Cause Marketing Thongs to Benefit Microfinance

The title of this post is a clause I never expected to put together. An enterprising entrepreneur named Renata M. Black is selling women’s thongs to benefit microenterprises in the United States, Brazil and India.

Empowered By You panties are seamless thong-style panties available at a handful of online and bricks and mortar outlets. Sales of the panties benefit the Seven Bar Foundation, whose mission is to support female microenterprise.

The ad… from the October 2012 issue of More magazine… is kind of a hot mess. Although it’s so sexy, you might not ever notice.

Plainly the model is breaking through the glass ceiling to where the men are. But how is it that she’s “Empowered” by said ceiling, I can’t get guess.

A paragraph at www.empoweredbyyou.com explains the visual like this:

“In the spirit of liberating the superhero in all of us, it is only a natural fit that every Empowered By You panty empowers women with their first break to make it. Instead of a ‘cape’ she is given a ‘break.’ A confident woman in the Empowered By You panty enables an underprivileged woman to spearhead her own business and rise out of poverty via microfinance.”

Apparently copy editors these days are as unfashionable as granny panties.

I got a 404 error when I tried to open up www.Aha.com/empoweredbyyou.

The Empoweredbyyou.com is functional, except the tab labeled ‘The Cause.’ You can read about the cause on the Seven Bar Foundation website, which substantially mirrors the Empowered By You website.

Both are long on goals, vision and sex-appeal, but short on substance, order, and, most of all, coherence. They both seem like they might be an unfiltered ‘brain dump’ from Renata straight to the website designer.

A word search on aha.com turns up a sell-page for Empowered By You panties. Aha.com is one of those curated websites for the fashion-forward. The sell-page says the thongs are seamless Brazilian cut and available in several colors and sizes for $20. It also says that $1 from each sale goes to provide microloans to women.

The Empoweredbyyou.com website says the goal is donate $1 million to microfinance by 2015.

Renata Black plainly understands how to use sex-appeal, so she may well meet her goal.

But I think she could get there a whole faster if she or someone at her company and foundation would sit a little bit closer to a professional editor while creating content and ads.

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