IRNBY | A Visual Study of the Brand’s Communication Strategy

Positioning and Brand Codes

IRNBY positions itself as sport-chic / active-lifestyle fashion: clothing for training, the city, and everyday life. Fit, body-shaping lines, fabric quality, and a sense of confidence in one’s body are central. The brand’s visual language combines sport, minimalism, physicality, and provocative femininity. Its aesthetic draws on the aerobics of the 1990s and 2000s and is deliberately eroticised

Tagline «INSPIRED WITH SPORT SPIRIT», сhannel motto «YOU BUT BETTER» and logo — the letter «I» shaped like a dumbbell. Mironova describes the brand’s logic plainly in an interview with Sobaka.ru: «Sex really does sell — it is one of our basic instincts… But openness can hold poetry rather than vulgarity. What I sell is not the body but emotion»

Target Audience

The audience is mainly young, affluent women (roughly 18–35), concentrated in Moscow and St. Petersburg. Their interests include fashion, fitness, body aesthetics, self-care, and the visual culture of social media. For this audience, clothing is not only a functional item but also a way to display discipline, attractiveness, status, and membership in a lifestyle community. A defining feature is that the core audience consists of Mironova’s own followers, for whom she is a role model — a parasocial bond

Product and Pricing

There are two lines sportswear (tops, shorts, rashguards, leggings, cycling shorts, tennis dresses) and casual wear (jeans, suits, dresses, hoodies, outerwear, accessories). The price segment is mid-to-high for the Russian market

• ribbed tank top — 2,990 ₽ • sport shorts — 4,390 ₽ • hoodie dress — 8,490 ₽ • eco-leather jacket — 16,990 ₽

Instagram*

Instagram* is the brand’s main visual storefront. Campaigns, model photography, short videos, and the aesthetics of the body, sport, and confidence all do their work here

@irnby.store — around 433,000 followers @mironovanastasiia — around 2 million (the personal channel that drives trust and sales) @irnby.club — around 211,000 (workouts)

Through Instagram*, the brand sells a desired image of the self

Telegram

Telegram is a more direct line to the audience, where there are news, announcements, links to the site, and information about IRNBY Club workouts. It sustains the feeling of a closed community of insiders

@irnby_store — around 21,600 followers @irnby_club (Training Club) — around 21,500 followers, average reach of roughly 4,000 per post, ER ≈ 12,4% (high engagement)

TikTok

TikTok works as a stage for building a mood around the brand. The clothing appears through trend-driven formats such as lip-syncs, popular sounds, fast cuts, stylish shots, and short fashion videos

The @irnby.store account is confirmed. Through these trend formats, IRNBY’s pieces read as part of the current visual language of social media — bold, confident, on-trend

Choice of Theories

Two theories from the course were chosen because they best explain IRNBY’s strategy:

1. Visual Rhetoric (rhetoric and persuasion) — how the brand persuades through the image
2. Grunig and Hunt’s Four Models of PR + Dialogic Theory (public relations) — how the brand builds, and fails to build, relationships with its publics, especially in a crisis Together they cover both everyday communication and behaviour during scandals

Visual rhetoric studies how we are persuaded by what we see: composition, colour, and the layering of images. As media grow more interactive, the visual dimension matters more and more. Aristotle identified three instruments of persuasion that apply to the visual as well, there are «ethos», trust in the source (Mironova’s persona), «pathos» like emotion (desire, status, physicality) and «logos» — logic and argument (quality, fit, results)

All of IRNBY’s communication is persuasion through the image rather than through text

Visual Language: Ethos

The brand’s ethos is Mironova’s persona. The audience trusts not an abstract brand but a specific person — a self-made fitness entrepreneur. This can be seen in the comparison of social media — roughly 2 million followers on the personal account against 433,000 on the brand account, and a PR contact in the personal profile (ceo@irnby.com). Personal and corporate capital are fused, people’s trust in Mironova transfers onto the clothing Here ethos outweighs logos — people buy a connection to Mironova rather than the technical properties of the fabric

Visual Language: Pathos

Pathos is IRNBY’s main lever. Body-shaping silhouettes, the aesthetics of the body, and provocative prints (the chest, the torso) appeal to desire, confidence, and status. The founder admits as much: «What I sell is not the body but emotion.» This is a direct description of how pathos works — the image triggers an emotional response that is then transferred to the product

In September 2025 at the opening of IRNBY’s café in St. Petersburg, disposable cups printed with a spine and cup holders showing women’s faces with open mouths appeared and came together in a composition the public read as a reference to oral sex. The reaction included accusations of objectifying women, of vulgarity, and of chasing hype, with parallels drawn to the earlier «Pims» scandal. Part of the audience, by contrast, defended the brand as «true to its style» but in May 2026 the episode repeated itself with cups featuring a male nude

Through Visual Rhetoric

In terms of visual rhetoric, the meaning is created not by a single object but by the composition (cup with cup holder). This is a classic visual argument in which the viewer’s reading diverges from the author’s stated intent. The brand bet on provocative pathos but did not control the interpretation, the audience decoded the message differently from how the sender encoded it. The visual argument proved ambiguous and turned against the brand

Through the PR Models

First the stories were removed without comment, then Mironova stated that the women were «doing face fitness» and that the rest came down to «the breadth of people’s imagination and thinking» This is the press-agentry model (provocation for attention) combined with the two-way asymmetrical model where the criticism is not acknowledged, responsibility is shifted onto the viewer, and the organisation does not change. There are no signs of dialogue, no empathy, no acknowledgement

Assessment of Effectiveness

IRNBY’s communication strategy is effective in terms of reach and sales, we can see a strong visual language, a powerful personal brand around the founder, high engagement (ER above 12% on Telegram), and growth of more than 60% over 2025

However, it is reputationally fragile, the reliance on provocation regularly produces scandals, and crisis communication is built on asymmetry and the avoidance of dialogue, which amplifies the negativity

Strengths

• A clear, recognisable visual code • Mironova’s persona as a source of trust • A self-contained lifestyle ecosystem (clothing, fitness and art) • High engagement within a loyal core • Competent handling of reviews on maps

Weaknesses

• Loss of control over how provocative visuals are interpreted • Crisis communication run on the asymmetrical model (deletion and dismissal) • Absence of apology or dialogue, which escalates the negativity • Borrowing another brand’s visual argument, which damages ethos • Dependence on a single individual it leads to concentration risk