Jill Verde on the revelations that come from being all kinds of queer on Bonobos social

Jill Verde, Social Media Manager at Bonobos | In conversation with Maggie Lee

Your role now is Social Media Manager, but you started at Bonobos in email marketing. How did you end up switching?

The guy who was doing it left, and I said I wanted to do it. I took the account over from him.

How did you develop the voice you’re now using on their social channels?

At first, I just started doing it the way that it was already being done. I remember very actively trying to pretend to be a straight man, I guess. That was the vibe that had been established. So the emojis and the language that I was using were much more bro-like to fit the tone of what had been going on.

But I did take note of the way we’d been celebrating gay people and gay themes — it had been somewhat limited to Pride, which can appear like we’re trying to take advantage of a moment, even if we are donating on a consistent basis. And I wanted to sprinkle the moments in more and more on social to give our LGBTQ+ followers that chance to feel represented year-round. And to be honest, it seemed like we just overwhelmingly got a positive reaction every time I did that. So then I was like, Oh, I can vibe with this. And I just let it take over.

It sounds like Bonobos gives you a lot of freedom there, and that lends to the authenticity and real-time relevancy.

The visuals and captions do go through a review process with the team, but I have complete control in regards to how I interact with and respond to people. I've definitely had a lot of freedom within the comments in particular, but my approach with that was really influenced by the first gay wedding photo I posted, breaking from just straight couples getting married in Bonobos attire. It wasn’t a Pride thing, it was just a cute picture of two men in our suits, and the engagement we got was positive, so I took that engagement further in comments.

I did see in a recent post quite a number of comments from people saying they were unfollowing in reaction to something you posted, though.

Yeah. They're cool with us being gay — we get very little like backlash whatsoever there, maybe the worst that gets is followers asking if we ever post straight people, as a hyperbolic criticism of when I get on a gay-only roll. But what you’re referencing was our first time posting someone who is gender nonconforming. This seemed harder for people to wrap their heads around and we definitely lost some followers.

Some issues that exist really become very transparent through social data like that.

Yeah, something about seeing someone male-presenting in a bra and nail polish. Honestly, I viewed it as a test. People were more upset than I thought they would be, but for the people who saw themselves represented by the post, I think it had a very meaningful and hopefully lasting impact on their perception of the brand. In addition to the small amount of backlash, there was also an overwhelming number of positive comments and quite a bit of appreciation. In taking a risk like this, we ruffled some feathers but we also showed people who might not get a chance to see themselves properly represented by brands and in media on a daily basis that they matter to us and that we see them.

Do you think some cis straight men who wear Bonobos are worried people will think they're less straight or less masculine? GNC people are a demographic that is less normalized and understood in the mainstream, so it’s not as easy for cis straight men to segment themselves apart from it, perhaps?

That’s definitely part of it, yeah. Someone recently tweeted that Bonobos is straight clothes for gay men and gay clothes for straight men, which is really funny, and we posted it on Instagram and people loved it, but I know that there was internal debate over whether it would be upsetting to cis straight men. But we had faith based on what we'd seen from our customer base so far, and decided that any joy it would spark for our customers would outweigh any upset. We also felt comfortable enough at this point in time to really embrace this very fun-loving and accepting part of our voice and our narrative and to really lean into it.

A lot of brands at one point interpreted being inclusive as posting things like “yas kween” on Twitter, but at a certain point, that was better defined as appropriation. As a queer person, should Bonobos trust you to create more authentic content?

This is known to be a “menswear” brand, so even our queer perspective is assumed to be a queer male perspective, and I know many followers assume I'm a gay man. I try to seek the authenticity in how I approach that. Sometimes I feel like I'm appropriating gay male culture, but I do feel like I have a good gauge on what is and isn’t okay. A turning point for me was when we had “daddy vibes” as a caption on a photo to kind of push the limits, and the post itself got a really positive reaction from customers in the comments, but a former employee — a gay man — did reach out to say that it seemed as though we were appropriating gay culture. I realized in this moment that perhaps we hadn't come as far as I'd thought that we had in proving, on a daily basis, that we stand for and represent all types of people. In a lot of ways this was good motivation for me to ramp up the work of being inclusive in our representation. my hope was that if i continued to put in that work that in the future people wouldn't reach out saying we were appropriating anything but rather would be able to see it for what it was; i.e. authentic. It was definitely a strange moment for me as a gay person, though, because I felt as though an assumption was being made about me as the person running the account which obviously did not at all align with my sense of self — the assumption being that I'm a straight man and not a lesbian. If we’re open to representing our community fully, what does it mean for a non-male queer to represent a “menswear” brand? How can we defy the binary through every step of this but also authentically represent the communities which have historically been our core consumers? I’m in test mode on all of this.

Why do people assume you’re a gay man? I know a lot of lesbians who buy Bonobos.

I feel like you can tell by the interactions that they assume I'm a man, and I consciously roll with it. Someone tweeted recently like, somebody give the Bonobos social media gay a raise, which to me read that they assume I’m a gay man. They don't think I'm a lesbian. But I consider that a win. Doesn’t that prove something in itself, if people can read tweets from a lesbian and assume I’m a gay man, what does it all mean anyway?

Do any of the posts come off “straight”? You said earlier you get asked by followers to post photos of straight people?

Yeah. People call us out if it's too many gay couples. Which is silly, because we’ve never actually hit that threshold in my opinion. The way that I respond to people in comments is usually like 50/50, gay/straight, though. I do actually write captions with a straight man. So we can balance one another, which is fun. But the way that I respond to people now in comments, it’s a lot of kiss emojis, or calling them “boo.” (laughs) I’ll comment on men's pictures and be like “absolutely hot.” It’s important to remember that I’m engaging with a very specific segment of people — it’s not just LGBTQ+ people as a whole, it’s LGBTQ+ people who are on the internet and follow our brand. They’re there talking to me for a reason — it’s actually more of an internet culture than a queer culture that informs why I go and say this stuff.

At the end of the day what we're doing is showing off the clothes that we sell, so the majority of our posts are literally about the clothes and their product attributes, fashion, style, quality, and so on, and not about being gay or straight or anything else at all. But when it comes to sprinkling in lifestyle imagery and influencer content, I think it's good to organically represent our customers as they actually are — and often they are gay, gnc, or even (gasp) lesbians.

Do you have any overarching goal or direction you want to keep taking the accounts?

I was thinking on what we could do for Pride in a year past, and my friend suggested that anything is better than nothing, right? She said wouldn't you just be upset if Glossier didn't do anything for Pride — because I'm obsessed with Glossier. And I realized, I actually didn't know if Glossier was doing anything for Pride, despite being sure they represented me and stood for things I believed in, based on what they did all of the time. And I realized there’s more weight in that — how are you holding yourself as a brand year round? So, further establishing that has been my goal for Bonobos. Just to be normal and include people consistently. Then anything we do for Pride won't be performative. And people will actually feel represented by our brand. To your earlier point, we've been seeing more and more lesbians and people across the whole spectrum of gender commenting and relating to our content, saying they also wear whatever fit we’re showing. That’s really nice to see. So I just want to keep going in that direction. To not just be representing straight and gay cis men. To be more inclusive.

Some brands now are trying to be inclusive by making things like “male nail polish.” In my opinion, that doesn't make any sense. What makes it male? I like that Bonobos hasn’t made “women’s pants.” Plenty of women just want to wear the pants they’re already making.

Right, it's literally just clothes.