• by Les Luchter , November 27, 2024

Caption: Linnea Herzog, lead singer of Boston-based Linnea’s Garden, poses amid customized condom tins.

If you go see a glam punk rock band called Linnea’s Garden in Providence, Rhode Island, on Dec. 6, you may well come home with free condoms.

Linnea’s Garden is one of some 40 local bands, most currently based in the New England area, who have teamed up with One Condoms on the brand’s four-month-old One On Stage program, designed to reach 18- to 35-year-olds with safe sex messaging.

“Linnea’s Garden is all about staying safe when you’re getting sexy,” wrote the band on social media to mark the start of the tie-in. “That’s why we’ve partnered with @onecondoms to offer these new condom tins, exclusively available at our upcoming live shows. Visit us at the merch table and snag yours for FREE!”

Why mostly New England bands?

“I started out by messaging bands that I was a fan of,” Liz Kiraly, marketing coordinator for the brand’s parent company, Global Protection Corp., tells Marketing Daily. “Some of them I had met before, some of them I hadn’t.”

One Condoms’ purpose is to “harness the power of fans to use this shared love of music as an icebreaker to have conversations about safer sex and proper use,” Kiraly relates.

One Condom supplies participating bands with customized condom tins, each containing the band’s logo on one side, the brand’s logo on the other, and two condoms inside. The bands can distribute them gratis, as a bonus with the purchase of T'-shirts or other merch, or in other ways.

All the brand asks is that the band create at least one social media post or video about the partnership. In return, One Condoms includes a profile page for the band on the “One On Stage” section of its website and cross-promotes the band on its own social media.

“Eventually,” says Kiraly, “we’d like to move into sponsoring events like music festivals or larger scale concerts where we can continue handling out product, maybe get some promotion on stage from the bands, and supplement that with shared social media promotions and other forms of marketing to help spread awareness about the program and continue talking about safer sex.”

While band-branded condoms are new to 20-year-old One Condoms, the brand has a heritage back to the late ‘80s -- through Global Protection founder and chief executive officer Davin Wedel -- that includes customized condoms for such major artists as Prince, U2 and Kiss.  

“For the Purple Rain tour, there was a very cool Prince collaboration where it looks like a record and you open it and there’s a purple condom inside,” Global Protection director of marketing and communications Milla Impola tells Marketing Daily.

Also not new to One Condoms is a dedication to creative, artsy product packaging and what the brand calls community “engagement programs.” In addition to One on Stage, those programs include: Project Condom, “where all the garments are made out of condoms,” per Impola; a loyalty membership called Momentum: and College Ambassadors, where campus reps earn points good for free condoms, lubricants and other swag in return for hosting events and other activities. The latter group also now gets points for recommending local bands.

Impola says that One Condoms' aim since its start has been “how can you engage different types of groups to talk about safer sex and help normalize the conversation using our art and using creativity?”

“Music is a form of art,” she notes. “One on Stage came out of, how can we encourage music as a form of art to inspire conversations about condoms?”