Tom Berry Named Chief Executive Officer At SAXX
Press Release:
SAXX has announced the appointment of Tom Berry as Chief Executive Officer. Berry will succeed Wendy Bennison, who will remain in the business to facilitate a transition period before joining the SAXX board of directors in April 2024.
Berry comes to SAXX with an impressive background in the high-performance consumer goods space — most recently he served as president and CEO America’s of the Danish footwear and leather accessories company ECCO, and prior to that, held leadership roles at premium-brands Levi Strauss & Co, Tecnica, Salomon and The North Face.
With a track record of delivering results in both scale and agile business environments, Berry has led brand transformations, new business development and launches, category and geography extensions, turnarounds, and profitable partnerships. His career’s pattern of leading brands through growth comes at the perfect time for men’s underwear innovator SAXX — currently the number one men’s single-pack boxer brief brand in the U.S.
“With Tom at the helm and the continued dedication of our team and retail partners, we are heading into an exciting future as we reach more men with innovative, technical and life-changing products,” said Dan Galpern, chairman of the SAXX board and Partner at SAXX investor TZP Group. “Wendy’s remarkable achievements, including overseeing a period of significant growth and expansion, will leave a lasting mark on SAXX’s success, and we look forward to welcoming her onto the SAXX board.”
As the creator of the pouch underwear category with the patented BallPark Pouch™, SAXX has a fanatical customer base, evident by the fact that it sells 10 pairs of underwear each minute with a 93% customer repurchase intent. In fact, SAXX has outpaced the growth of the premium underwear market by three times since pre-pandemic1 and has successfully established its product as a household name by convincing men they deserve better underwear.
“It’s a true privilege to succeed Wendy and join a category leader and innovator,” said Berry. “The SAXX team has introduced countless men to SAXX’s life-changing underwear; but the reality is that the opportunity is so much larger as more men realize the benefits of taking care of themselves. I look forward to working with the SAXX Team, our world class retail partners, and TZP to let men know that it’s time to upgrade their underwear drawer.”
Berry succeeds Bennison, who will continue to serve as a SAXX board member moving forward. Bennison joined the company in 2017 with a track record of tripling businesses (a tradition she successfully continued at SAXX) and led the company through a period of substantial scaling, a rebrand, multiple new product categories including activewear, sleepwear and swim, and aggressive US retail expansion — culminating in valuable partnerships with premium department and sporting goods stores, as well as specialty retail partners.
“Encouraging men to embrace self-care, has been one of the greatest surprises and most fulfilling challenges of my career — and it’s a mission the team has catapulted at SAXX,” says Bennison. “I am thrilled that Tom is joining us to lead the next chapter in this incredible brand story.”
