Taking back #WorkingNakedDay

Injecting a naturist message into a fake holiday

Naturists the world over have embraced Working Naked Day, a fictional holiday which was invented by author Lisa Kanarek in 2010 to promote her book and brand Working Naked. The “holiday”, which falls on the first Friday in February every year (that’s this Friday if you’re paying attention), was originally meant to promote the idea of working from home and creating simplicity in your home workspace, and wasn’t really about nudism—or even nudity—at all. In fact, the publishers cleverly played off of a few existing nudist holidays, such as World Naked Gardening Day—which was founded by Mark Storey and Jacob Gabriel of Body Freedom Collaborative in 2005—and smartly used viral internet marketing (still somewhat new territory for advertisers in 2010) to spread news of the holiday and attract cheeky media stories. In the context of the book’s clear marketing strategy and the tendency of advertisers to tack “Naked” onto the names of any widget they can as a means to move more units, it seems …