home is about popularising men’s shorts that are actually short, just like in the ’70s.
Their branded content on Instagram even provokes their customers to make their own funny content, tagging them when posting. If we go over to their “tagged” section on Instagram, it’s UGC heaven. As of writing, their last tagged post was 15 minutes ago, and they’re getting 20-30 tagged posts every day, not even counting stories.
In essence, Chubbies shares the stoke of the weekend on its page and encourages customers to share the stoke on their pages and tag them.
The Stay In-Fluencer Competition
In March 2020, Chubbies launched a competition on Instagram Feed, Stories and TikTok called the “Stay In-Fluencer Competition”, encouraging customers to post content tagging Chubbies.
The selection process was all about the engagement of the content – they wanted people to post creative content that gets the most likes, comments, and shares – but the final decision was up to Chubbies.
It turns out that the guy who won was one Brandon Duck with only around 1K followers.
He won a lifetime supply of Chubbies and a $1000 vacation post-pandemic. Chubbies can be sure that aside from generating a massive amount of UGC throughout the course of the campaign, they’ve created an ambassador for life since he continues to post about himself wearing Chubbies.
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Key Takeaways from Chubbies’ Success
For us, the key takeaway is this — define your message, and then go ALL IN.
Chubbies is all about short shorts, the weekend, men showing their thighs, and not being afraid to be yourself.
By going all-in on their brand and messaging, they naturally attract the best community for the brand, people that share their values and vision. This community for the basis of their most loyal customers, leading to millions in annual sales.
Since their branded content is done in a way that is accessible, they also encourage their customers to post similar kinds of content on their own Instagrams to feel “part of the community”, leading to hundreds of pieces of UGC created every week.
Want to find loyal brand ambassadors within the community of your brand?