Panos Emporio: dare to be human

Panos Emporio

We weren’t responsible for the layout or photography, but our contribution here is in the tagline, ‘Dare to be human’.
   In my 12-year friendship with Panos Papadopoulos, the designer behind Swedish swimwear (and now clothing) label Panos Emporio, we’ve often worked on marketing tasks. The most recent one: come up with a tagline that encompasses the Panos Emporio brand.
   The term ‘Dare to be human’ has emerged elsewhere (as I discovered after coming up with it), though to my knowledge not in this industry or as a tagline, and since the campaign is largely focused on Scandinavia, it doesn’t appear to have any conflict.
   The story is fairly simple: mixing the vision of the head of the company with the accurate external perceptions, and coming up with something that all audiences can agree on.
   We had done some exploratory work on the philosophy of Panos Emporio earlier in the year and this was an extension of that.
   Our brand research has usually shown that an accurate tagline is more effective, in communicating a brand internally and externally, than any mission statement, and one that can serve a company in the long term is better still.
   Panos’s thoughts were that he liked to push the envelope when it came to his swimwear designs—that much is a given, and accepted by his customers—and his use of PR in Sweden over the years suggested as much. Where we align even more is our shared belief in humanitarianism, and the idea that good people can become anything they wish, and should have the opportunity to do so. Over the years we’ve discussed some great programmes that can help young people, and trying to cement these ideas, and many other ideas of things we’d like to do to advance our planet. If you look back across the 25 years of the label, Panos Emporio was often pioneering in its designs and publicity programmes, often shocking the sector, and earning Panos a celebrity status (including an episode of the Swedish version of Secret Millionaire).
   External audiences will always come back to us to tell us the comfort in Panos’s designs first, followed by their appreciation of the designs themselves, so there was an intersection with the “human” aspect here. It was taking that with humanitarianism and social responsibility, and blending it with the envelope-pushing.
   ‘Dare to be different’ is trite, so it really was down to changing the last word. (I am simplifying the process because there were many others that were rejected.) It tested well, and the first ad with the new tagline will break this quarter.
   I hope it’ll stay with the firm for many years to come. I think it encompasses everything Panos tries to say with his work.


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