“Dear man,Your life is your party.
It’s time to explore all versions of yourself.
Embrace your emotions. Enjoy your contradictions.
And cry if you want to.You were born to be imperfect.
Give yourself more chances and remember you don’t need to prove anything to anyone.
Except that you’re an awesome human being.”

Brand manifest
Dearmen is a new brand of accessories that was born with the desire to give men the tools to explore and express their own masculinity. Because we need to speak, in plural and freely, about masculinities; we urgently need to diversify the narrative around what it means to “be a man” and banish the traditional definition. So that one day when we look into each other’s eyes we see what we really are. Humans.

Our client wanted to create a “whimsical retail and distribution business” for men. He trusted us to create his brand, based on three premises: it had to be a brand for “men of our time”, “very masculine” and “build community”. Three guidelines that seemed antagonistic to us. So we revolted against the brief. Sometimes that happens with us.

Continuing to talk about “masculinity”, as if there is only one way to be a man, is not the way for men to feel represented by a new brand’s discourse. Nor is it the way to create community. Nor is it a current approach. Instead, it is the way to exclude and perpetuate traditional, unrealistic, corseted and, all too often, toxic masculinity. During the strategic analysis, we realized that more and more men think and recognize that other ways of being a man are necessary. It is around these men that we found our niche market and built our brand positioning: Dearmen gives men the tools to explore and express their own masculinities. With awareness, freedom, authenticity. No labels, no stereotypes. Simply as human beings.

Dearmen is a brand for men. But it doesn’t talk like the vast majority of men’s brands. Nor like many men. Because the path to creating an egalitarian society starts with the words we speak. Dearmen calls men dear/s and thus establishes, from its very naming, a declaration of intentions. Because Dearmen sets out to “bring out the inner human being” that all men carry inside. Not the man, but the human being. That means showing oneself as one is. Without worrying about whether what you do, say or feel fits in with what “men” are supposed to do, say or feel. Dearmen uses an affectionate, complicit and provocative tone and verbal style to convey this discourse. On the one hand, because he invites men to dare to speak to other men in the same terms (it is liberating!). On the other, because his discourse is full of winks that, from the male reductionist point of view, would be considered “girlish/girlish/womanish”. Like certain phrases by Lesley Gore, The Weather Girls or Nancy Sinatra. But also Freddie Mercury, one of the great antagonists of traditional masculinity.

Dearmen could be the heading of one of those letters that used to be written, by hand, with a nib, long ago. And that’s where the inspiration for the corporate identity, with all its visual representations came from. The logotype is a typographic composition formed by the Alfreda font, which has a calligraphic air, and the Albra, which gives the brand the necessary touch of modernity. The isotype is made up of the initials of the two words that form the naming.

The visual universe is completed with the neutral chromatism of paper and ink, and with a photographic style featuring men who break away from traditional standards.