Hanes (founded in 1901) and Hanes Her Way (founded in 1986) are brands of clothing currently owned by the HanesBrands, Inc Corporation (NYSE: HBI).
The Hanes brand is used by the company for marketing a broad range of clothing essentials:
- Innerwear
- Outerwear
- Activewear, such as performance t-shirts and shorts
- Casualwear, such as t-shirts, fleece and sport shirts
- Hosiery
In September 2006, Sara Lee Corporation spun off its branded clothing Americas and Asia business as a separate company called Hanesbrands Inc., which designs, manufactures, sources and sells a broad range of clothing essentials. The company’s portfolio of brands include Hanes (its largest brand), Champion (its second largest brand), Playtex (its third largest brand), Bali, Just My Size, Barely There, Wonderbra, L’eggs, C9 by Champion, Duofold, Beefy-T, Outer Banks, Sol y Oro, Rinbros, Zorba and Ritmo.
The brand’s two main competitors are Fruit of the Loom and Jockey.
Advertising
During the 1970s and 1980s, their women’s hosiery tagline was “Gentlemen Prefer Hanes”. In the early nineties, the slogan was turned around as “The lady prefers Hanes”.
During the late 1990s, the brand’s main slogan was “Just wait’ll we get our Hanes on you.”
In the 2000s, an ad campaign began for their Hanes “Go Tagless” T-shirt, featuring various celebrities including Michael Jordan, Phillip Brooke, BIG Ben Kennedy, Jackie Chan, and Brian Regan.
In 2005, an ad campaign was run with the slogan “Look who we’ve got our Hanes on now”, featuring various celebrities including Michael Jordan, Jennifer Love Hewitt, Marisa Tomei, Damon Wayans, Matthew Perry, and on Spanish-language advertising, Aracely Arámbula, and Pablo Montero. In 2006, the campaign added Kevin Bacon and Christina Applegate to their lineup. In 2007, the campaign expanded again to include Cuba Gooding, Jr., and Sarah Chalke in 2008.
As of July 2008, Charlie Sheen joined Michael Jordan as the next Hanes celebrity spokesman. The commercials (along with the previous Cuba Gooding, Jr. commercials) were created by writer Brett Baker and Art Director David McKay of The Martin Agency in Richmond, Virginia. Hanesbrands has ended its advertising campaign featuring Charlie Sheen because of domestic violence charges filed against the actor in 2010.
Controversy
Like other clothing companies, Hanes has come under criticism for outsourcing its manufacturing to factories around the world, many of which are sweatshops.
From October 2006 to November 2007, customers buying at the hanes.com website were submitting their credit card info over an unencrypted HTTP connection despite using an order form that appeared to be secure.
In 1947 James Hanes, the hosiery magnate who started the brand, founded along with Dr. Clarence Gamble of Proctor & Gamble the Human Betterment League of North Carolina, driving the eugenics movement in North Carolina, which sterilized 7,600 people who were deemed unworthy of having children—including black girls who had been raped and were for this reason considered “promiscuous”, poor children from large families, people with epilepsy and those considered too “feeble-minded” to raise children.
A Wikileaks post published on The Nation shows that the Obama Administration fought to keep Haitian wages at 31 cents an hour. It started when Haiti passed a law two years ago raising its minimum wage to 61 cents an hour. According to an embassy cable: This infuriated American corporations like Hanes and Levi Strauss that pay Haitians slave wages to sew their clothes. They said they would only fork over a seven-cent-an-hour increase, and they got the State Department involved. The U.S. ambassador put pressure on Haiti’s president, who duly carved out a $3 a day minimum wage for textile companies (the U.S. minimum wage, which itself is very low, works out to $58 a day). Haiti has about 25,000 garment workers. If you paid each of them $2 a day more, it would cost their employers $50,000 per working day, or about $12.5 million a year … As of last year Hanes had 3,200 Haitians making t-shirts for it. Paying each of them two bucks a day more would cost it about $1.6 million a year. Hanesbrands Incorporated made $211 million on $4.3 billion in sales last year. Thanks to U.S. intervention, the minimum was raised only to 31 cents.
