Athletic apparel seller Vuori is dipping its toes in a new advertising realm with its first-ever TV commercials—an opportunity to spotlight its high-in-demand product category, as many consumers are gravitating toward activewear amid the pandemic.

We recently spoke with Jamie Fontana, director of ecommerce at Vuori, about this initiative, which is running across a variety of networks, including Bravo, CNBC, MTV, and HGTV.

Describe Vuori's new TV campaign.

We're going to be testing across linear TV and streaming. We’re running two concepts alongside one another, so we can test and learn. It was really important for us that the content captures the overall spirit and the unique positioning of Vuori as being rooted in our active coastal California lifestyle. Both of the concepts do that very well. One of them is just a brand concept, while the other focuses more on our top-selling joggers.

More direct-to-consumer (D2C) brands are diving into TV. Why did you decide to finally leverage this particular channel?

We're always looking for new ways to be innovative in our approach. Our advertising is also about storytelling and introducing people to the brand. We believe that TV is a great extension of what we're already doing on social media and digital advertising. Our commercials highlight the feelings that customers have when they interact with us. We really wanted an introduction to this channel to be very thoughtful, recognizing that it has a strong potential to build awareness and reach new customers, while also creating that emotional tie to the brand through storytelling.

How have the ads performed so far? Have they translated into sales?

It's still really early for us, so I don’t have any KPIs [key performance indicators] to share at the moment. Each day, we're learning a lot, but reaching our goals is looking positive. We want to increase awareness, reach many more people, but also tie it back to sales and site traffic so that we can scale and learn. We're monitoring everything from traffic to our site to overall advertising effectiveness in the marketing mix, so that we can really understand the impact of the campaign.

What are you hoping to get out of this campaign?

We're looking forward to understanding the possibilities of TV. It's a new way for us to reach our audience, and it's one of the main places where they're spending time.

After that, we’ll test, learn, iterate and—should we see continuous performance—ultimately scale the channel, because we're always looking for a new and successful channel to add to our marketing mix.

How does the TV advertising compare with other forms of advertising Vuori has done in the past?

TV has a lot of possibilities to be able to play really well with the channels that we're currently investing in, but it also has a broad range. You're able to connect to customers and tell a story with the commercial, and then tie that to the brand in an emotional way. It’s brand storytelling.

TV also has a large audience where a lot of people are spending time in our current environment. It really does a great job of allowing us to capture their attention.