Before founding swimwear brand Andie, Melanie Travis found that women’s swimsuits, despite being sold to women, were often advertised with a different gaze in mind.
“Seven or eight years ago when I started Andie, if you did a Google image search for ‘women's swim,’ it was all really thin women covered in cocoa butter on a rocky cliffside,” Travis told us. “It was so impractical and not at all what I was looking for.”
A lot has changed in less than a decade, and Travis now thinks women’s swimsuits and the way they’re marketed seem to be changing for the better. That’s due, in part, to a growing number of inclusive brands, which she said is welcome competition.
“We need to turn the tide on objectifying women’s bodies,” Travis said.
We spoke with Travis about Andie’s enduring values, her ever-evolving role as CEO, and the marketing tactics that have helped grow the brand into what it is today.
Shopping with empathy
It’s one thing to want an inclusive swimsuit company, but it’s another thing to start one. Travis, who previously worked at companies like Foursquare, Kickstarter, and Bark & Co., said her past experience gave her a playbook for acquiring customers online as she built Andie. Her experience also taught her the importance of creating a brand personality and fostering a brand community, she said.
“If there’s no physical storefront, as there was not when [Andie] launched, and it only exists on the internet, you really have to craft something that is meaningful and powerful and has character that’s more than a dot-com,” she said.
From the colors to the logo to the fonts used, Travis said she wanted Andie to feel friendly and approachable, offering an alternative to a swimsuit shopping experience that might feel uncomfortable.
“Wearing a swimsuit is the most naked women will ever be in public,” Travis said. “There are things like lingerie, but it’s typically worn behind closed doors, so it’s actually quite a vulnerable category that I think is underappreciated.”
The brand operates around three core values designed to make swimsuit shopping a positive experience: sustainability, inclusivity, and fit. That means not only creating suit options for women of all shapes and sizes, but also ensuring those women are represented in the brand’s marketing materials, Travis said.
As a member of the LGBTQ+ community, Travis said she thinks of the brand’s LGBTQ+ representation—which includes posting photos of her and her wife in Andie suits on Instagram—as being representative of normal life.
“Inclusivity isn’t just a marketing gimmick,” she said. “It’s who we are, and so it’s infused across all of our touch points in a way that is natural.”
In a year when many brands pulled back on their Pride activations, Travis received what she described as an unusual amount of backlash to an annual letter emailed to customers on what it means to be queer. “It was disappointing and a little hurtful that people think it’s so bad that I’m married to a woman that they won’t buy these swimsuits anymore, but it’s not going to change anything for me,” Travis said. “For brands that are shying away from it, that just means it’s a little bit more superficial.”
Star power
As Andie looks to reach more customers, Travis said her team has “tried everything,” including subway takeovers, billboards, national TV campaigns, and podcasts. As Travis has evolved Andie’s digital playbook, the brand has largely shifted from working with micro-influencers to doing co-branded collections with celebrities like Claire Holt, Demi Moore, and Mindy Kaling—though Andie still works with creators, primarily on whitelisting campaigns.
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“After a few years, we got this idea of, ‘What if we work with a bigger influencer, but instead of a flat fee where they post X number of times about our product, we let them design a small collection that they feel a lot of ownership of, give them a little bit of equity in the company, and give them a revenue share on the collection?’” Travis said.
The strategy means Andie doesn’t put any money into marketing and instead relies on the celebrity partner for all promotions. Putting the onus on the celebrity boiled down to simple math. “If we normally give Mark Zuckerberg 30%,” she said, referring to the percentage of a collection’s revenue spent on Meta ads, “‘Let’s give this person who we really like 30% and see if it works. And it has.” Travis said the brand’s co-branded collections have exceeded expectations and led to both sales and traffic boosts.
Travis attributes each collection’s success, in part, to forming real relationships with the celebrities and maintaining an open line of communication, beginning with a conversation about why they care about the brand.
“It can’t just be about parameters in a contract,” she said. “There has to be an underlying, authentic relationship there, whether it’s a friendship or not. That’s what makes the difference with a celebrity.”
Travis said she’s hoping to evolve Andie’s partnership strategy, perhaps creating capsules exclusively for one wholesaler or doing a group collaboration. And there’s also the organic endorsement, too: Recently, Reese Witherspoon was photographed wearing a (not gifted, said Travis) Andie suit, which “skyrocketed” site traffic and led to a tenfold sales increase on that suit from the day before. The “Reese effect” has sparked some ideas about the brand’s next partner, she said.
While it’s not out of the question for Andie to continue experimenting with other marketing methods, Travis plans to continue to lean into the power of celebrity.
“Reese in a Malibu [suit] does better than spending a million dollars on subway takeovers,” she said. “I’m a big fan of out-of-home because I think it’s fun, but it doesn’t quite have the bang of a big celebrity pictured wearing your swimsuit on vacation.”