Online underwear retailer BANG&STRIKE has relaunched itself overnight as an own brand store, making the bold move to drop all big name underwear brands it had stocked for the past 10 years. Over the past decade, BANG&STRIKE have carved out a respected position as a leading online retailer of men’s underwear and had one of the widest ranges of styles available in the UK, stocking over 30 different designer name and niche brands.
Over the past 4 years, however, company owner Mat Priestley had fallen out of love with retailing brands, the stories they were telling and the imagery they used. Plus he was also aware of the structural changes occurring within the retail industry both on and offline and the shift in the relationship between consumers, brands and retailers. “It had always been our wish that one day BANG&STRIKE would have its own branded underwear, and it was in fact in our original business plan in 2006, but the success of the launch back then took us by surprise and the ease of selling brands was seductive so the plans got shelved.”
“Jump forward 13 years and I just no longer wanted to be a conduit for other people’s stories, ideas and creations,” he adds. “I needed to do our own thing and that required a radical approach. Having looked at all the options I just thought it was time we took back the control, broke that relationship with the brands and created our own story, giving our customers something unique built on the knowledge of the sector we had accumulated.”
BANG&STRIKE overnight switched off their site, dropped all the brands they stocked and switched on a completely new look website that they had been secretly working on for the past year. “All our social media was cleansed, deleted and stripped back to zero, our logo and website have been totally redesigned and we switched ecom platform to Shopify. It really feels like we are new again and it’s an energising and exciting feeling to create something of your own and put it out there for people to digest.”
The launch collection from BANG&STRIKE shows the brands future intent with a stripped back modern look in an understated palette of white, desert, black, rifle green and khaki. It features interpretations of classic core styles, the STRIKE PRO EMBOSS sports range of micro fibre performance underwear with a woven emboss logo waistband, and the premium look and feel of the MICRO MODAL range.
