...the BenCH

Bench bags international honors


The Philippine Star
November 06, 2011

Ben Chan at the 15th Asia-Pacific Retailers Convention in Singapore. Bench won the Best Marketing Campaign award for its series of underwear shows.|

MANILA, Philippines - When you think of a local retailer that has successfully gone global, top of mind would be Bench. Now with stores in Riyadh, Kuwait, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and different cities in China (more than 27 company-owned stores and 19 franchises in this emerging superpower alone), Bench is now providing affordable and quality products to not just Filipinos based abroad, but also to fashion lovers who can’t resist the brand’s youthful, practical and trend-purveying products.

Bench’s international appeal, however, is not only consumer-reliant. Just recently the clothing and lifestyle brand proved that global success is not just based on sales or a particular number of stores when it bagged the Best Marketing Campaign Award at the 2011 FAPRA (Federation of Asia-Pacific Retailers Association) Awards.

Bench head honchos Virgilio Lim, Ben Chan, Nenita Lim and Bryan Lim

Once just a small booth at SM Department Store, Bench, founded by Ben Chan (a dreamer with an interior design education), first entered the retail scene by peddling T-shirts. A year later, Chan opened his first boutique and expanded the Filipino wardrobe by offering bottoms and more clothing options. In 1991, Bench pursued the possibilities of advertising and released a TV commercial featuring then local heartthrob Richard Gomez. Devoid of copy or voiceover, the black-and-white TVC showed Gomez rowing a banca to a soundtrack of Chopin’s Claire de Lune.

The audacious simplicity of this ad won the Best Cinematography Award in that year’s Philippine Advertising Congress and set an internal standard for succeeding Bench advertising and marketing campaigns. The success of this TVC also became a portent to other forms of marketing recognition, a fitting precedent to the FAPRA award it recently received.

Ben Chan, on behalf of Bench, receives the Best Marketing Campaign award from FAPRA Permanent Secretariat Secretary General professor Xiaoning Cao with Dr. Jannie Tay, FABRA chairman Lee Chul Woo.

Held annually during the Asia-Pacific Retailers Convention and Exhibition, the largest gathering of all retailers in the region, the FAPRA Awards honors Asian merchants’ most innovative and creative efforts in the selling,
marketing, customer service  and even training categories.

This year, the Philippine Retailers Association (PRA) nominated Bench and its series of underwear shows as a contender for the Best Marketing Campaign Award. The much-awaited event, which had its debut showing in 1997, is mounted every two years and attracts hordes of attendees, most of whom would probably give an arm, leg and any other available limb just for a ticket. Over the years, the Bench underwear event has grown from just being a show of skin or a celebrity stage gathering to a spectacle that incorporates international acts and globally-based Filipino designers — in 2008, Bench introduced their Mobo underwear line by London-based designer Lesley Mobo, and also wowed audiences with French acrobats hanging from the ceiling, tethered just by aerial silk; in 2010, the Bench Uncut show focused on Bench’s global undertakings and featured designs of Dubai-based designers Michael Cinco and Furne One, both now making waves in Hollywood.

PRA president Frederick Go with Ben Chan, Virgilio Lim and Robert Claudio