Hanes Brands
Find Your Perfect Fit
Focus:
Employer Brand Transformation & Value Strategy Development
Key Elements:
Decision-Dynamics Research, Creative Direction, Content Strategy, UX Design, Career Site Reinvention, Storytelling.
The Challenge
HanesBrands is not a simple company. Seventeen brands. 61,000 associates. Operations spanning 47 countries across manufacturing, retail, corporate, and private label. The people making t-shirts in Honduras and the merchants buying trends in New York are both HanesBrands, and they need to feel that way
They came to us with the bones of an employer brand that hadn't been fully realized. The existing employee engagement data told us what people said they liked, but not why it mattered to them or how it shaped their decisions. That's the limitation of preference data — it gives you a menu, not a map. So we worked around it, drawing from third-party review sites, job seeker behavior patterns, and the materials HanesBrands shared about their own culture. What emerged wasn't a dramatic revelation. It was something more useful — a clear, honest picture of a company with genuine pride in what it makes, big hearts about where it operates, and more personality than its category typically allows.
What We Did
The strategic goal wasn't to reinvent HanesBrands as an employer. It was to connect more honestly and creatively with the people who would thrive there — and let them recognize themselves in what they saw.
That started with finding the right idea. Find Your Perfect Fit works on two levels simultaneously — the apparel fit and the career fit — and it earns both without winking too hard at either. On its own, the line risks feeling lightweight. Executed with the right creative confidence, it reads as the intelligent entendre it is.
To prove it, we put it on a plain white Hanes t-shirt — their most iconic product — in clean typography, and handed it to real employees to wear. No explanation needed. The object made the argument.
We then asked their in-house video team to do something simple and unscripted: walk up to employees with a mic and camera and ask them, unprompted, what their perfect fit was. No talking points. No approved answers. Employees interpreted the question however they wanted — their role, their team, their growth, their life outside work. The range of answers was the point. It showed a company comfortable enough with its own culture to let people describe it in their own words. And many of them were really funny, especially people who took the question into underwear and bras. Full transparency, some of them had to be edited for, well, approval.
The career site was built to carry all of this — 28 pages, seven languages, IP-based language detection for international visitors, and a content architecture that guided candidates toward the experience most relevant to them, whether they were applying for a manufacturing role in Central America or a corporate position in the US. A dedicated section, Hanes for Good, told the story of the company's philanthropy and community investment across South and Central America — free education, community programs, and a giving culture that runs deeper than most companies in the category.
The design reflected the same thinking. Rather than defaulting to stock photography or a sanitized corporate aesthetic, we asked HanesBrands to send us photos from their actual locations around the world. They delivered. Real employees, real places, real work — clustered throughout the site in a visual language built to feel as global and varied as the company actually is.
The Result
When you stop trying to appeal to everyone and start creating the conditions for the right people to recognize themselves, the brand does more of the work. Find Your Perfect gave HanesBrands a platform elastic enough to stretch across 47 countries and three distinct candidate audiences — and specific enough to mean something to each of them.
For a company that makes the clothes the world wears, it turned out the most honest thing they could say was also the most compelling: there's a version of this place that's exactly right for you. Come find your perfect fit.