EXCLUSIVE: David Beckham to Strip Down for Boss One Underwear Campaign
David Beckham can finally eat a decent meal again.
The sports star, who signed a multiyear global partnership and design deal with Hugo Boss for the Boss brand last May, is now stripping down to his skivvies for the Boss One Bodywear collection.
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It will be the first true underwear campaign for the German apparel brand and the marketing plan is extensive. It was created by Trey Laird and his Team Laird agency and photographed by Mert & Marcus who shot both stills and video of Beckham. The former soccer player pulls up in a classic sports car wearing a suit and enters a dimly lit warehouse apartment. There, he strips down to his Boss One Bodywear trunks.
The film will be shown in theaters and streaming platforms including Amazon Prime, Netflix, Max, Paramount Plus and Sky TV. Still photos will appear on billboards in high-traffic locations globally as well as in Boss stores and other retailers around the world.
The company will also install Boss One Bodywear vending machines at key locations in the U.S. and Europe, selling hero products from the collection, and there will also be more than 100 pop-ups created worldwide.
Daniel Grieder, chief executive officer of Hugo Boss, said when the company was pondering who could be the ambassador for Boss One, the choice was an easy one. “David Beckham is an individual that is just known worldwide,” he said. “Wherever you go, from America to Europe to Asia, young, old, men, women — everybody loves him.”
Up until now, Beckham has appeared in ads for the company’s more-tailored offering, but Grieder said when the athlete was presented with the concept for the underwear campaign, “he was immediately convinced.”
But it also meant he had to get back in underwear model shape. Although Beckham had hardly let himself go, Grieder said he asked for six to eight weeks to prepare. “He started to train and we started to shoot the campaign eight weeks later,” Grieder said. “He was really working out but also eating less. And some of his team said to me, ‘We are happy when he can eat again, because he starts to get grumpy.’ So when everything was finished, he said: ‘I really can’t wait to have my first pizza.’ So we when he was finished, we gave him a pizza.”
Grieder said that while Boss has done underwear shoots in the past, this is its first real campaign for the category. It also marks the first time it is testing the vending machine concept, which he referred to as “more a marketing tool than a selling tool.” More important, he said, will be the pop-up shops.
“This is our biggest campaign since the launch of Claim 5,” he said, referring to a growth strategy unveiled in August of 2021 that included a refresh of the Boss brand to target a younger customer.
Grieder said that Boss has offered underwear for many years, “but we never really took it seriously.” Looking at the volume generated by competitor Calvin Klein, Boss knew “the potential was there. But we needed the right product, which we found. We needed to fine-tune it into underwear that David feels comfortable with, which he also helped us to do.”
He said Beckham, who always “adds his vision, his style and his details into everything we do,” said he didn’t want a waistband that read Boss, Boss, Boss all the way around. Instead, he suggested a more-subtle branding with one mention of the brand on the front.
This launch could be the fuel Hugo Boss needs to reignite sales. When the corporation reported results for the third quarter in November, the company said sales only inched up 1 percent to 1.03 billion euros and Grieder said his previously announced goal under the Claim 5 strategy to hit 5 billion euros in sales annually by 2025 may need a little more time to be reached.
This month, he was more upbeat. “You know, 2024 was a difficult year for nearly all brands. I think the world was kind of upside down from all perspectives, and it was for our customers. There was less traffic and people were not in a mood to buy. I cannot talk about the year-end yet, but we had a better second half than the first half. So things eased a bit up.”
With tailored clothing once again having a moment, it also bodes well for the company’s future. “Tailoring is indeed coming back, but in a different way,” he said. “And I think we have a perfect concept, because it’s more performance-driven and comfortable. Nobody wants to sit here in track pants, and our answer to that is casual and comfortable materials but more sophisticated.”
Turning to the threat of tariffs being imposed by the new U.S. administration, Grieder isn’t overly concerned. “It’s too early to say, but hopefully, he is a president that brings peace to the world. I think if anyone can do that, it might be him. And I think he understands the economy and that the economy needs to work so people will have a better life. But other than that, I don’t know what to say. Trump is Trump, and he will surprise us all.”
Closer to home, the German economy has also been under stress, he said. “It’s kind of difficullt too,” he acknowledged — but Grieder said that even though Hugo Boss is a German company, the U.S. is its largest market. “In the past, we only sold our suits in the U.S., but since we casualized our collections, we got much more space and point of sales. We’ve had tremendous growth in the States over the past three years but Europe is still growing. Germany is still growing.”
Another challenged country is China, but because it only represents 5 percent of Hugo Boss’s sales at the moment, “there is not that much risk for us,” he said. “I think it will recover, but slowly.”
So while the macro situation is always top of mind, it’s the Beckham Boss One campaign that is consuming Grieder’s thoughts right now. “He’s not only a great athlete, he is also a fantastic person who has great values that fit our values,” he said. “He is a family man, cares about everything, is humble, and what I like is, he has a passion for fashion. He’s all in one, and that really fits us, and therefore we are happy to have an authentic partnership with him.”
David Beckham Models Boss One Underwear in New Campaign [PHOTOS]
Launch Gallery: David Beckham Models Boss One Underwear in New Campaign [PHOTOS]
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