Bonds: how Chesty's singlet ended up owned by Hanesbrands

Walk into a Kmart in 2024 and the Bonds display still does the heavy lifting it always has: chesty tees, hipster briefs, the singlets your dad wore under his work shirt. The packaging still leans on that laconic, square-jawed cartoon bloke. What it doesn't tell you is that the company behind it has been American-owned for the better part of two decades, and that the factories where those singlets were once knitted, in places like Unanderra on the New South Wales south coast, have been closed for even longer. I've spent a fair bit of time this year going back through the Bonds story for a longer project on Australian textile brands, and it's one of the cleaner case studies I've found of a beloved local icon quietly becoming an overseas balance-sheet line item.

The Bonds ownership history is not a scandal in the tabloid sense. Nobody broke the law. But it is, I'd argue, one of the more instructive examples of how a brand can stay culturally Australian in every visible way while the actual business behind it drifts steadily offshore, first in manufacturing, then in ownership itself.

A Yankee name that became fair dinkum Australian

Here's the twist that trips up most people, including me the first time I looked properly: Bonds started as an American company. It was founded in the United States in the 1900s by George Frost Bonds, and the Australian operation began life around 1915 as a local subsidiary, first as an importer and manufacturer under licence. Over the following decades the Australian arm effectively went its own way, developing its own products, its own manufacturing base and, crucially, its own advertising identity that had nothing to do with the parent brand back in the States.

That local identity became inseparable from the character of Chesty Bond, the barrel-chested, chinless cartoon figure created for a newspaper advertising campaign in the 1930s. Chesty was a home-grown creation, drawn originally by a Sydney artist for the local Bonds business, and he did more to cement "Bonds" as an Australian word than any amount of American corporate paperwork ever could. By the postwar decades, most Australians would have assumed, reasonably, that Bonds was as local as Vegemite. The company ran large manufacturing operations across New South Wales and Victoria, employing thousands of Australians in spinning, knitting and garment-making at its peak.

The industrial heartland behind the singlet

It's easy to forget, looking at a plastic-wrapped three-pack at Big W, that Bonds was once a genuine manufacturing employer of scale. Mills operated in and around Wagga Wagga, Unanderra and other regional and outer-metropolitan centres, part of a broader Australian textile, clothing and footwear sector that at its height employed well over 100,000 people nationally, according to historical Australian Bureau of Statistics manufacturing data. Bonds wasn't just selling underwear; it was a fixture of regional employment, the kind of business a country town built a football club sponsorship and half its local economy around.

That began to change from the 1990s onward, as tariff protections that had shielded Australian textile, clothing and footwear manufacturing were progressively wound back under successive federal governments. The logic was standard economic reform: expose local industry to global competition, let efficient firms survive and let consumers benefit from cheaper imports. The practical effect on companies like Bonds was that offshore manufacturing, particularly in China and later other parts of Asia, became dramatically cheaper than running Australian mills bound by Australian wages and conditions under the relevant modern awards.

The offshoring controversy

Bonds shut its remaining Australian factories in stages through the 2000s, shifting production offshore in a move that mirrored almost the entire domestic textile, clothing and footwear sector. The Unanderra plant's closure, along with other regional mill closures, drew sustained criticism from unions, including the Textile, Clothing and Footwear Union of Australia, and from communities that had depended on those jobs for generations. The argument at the time wasn't subtle: a brand that had spent seventy years wrapping itself in Chesty Bond's very Australian singlet was now making that singlet in factories on the other side of the world. The company's defence was the one every offshoring manufacturer gives, and it wasn't dishonest: without the move, the argument went, Bonds risked being priced out of the market altogether by cheaper imported competitors, costing more Australian jobs in retail, distribution and head office than the manufacturing shift would save. I'm not fully convinced that's the whole story, in my view the retail-jobs-saved argument always does a lot of work in these debates precisely because it's harder to falsify than a factory closure with a date on it. But it's also true that Bonds was hardly unique. By the time its mills closed, most of its Australian competitors had already gone the same way or gone under entirely.

