The team behind the casual apparel brand Alex Mill knew they wanted a splashy marketing campaign for the launch of its first denim line. It didn’t take long for them to come up with their idea: a coordinated dance routine set to “You’re the One That I Want” from “Grease.”
The team dropped the video on Alex Mill’s Instagram channel on February 15, getting almost 60,000 views on the first day and 80,000 by February 23. That helped the brand sell out of multiple styles from the denim line within the first week. The video was inspired by a similar video the brand launched six months ago to promote the launch of jumpsuits. It was set to a mashup of Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Call Me Maybe” and Whitney Houston’s “I Wanna Dance With Somebody.”
Notably, the dances were performed entirely by Alex Mill’s team, rather than hired actors or models. Among them were founder Alex Drexler, creative director Somsack Sikhounmuong and Drexler’s father, retail executive Mickey Drexler who is best known for his transformative roles at J. Crew and Gap and now works as an Alex Mill advisor. Alex Mill promoted the video heavily, posting it Instagram and TikTok, boosting it through Instagram ads, and doing paid partnerships with influencers including Isabella Boylston (700,000 Instagram followers), Jake Woolf (60,000 followers), Ashley Avignone (117,000 followers) and Hannah Douglass (100,000 followers).
For Mickey Drexler, the decision to feature the brand’s employees was both practical and strategic.
“We’ve had such an amazing response, [including] so many posts of people doing their own dances to our song,” Drexler said. “People connect with real people; they can identify with them. We had so much fun making the video, and people can feel that when they watch it.”
Featuring employees in social marketing campaigns isn’t a new strategy. Brands like ModCloth popularized the idea in the 2010s. And in the TikTok era, more authentic content has continued to be a valuable aspect of brands’ marketing efforts.
Drexler said he considers the 12-year-old brand to be a “hidden gem” among consumers — smaller than the megabrands he’s worked with in the past but with a dedicated fanbase. It currently has around 100,000 followers on Instagram and around 1,000 on TikTok. Alex Mill is privately held and a rep from the brand declined to disclose revenue or growth figures.
To activate those loyal customers, Alex Mill launched a contest alongside the video. Customers could send in their own take on the “You’re the One That I Want” dance. The winner, announced on Monday, won a trip for two to Manhattan and a $3,000 gift card to Alex Mill for a shopping spree led by Sikhounmuong.
Drexler said music and dance, especially in the era of TikTok, are an important medium for creative marketing. Luckily, the brand has a secret weapon for making these dance-oriented videos.
The choreography was done by Alex Mill’s senior production manager, Michael Patlingrao, who Mickey Drexler jokingly refers to as the brand’s “in-house choreographer.” Patlingrao has a background in dance and performs as part of a New York dance troupe called Bold Dance Company.
In an email statement to Glossy, Patlingrao said, “I never thought dancing would be part of my day job. How fun to have those two things collide!”
Denim is a particularly competitive category, slated to be worth nearly $100 billion by 2030 and filled with big brands like Gap, Levi’s and Madewell. Notably Sikhounmuong also has a background at J. Crew and Madewell and brings some of the design ethos from those brands to Alex Mill.
“Denim was part of our plans for at least the last three years,” Drexler said. “It’s ubiquitous, maybe the most commonly worn fabric in the world. It’s a universal category.”
