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ABS Wheels: Swedish tyre business doubles sales after dropping ‘sexist’ adverts

Owner Andie Lahdo said: ‘The number of women customers is now six times higher’

Thursday 24 December 2015 17:52 GMT

ABS Wheels stopped using sex to sell its products (Getty)

A Swedish tyre company found their sales and popularity doubling after dropping “sexy” adverts and pursuing a more straightforward approach.

The company’s adverts had previously been branded as sexist by Sweden’s advertising ombudsman four times, the worst record held by any company in the country, according to a report by Dagens Media magazine.

ABS Wheels, based near Stockholm’s Arlanda Airport, made the decision a year ago to replace the tasteless adverts, instead using clear, straightforward imagery of their product, during a redesign of its website.

As a result, they found sales suddenly booming, from about 25 orders a day to about 50 – and many of their new customers were women.

Owner Andie Lahdo told The Local the number of women customers was “six times higher than before” and explained their new strategy.

“Our marketing now isn’t just products, it’s education-based marketing, with lots of visuals,” he said. “When we go to trade fairs, we now take a sports car rather than a hostess, which means you meet a much broader set of customers.”

The company originally built its customer base by advertising in Swedish men’s magazines such as Slitz and More, which are the Swedish equivalents of FHM or Maxim.

Mr Lahdo told The Local they modelled their old adverts on similar ones commonly seen in the “American tyre business”.

One of the ads features a model in lingerie holding a chainsaw, while another features two women dressed in straps, who appear to be wrestling, with fire in the background.

The actors fighting against sexism in Hollywood

Show all 12

1/12The actors fighting against sexism in Hollywood

The actors fighting against sexism in Hollywood

Anne Hathaway

The 32-year-old actress said she has already experiences job rejections because of her age. “Now I'm in my early thirties and I'm like, 'Why did that 24-year-old get that part? I was that 24-year-old once. I can't be upset about it, it's the way things are,” she told Glamour.

EPA

The actors fighting against sexism in Hollywood

Helen Mirren

On news that Maggie Gyllenhaal had been turned down for being ‘too old’, aged 37, to play a 55-year-old man’s partner: “It’s f***ing outrageous. It’s ridiculous. Honestly, it’s so annoying. And ’twas ever thus. We all watched James Bond as he got more and more geriatric, and his girlfriends got younger and younger. It’s so annoying.”

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The actors fighting against sexism in Hollywood

Maggie Gyllenhaal

Gyllenhaal revealed she was told by a Hollywood producer that she was too old, aged 37, to play the love interest of a 55-year-old man. “It was astonishing to me. It made me feel bad, and then it made feel angry, and then it made me laugh,” she said at the time.

Getty Images

The actors fighting against sexism in Hollywood

Meryl Streep

Meryl Streep has helped fund an all-female screenwriters group called The Writer’s Lab to encourage more women to pen Hollywood scripts. She previously told Vogue in 2011: “Once women pass childbearing age they could only be seen as grotesque on some level.”

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The actors fighting against sexism in Hollywood

Emma Thompson

The actress said she thought Hollywood is “still completely s***” when it comes to treating women equally to men. ““When I was younger, I really did think we were on our way to a better world. And when I look at it now, it is in a worse state than I have known it, particularly for women, and I find that very disturbing and sad.”

EPA

The actors fighting against sexism in Hollywood

Elizabeth Banks

Banks said she was driven from acting to directing due to the lack of roles for older women in Hollywood. “"[Industry sexism] drove me to direct for sure. I definitely was feeling that I was unfulfilled and a little bit bored by the things that were coming across my desk. I mean look at Gwyneth Paltrow who has her Oscar [for Shakespeare in Love] and played fifth banana to Iron Man,” she told Deadline.

PA

The actors fighting against sexism in Hollywood

Viola Davis

“I had never seen a 49-year-old, dark-skinned woman who is not a size 2 be a sexualised role in TV or film. I'm a sexual woman, but nothing in my career has ever identified me as a sexualised woman. I was the prototype of the ‘mommified’ role,” she told The Hollywood Reporter.

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The actors fighting against sexism in Hollywood

Liv Tyler

The Lord of the Rings actress said she only get cast in roles where she is treated as a “second class citizen” at the age of 38. “When you’re in your teens or twenties, there is an abundance of ingenue parts which are exciting to play. But at [my age], you’re usually the wife or the girlfriend - a sort of second-class citizen. There are more interesting roles for women when they get a bit older,” she told More magazine.

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The actors fighting against sexism in Hollywood

Cate Blanchett

The actress famously called out sexism on the red carpet at the 2014 Screen Actors Guild Awards. When a camera operator scanned her up and down, she said: “Do you do this to the guys?” In her Oscar acceptance speech for Blue Jasmine, she reminded the film industry that movies with leading women can still be successful. “And thank you to... those of us in the industry who are still foolishly clinging to the idea that female films, with women at the centre, are niche experiences. They are not -- audiences want to see them and, in fact, they earn money. The world is round, people.”

Gareth Cattermole/Getty

The actors fighting against sexism in Hollywood

Ellen Page

Asked if she had ever encountered sexism in Hollywood, Page told The Guardian: ‘Oh my God, yeah! It's constant! It's how you're treated, it's how you're looked at, how you're expected to look in a photoshoot, it's how you're expected to shut up and not have an opinion, it's how you... If you're a girl and you don't fit the very specific vision of what a girl should be, which is always from a man's perspective, then you're a little bit at a loss.”

Getty Images

The actors fighting against sexism in Hollywood

Zoe Saldana

The actress says she refuses roles where she has to play the generic girlfriend, wife or sexy bombshell. "It's very hard being a woman in a man's world, and I recognised it was a man's world even when I was a kid. It's an inequality and injustice that drove me crazy, and which I always spoke out against — and I've always been outspoken,” she told Manhattan magazine.

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The actors fighting against sexism in Hollywood

Charlize Theron

The actress spoke to ELLE about negotiating equal pay for the Snow White and the Huntsman sequel: "This is a good time for us to bring this to a place of fairness, and girls need to know that being a feminist is a good thing. It doesn't mean that you hate men. It means equal rights. If you're doing the same job, you should be compensated and treated in the same way."

Andreas Rentz/Getty Images

Mr Lahdo said he worked in a “traditionally very male-dominated business”, and he had no regrets about the old adverts as the company never received complaints from clients.

“But now, in retrospect, it’s clear that the changes we’ve made have doubled our sales,” he added.

The automobile industry has always been a subject of controversy when it comes to sexism and the objectification of women in advertising.

In 2009, Toyota chose an innuendo-laden advert to promote its Toyota Yaris model, featuring a conversation between a father and his daughter's boyfriend in which they both agree she can "take a good pounding".

After receiving complaints of sexism and incestuous tones, the advert was removed from Toyota's website and the company apologised for the offence.

This year, car service company Ultra Tune came under fire when it featured women dressed in bondage gear to promote the sale of tyres. The tagline was: "The word is out we're now into rubber".

The Advertising Standards Bureau did not find the advert to breach any codes of conduct.

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