From Pacific Dunlop to Hanesbrands

The corporate ownership had already shifted well before the final factory closures. Bonds had become part of Pacific Dunlop, the sprawling Australian industrial conglomerate, which built a portfolio spanning rubber, batteries, cabling and apparel through the mid-twentieth century. Pacific Dunlop's later corporate history was one of steady divestment and restructuring, and its apparel and consumer businesses were eventually spun off and rebranded as Pacific Brands in the early 2000s, taking Bonds, along with other well-known local names like Berlei and Sheridan, into a standalone ASX-listed company. Pacific Brands ran into its own well-publicised financial pressure in the years following the global financial crisis, and it was against that backdrop that the group's ownership eventually changed hands. In 2016, the American apparel giant Hanesbrands, owner of global names like Hanes, Champion and Playtex, acquired Pacific Brands in a deal that brought Bonds, alongside stablemates such as Bonds' own underwear rival Berlei and homewares brand Sheridan, under United States corporate control. It's worth being precise here: Hanesbrands didn't buy "Bonds" in isolation, it bought the whole Pacific Brands portfolio, of which Bonds was easily the highest-profile asset.

What stayed, what left

The bit I find genuinely interesting, and it's the same pattern I keep finding when I go looking at these Australian-icon-goes-offshore stories, is what a foreign owner chooses to keep. Hanesbrands kept the Bonds name, the Chesty Bond mythology, the Australian-flavoured marketing, the sponsorships, the design and merchandising teams based here. What had already left, well before Hanesbrands arrived, was the manufacturing base and, with the change of ownership, the ultimate profit destination and strategic control. That's a distinction worth sitting with. A brand can remain thoroughly Australian in voice, in advertising, in cultural placement, in the way it's stocked at Kmart and Target and Myer, while the company issuing dividends sits in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. It's a similar dynamic to what played out with Ugg boots, where the American owner of the trademark kept using unmistakably Australian branding cues while the legal and commercial control sat entirely offshore, as we've covered in our piece on the Ugg trademark war. Bonds is a gentler version of the same phenomenon: no courtroom drama, just a quiet handover.

Why this pattern keeps repeating

Bonds isn't remotely alone. Australian consumer brands with strong local mythology have proven to be attractive, well-understood acquisition targets for larger global groups precisely because the emotional equity is already built. Nobody has to spend money making Australians love Chesty Bond; that work was done decades ago. A foreign owner just needs to not break what's already working, keep the local marketing team doing its job, and let the distribution economics of a global apparel group do the rest. We've traced a few of these journeys now, including in our broader look at the roster of iconic Australian brands now owned overseas, and the through-line is fairly consistent: local manufacturing goes first, usually under tariff or cost pressure, then the corporate ownership follows once the economics of the business look attractive enough to a bigger foreign group. It's a different mechanism to what happened with a brand like Aesop, which built its identity on deliberate restraint and was acquired by L'Oréal specifically because of that discipline, a story we told in our history of Aesop's sale. Aesop's founders chose their moment. Bonds' path offshore was less a single decision than a slow accumulation of smaller ones, tariff reform, mill closures, conglomerate restructuring, eventual acquisition, each individually defensible, each moving the centre of gravity a little further from Australia.

Chesty's afterlife

What's genuinely remarkable, and I say this as someone who's watched a lot of brand mascots fade into irrelevance, is that Chesty Bond has survived all of it. He's been retired and revived by marketing teams more than once, updated for changing sensibilities around body image and masculinity, but he's never been junked entirely, because he remains one of the most recognisable pieces of Australian commercial iconography from the twentieth century. Under Hanesbrands, Bonds' Australian marketing has, if anything, leaned harder into nostalgia and local identity, sponsoring Australian sport and culture, running campaigns that trade heavily on being the singlet your grandfather wore. There's a reasonable question in there about whether that's a bit rich coming from a company whose profits flow to North Carolina, but I don't think it's cynical exactly. It's simply how modern branded consumer goods work: the emotional home of a product and the financial home of its owner have become almost entirely separate questions. Bonds tells you it's Australian because, in every way that matters to the customer standing at the underwear rack, it still is. The company that owns it just isn't.

For more on how Australia's household names ended up in someone else's annual report, our Iconic Brand Histories hub has the rest of the series.