Pardon My ... Jeans?

A couple months ago, when NFL teams were announcing their schedules for the upcoming season, the team at Mugsy got an unexpected gift: The Cleveland Browns “ripped off” Mugsy’s “best creative of all time.”

The copycat coverage, if you will, earned Mugsy PR hits in a number of publications and blew up on social media sites like X and Reddit. 

If you were to follow the story from there, you might end up with a “huh, that’s wild” type reaction. But the story is cooler than that, given Mugsy’s history advertising with Barstool Sports, Pete Weber’s overlap with Barstool, and how Mugsy CEO Leo Tropeano used early customer surveys, cold calling, and a bit of luck to make it all happen.

Read on for our conversation with Leo to find out how it all came together.

A couple months ago, you guys caused a stir when the Cleveland Browns ripped off your Pete Weber ad to announce their schedule.

We could talk about that, but I think the more interesting thing is probably why you did an ad with Pete Weber to begin with. My guess is that it has to do with your Barstool partnership.

So, maybe we could start there: You have a pretty long-running advertising partnership with Barstool. When, exactly, did it start? And maybe more importantly: Why?

Yeah, it's a cool story.

I did a Kickstarter in 2014 with a buddy on jeans and a different brand name. We were kind of interested in this idea that jeans could use a facelift and we did just enough to break even. I think we got  like 200 customers and I knew half of them.

It worked out to me quitting my job in 2015 and building up Mugsy, or what would be Mugsy. And the first thing I did was like really get to know, really think on who our guy was. Luckily, it was just my friends and me. So, you know, it was easy enough to just come up with like, ‘Alright, where are we? What are we doing? How can I, like, infiltrate a group of, you know, fresh out of college, starting to make some decent money?’

And so I tortured my friends those first years. I made them be models in photoshoots, I sent them surveys. And onle of the surveys was really, like, tell me everything you are reading, what podcasts to you listen to, who do you follow on Twitter—all that stuff.

And Barstool was the common denominator.

So I just set out to say, all right, I'm going to get in the Barstool, and I basically cold called them for—, I don't know how long—I tell people a year, but it might have been much shorter.

And then one day I get a call from some dude—and this is after months of not getting any response—and he just said, ‘Hey, I'm new to Barstool. My boss said to call you. He wants to know what you want, so you can stop calling him.’

At the time, Pardon My Take was relatively new. I think it was in its first year. The most expensive ad we’d ever run was probably, like, a thousand bucks, and this was much more than that. It was astronomical pricing for me, and this was like the biggest leap ever of like, ‘Man, this is a make it or it'll break it moment.’

But I was so confident and had so much research from the surveys and just asking everyone. 

It obviously made the brand, and I think everything that followed since then has kind of like they, ‘They’re with Barstool,’ and that kind of legitimacy helped us getting in with Howard Stern.

To help set context for people: Whathat's the scale of like your Barstool spend versus, like, say, Meta spend?

You’ve got to feed Zuckerberg, so we still spend anywhere from 60 to 80% on Meta and Google combined. The breakdown within that might be like 70/30 Facebook or something along those lines.

We're very heavy Facebook and that's just, like, the nature of an ecom brand at this point.

In fact, we've found that, if anything, compared to our peers and competitors, we spend less as a percentage on the digital or paid search or whatever and we spend more on this kind of traditional advertising stuff, like podcasts and billboards and radio and all that stuff.

So the sad part about that is that it kind of limits our ability to do other things.

Barstool takes up as big of a chunk as we can give them. You know, it's one of those things where we'd love to give them all of our money but you’ve got to feed Zuck and Google.

With Barstool, is it valuable for the pure reason you started to advertise with them in the beginning, which is like, ‘Hey, all my friends basically said this is exactly what they read and exactly what they listen to and I want to continue to reach more people like that?’

Is that simple or is there more to it from a perspective of like, ‘We're so intertwined with them now we have to keep it up.’

What's the rationale for continuing to put so much there when so many other brands your size don't actually invest that much there? 

I'd say every year we bring in some vendor and they try to convince us out of working with Barstool or, really, they always just try to get us to put more into Facebook and Google. They just kind of claim that the return isn't there and, you know, you can get like 4x ROAS on a Facebook ad compared to maybe like a 1X on a podcast or something.

They have all the data, but I always go back to like my gut, which is just, like, anytime I see someone on the street and they’re like, ‘Oh my god, I know of them. My son has a pair!’ or whatever and I ask, ‘How’d you hear about us?’ and it’s always ‘Barstool.’ 

First, yeah, it's a little bit of loyalty. But it’s a little bit gut. I just know that there's a legitimacy and the cool factor to being with them, and we've been with them forever.

The big thing you find when you go in with, like, a Barstool or a Howard or anyone really is that you saturate they're kind of market, and eventually your name starts to kind of fall on deaf ears. Just after six, seven, eight years of their listeners just hearing, you know, Big Cat, you know, ‘Mugsy might be the best jeans ever,’ it just doesn't have like a potency, it did, you know, in the first year or two, right?

So, early on, it was just, like, we have to keep it fresh and do cool things that people remember. And even if it doesn't lead to them directly clicking, you know, Mugsy or googling Mugsy, like at the time of the read, they'll see the ad and it'll make our digital ad spend work that much better.

It's hard to prove. It's hard to attribute that. But, in my gut, I just know it's there.

A part of that to maybe focus on is treating that team as a group of creators, if you will, and saying, okay, like, not only, you know, not only am I getting the normal type of reach, etc. that I get from a podcast read, but by allowing ourselves and allowing them to be creative, I'm also getting the best possible creative that completely aligns with my brand and I can use in a whole bunch of other ways, too.

So, that's maybe where feeding it back into Meta comes into play, right?

Yeah, and doing the cool stuff with them is mutually beneficial, because those guys are so tired. It's just like, ‘Alright, here's the 30-second read for a bidet company or something.’

We did that a couple of years ago. We had Big Cat whittling his dog Stella out of a block of wood in this log cabin or something. That stuff’s fun for them, you know? They want to expand and do creative stuff, too. So, everyone’s happy. 

Speaking of creative stuff, does the Pete Weber ad happen if, you know, you never get a call back from Barstool?

People say a lot, ‘You're so lucky to get into Barstool.’ That’s obvious, right?

There's so much luck doing this, but I always tell people, too, I'm like a rat in a cage; I will gnaw my way out of anything, which I think is just really stubbornness at its core.

So, hey, if Barstool didn't work out, I would have found a different path. And maybe that path wouldn't have led to Pete Weber, but, you know, eventually we got into Howard Stern, and maybe Barstool helped out a lot, but even that process took, like, months, and I had plans to go to New York and, like, wait outside his office and throw jeans at him and stuff.

So, I think the short answer is, yeah, Barstool helps a lot. And definitely it was like a direct path to Pete Weber.

By the way, the Pete Weber idea was our creative director Kyle on our team. That was all him. He did the whole thing, he came to us and was like, ‘I want to work with this guy. He's a legend.’

He’s like, ‘I'm going make the script, I'll set it all up,’ so it’s was, like, ‘Do it.’ And he got it to be probably our best creative of all time.

So kudos to Kyle for that, and, yeah, Barstool is a direct line to Pete, for sure. But if it wasn't for Barstool, I think we would have figured it out, you know?