Personal care brand Billie launched in 2017 with a mission of combating the so-called “pink tax” imposed on products marketed to women. The direct-to-consumer innovator quickly staked out a purpose-driven position, using its advertising to normalize body hair, encourage consumers to examine unconscious biases and make the world a more equitable place.
Billie — which was acquired by Edgewell in 2021 after a deal that would have sold the company to P&G was scuttled by the FTC in 2020 — has kept purpose a part of its mission. But since moving into national retail in 2022 and rolling out a line of body care products last year, Billie has had some brand building to do.
In two ads that launched last month, Billie is taking back the bathroom as a place of refuge for women, using the brand’s products as part of a guided meditation that aims to right a day’s wrongs. In “The Ick,” a woman kicks off her clothes and shaves off every red flag from a bad date (“You look just like my sister”) before being instructed to “swipe on lotion like you should have swiped left” and “delete the app.”
A separate 30-second spot, “Scary Meeting,” goes through the thought process of a woman who is anticipating a mysterious chat with her boss. Both ads show off Billie’s full product line, which extends beyond razors into shave cream, body wash, lotion and deodorant.
“More and more people come across our brand as we’ve expanded into national retail, but a lot of our equity to date has really been as a razor brand,” said Catherine Wolpe, Billie’s co-general manager. “With this work, we knew we wanted to drive awareness for the brand beyond just our razor and shave offering and start establishing ourselves as more of a core part of women’s personal care routines.”
Bathroom humor
While the new spots are more focused on product than purpose, Billie stayed true to its tradition of showing parts of women’s lives in a way that transcends how they are usually portrayed in marketing. The new work demonstrates how the bathroom can be a space where womanhood can exist free from societal pressure, Wolpe explained.
“We talk about it as a space where women can connect with one another, where they can be open, where they can process things and fall apart without judgment. They can hype themselves up, they can hype one another up,” Wolpe said. “There’s just this realness to the bathroom that we wanted to honor.”
Instead of focusing on the tropes of getting ready (or unready) that are frequently featured in ads and social media content, Billie looked for another way into bathroom routines. The brand’s in-house creative team eventually landed on the guided meditation device that animates the two spots. Not only does the concept ground the creative in reality, but it also pokes fun at the overly serene portrayals of women’s routines found in other personal care marketing.
“It allowed for us to take a more cheeky, self-aware and even a little bit irreverent tone with the script,” Wolpe said.
While Billie relies on social listening, cultural reports and consumer research to inform its marketing, the bad dates and anxiety-inducing meetings were also partially inspired by experiences shared by the brand’s team.
“We have a pretty dialed-in team, and we are always sharing inspiration back and forth,” Wolpe said. “We’re a group of people who are terminally online.”
Beyond the 30-second spots, Billie will have various cutdowns and vignettes that were shot as ad bumpers. The campaign was created for streaming, YouTube and social channels including TikTok and Meta, and will likely live on as a creative platform rather than a singular effort. Even as Billie looks to build awareness for its wider personal care portfolio, it is still committed to championing women and challenging the pressures that they face.
“We haven’t moved away from our core values,” Wolpe said. “Depending on the asset and the objective, that may come to life in different ways [but] we want to make sure that we’re taking an approach that elevates the real and authentic experiences of womankind and never panders to women or paints them with sort of a monolithic brush.”
