How (and why) pasta brand Banza makes swimwear

Tomato sauce purses, sandwich flip-flops, and now…a bucatini bikini.

Despite food-inspired fashion being all the rage this summer, Nicole Landesman, VP of marketing at Banza—the chickpea-based food brand that created the “bucakini”—told Marketing Brew that its involvement in the trend is purely coincidental.

“We’ve been doing this for a long time,” Landesman said of the company’s merch. She cited a collaboration Banza did in 2021 with beaded-accessory designer Susan Alexandra on pizza charms as one example.

“At the time, we saw on social that there were a lot of wearable food items,” Nicole McNey, director of earned media at Banza, added. “Every single time we launch, people just love [merch] and so that’s why we always try to do it.”

In addition to the bucakini—created to promote the company’s recent bucatini release—Banza also has a T-shirt line with actor Drea de Matteo on the horizon, according to McNey.

Companies create branded merch for several reasons: to get people talking online, drive media coverage, or collect customer data. At Banza, McNey said creating merch is about driving buzz on social and turning product releases into bigger moments.

“We launched bucatini in June and we really wanted to give people a reason to keep talking about it over the following weeks,” she said.

A new kind of pool noodle

After a brainstorm around what a summer product could look like, McNey said the team decided to zone in on bucatini looking like a pool noodle and the similarity between the sounds of “bikini” and “bucatini.”

Banza tapped designer and long-term partner Marianna Fierro to create the swimsuit’s pasta pattern. According to Landesman, it was important for the branding to not be too obvious, hence the small “b” tag on the back of the suit.

“Our priority with all swag is designing things that we think people will really want to wear, so to us brand comes second,” she said. “We try to find subtle ways of integrating Banza into the design in a way that doesn’t detract from what the messaging is or what the idea is.”

Landesman added that quality is also something the brand considers, with the swimsuits featuring hand-embroidered noodles from a local embroiderer in New York. “We try to find ways to elevate each piece of merch in a way that we think is cool enough for our own team to be wearing. And that sometimes comes with finding niche partners to bring that vision to life,” she said.

Merch doesn’t make up a “huge chunk” of Banza’s] budget on the marketing team, Landesman said, noting that  the team is “scrappy about it” to ensure that they’re able to deliver high-quality products that reflect well on the brand.

To get the word out about the $59.99 bikini, McNey said Banza tapped Yu Ling Wu from the Netflix show The Circle to model the product, as well as other creators like Callie Wilson, who is known for cooking in a bikini, and Jill Burrow, who made an “edible” bikini out of Banza’s noodles.

Once released, McNey said the 100 bucakinis produced in the first batch sold out within the first two days.

The bucatini does not stop here

With bikinis shipping out this week, time will tell how much organic social content comes from bucakini owners. McNey said engagement to date has been promising: “A fun anecdote that our team pulled from this launch was that our launch posts had an equal amount of shares and likes, which shows everyone who's liking it is also sharing it with someone.”

In addition to creating social chatter, Landesman said the bucakini was also about making people smile and building the brand image. Looking at comments on social posts about the product, she said, “The sentiment was so positive. And I think to us, that was a huge indicator of success.”

Next on the docket, McNey said the Banza team is working on the T-shirt line with de Matteo from The Sopranos. The plan is to celebrate the ways people eat pasta while also leaning into the “bad girl vibe” she has already cultivated in her own T-shirt line from her Sopranos character, McNey said, with one shirt saying, “bad girls eat angel hair.” As of now, she said the release date is expected to be sometime in the next month.

Landesman said a big reason why brands have jumped on the merch trend is because it gets “people thinking about your brand in a slightly different way than the core products that you’re making.”

By being witty and humorous, she said, “I think it just gives people one more reason to love us and look out for us in the store.”