How Mack Weldon is rebuilding its digital marketing strategy

As the new year ushers in feelings of hope and change, some direct-to-consumer brands are using the beginning of 2025 to unveil new marketing strategies.
For menswear brand Mack Weldon, a big focus this year is investing more in broader-reach marketing this year after spending the past couple of years essentially rebuilding its digital marketing programs and “getting real” about its unit economics, according to the brand’s founder and CEO Brian Berger. Last week, Mack Weldon unveiled its biggest-ever campaign, Comfortable Anywhere, which will start on TV and also appear on other channels like Facebook, Google and podcasts.
Other brands are in a similar position. Amid a tough economic climate, DTC startups have spent the past couple of years rethinking their marketing strategies after finding that some tried-and-true tactics were no longer serving them. Home goods brand Brooklinen, for example, invested last year in more mid- to upper-funnel marketing tactics that would put the brand in front of a wide range of new audiences.
Now, these brands hope that they have built a solid foundation to return to explosive growth this year. Grace Ouma-Cabezas, the founder of growth marketing agency GO & Co who previously led vice president-level roles at Food52 and the Skimm, said that, anecdotally, “it seems like people have an appetite again to re-invest” in the beginning of 2025.
Berger said Mack Weldon’s goal this year is to return to double-digit growth in its e-commerce business while also driving wholesale growth. Some of its wholesale partners include Bloomingdale’s, Dillard’s and Nordstrom.
“The last couple of years have been more about fixing things,” Berger said. “The back half of ‘24 and into 25 [has been] really all about growing again and really focusing on profitable growth.”
Mack Weldon previously tested television advertising once, in 2020. At the time, Mack Weldon was spending nearly 80% of its marketing budget on Facebook and Google and was hoping to diversify its advertising campaign. But Berger said that Mack Weldon had to pull the plug on that campaign sooner than it would have liked, largely due to the iOS 14 update that rolled out later that year.
“If the most efficient part of your advertising mix gets upended overnight, it just makes it that much harder to justify doing the broader reach awareness,” Berger said.
With this latest marketing reboot, Berger said that Mack Weldon had to rethink its unit economics first and foremost. In the early days of the DTC boom, he said that many startups thought they could forgo first-order profitability. The theory was that high retention rates would eventually lead to profitability on future orders. However, this became increasingly difficult, especially as Facebook advertising costs continued to rise.
Mack Weldon became much more disciplined about “saying we are not going to acquire customers that are not profitable on the first order period full stop.” The company also looked at what changes it could make to increase average order value that would allow it to justify spending more money on marketing in the first place. “Some of that has to do with product mix and merchandising,” Berger said, launching products with higher gross margins, such as jeans in 2023. Mack Weldon also made some tweaks to improve its gross margins, like switching fulfillment providers.
Once it got real about unit economics, “we sort of rebuilt our entire digital marketing programs from the bottom up,” Berger said. This entailed featuring a broader array of products in ads in order to drive a higher average order value.
Another focus was “making sure that our creative operation was set up to support more significant creative iteration.” Mack Weldon is currently hiring for a senior art director, for example. Previously, Berger said, Mack Weldon had a “bare bones” creative operation that was reliant on “auto-generated product ads.”
Ouma-Cabezas said that when she works with brands, many of the creative recommendations she makes centers around making sure “ads are distinct, that they are speaking to different audience types, different use cases, different stages in the funnel.” Then, if a brand finds a handful of winning ads thinking through “what are some variations that you can make to those?”
For Mack Weldon, these investments in creative generation really started to pay off towards the end of last year, Berger said, as new customer revenue in November and December grew by 30% year-over-year.
Now, the Comfortable Anywhere campaign is meant to set the tone for how Mack Weldon hopes to show up for the rest of the year. The campaign showcases men in a variety of uncomfortable scenarios — like pitch meetings or dinner parties — where feeling comfortable in their Mack Weldon gear gives them confidence.
“It’s not meant to be a one-and-done,” Berger said. “It’s meant to be something that is… kind of evergreen brand message that we’re out there with for 2025.”
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