It’s hard to imagine people thinking of corduroy trousers as light weight, and that was the challenge facing Cordarounds, a San Francisco clothing maker whose corduroys are light enough to be worn through the summer.
How to you get consumers to connect with that notion?
The folks of Cordarounds came up with a pretty clever answer on Earth Day.
They launched a pair of their summer cords attached to four balloons filled with 11 cubic feet of helium. Up the pants floated for all to see.
“The business problem that exists is that people don’t think corduroy is a summer fabric,” says Cordarounds co-founder Chris Lindland “The perception is it’s hot, so we thought a funny way to demonstrate that was to show their helium buoyancy.”
Size 34 Cordaround summer cords weigh in at 0.65 pounds, about half the 1.2 pounds of an average pair of khaki pants, and a pound less than most jeans.
A video of the event was shot by a Cordarounds customer and posted on YouTube.
And the trousers that rose into the sky that day?
“The pants went off and we have no idea where they ended up,” Lindland says. “They’re probably in a desert in Utah or something right now.”
Lindland says the stunt fit in with the humorous devices the company uses to attract attention, among them pseudo-scientific claims such as “our pants are more aerodynamic than yours.”
In one such instance, Lindland says Courdarounds sold a slew of white seersucker pants by putting out a press release that claimed that the old “No white after Labor Day” rule had been made obsolete by global warming.
