“Darn It” is a brand campaign for Darn Tough, a USA-made, Vermont-based sock company. In Darn Tough’s 20 year history, they’ve amassed an incredibly loyal fanbase, but had reached a saturation point, and were looking to drive brand awareness with new audiences.
We built Darn Tough’s first ever brand campaign around a singular insight: Their lifetime warranty is their #1 differentiator in a category filled with competitors whose products lack quality and whose guarantees are filled with fine print.
Inspired by real letters sent to the brand’s warranty department, we created portraits of life’s little “darn it” moments—all covered by the brand’s warranty. This campaign hook strategically activates the brand name to build awareness and recall in consumer’s minds. The takeaway? Thanks to Darn Tough’s aggressive lifetime guarantee, all damaged and missing pairs are replaced by the brand, no questions asked. Why? Because “life is tough, but our socks are tougher.”
Together, the hero spot, digital ads, visuals, and out-of-home executions carved out an ownable space in a market dominated by overly serious, homogeneous brands that tend to focus on tech points and product benefits. They show an unpolished portrait of the outdoors, highlight Darn Tough’s unique sense of humor, and reinforce product quality and brand love.
We started this project with an onsite brand immersion at Darn Tough headquarters in Northfield, Vermont. Our immersion began at the sock mill. While we were there, we came across the warranty department, where they let us open dozens of packages of warrantied socks, each of which would be replaced at no cost to the consumer. What came in these packages—beyond the well-loved, well-worn, damaged socks—were love letters to the brand about all of the adventures the socks had been through (adding to the hundreds of artifacts they’d already pinned up on the wall of their offices). The stories were deeply personal, and completely unexpected. This sparked our idea to focus on this treasure trove of customer stories and brand love, all thanks to the lifetime guarantee.
Previously, the warranty had three exceptions: fire, dogs, and lost socks. Our initial concept was to take those three exceptions and paint extreme scenarios of these circumstances – saying our warranty covers literally everything “except that.” The work, however, took a surprising turn when the brand’s founder was so inspired by the campaign strategy that he decided to remove all fine print from the warranty and change actual business policy –– shifting our script from “except that” to “even that”. This led to operational shifts internally among Darn Tough’s customer service team, all in favor of supporting customers no matter what mishaps life threw at them (and their socks).
The challenges that we faced for pulling this spot off practically included training a falcon to steal a sock (hint: it involved stuffing the sock with little pieces of bacon called niblets), and then getting the take before the falcon got full. We also ran into trouble when it came time to actually destroy the socks for certain scenarios (ripping, snagging, burning)––it turns out that the product is indeed tough!
The “Darn It” campaign was a massive success for the brand, yielding nearly 8M impressions across paid channels (paid social, Youtube, CTV). On YouTube, the hero spot has an average completion rate of 93%, keeping a vast majority of viewers' attention until the end when we pay off the brand’s lifetime guarantee. As a result, the video’s click-through rate was 6x above the brand’s historical benchmarks.
Assets for this campaign directed to our campaign landing page, which allowed us to analyze the type of customer that we were capturing through the creative. What we found was that 85% of viewers who landed on the landing page were new users—Darn Tough’s target audience for the campaign.
“Couldn’t imagine finding a better creative partner than Someoddpilot. They helped us push what we are capable of, and brought incredible creative to us, without the ego. The results have been stellar.” - Gabe Aceves, Client, Creative Director
