It was 2003 when two old friends, Travis Garone and Luke Slattery, were sitting in a pub, chatting about recurring trends. The pair began to question where the moustache had gone and joked about bringing it back into fashion. Soon after, a challenge was set and 30 mates banded together to bring upper lip hair back to the faces of men around Australia - the inaugural Movember event had begun. Under the banner Are You Man Enough To Be My Man? those first ever Mo Bros grew their moustaches with such enthusiasm that the following year a decision was made to formalise the concept and get all participants growing and raising funds for a specific cause – prostate cancer.
2004 saw 450 Mo Bros grow for Movember and AUD $54,000 was raised, funds which were donated to Prostate Cancer Foundation of Australia (PCFA) - the single biggest donation ever received by the organisation.
In 2005, PCFA joined Movember as an official men’s health partner and a new creative concept was designed for the campaign – Give Cancer A Kick In the Arse. The movement continued to gain momentum and the campaign saw 9,315 Mo Bros raise AUD $1.2 million for men’s health.
The following year, Movember was established as an official Australian charity - the Movember Foundation. Having identified depression as an additional and significant issue men faced, beyondblue: the national depression and anxiety initiative was brought on as Movember’s second men’s health partner.
That same year the campaign was launched in New Zealand in partnership with The Prostate Cancer Foundation of NZ. Small unofficial campaigns were also run in the UK and Spain. A total of 56,129 Mo Bros and Mo Sistas in Australia and New Zealand raised AUD $9.3 million.
In 2007, Movember took the men’s health message on the road with international campaigns being officially launched in the UK, US and Canada, in addition to a small campaign once again being run in Spain. The move saw 134,171 Mo Bros and Mo Sistas unite to raise AUD $21.5 million, in addition to generating of an enormous amount of awareness for men’s health in all corners of the globe.
Since the first Mo sprouted in 2003, Movember has grown at an extraordinary pace, raising €412 million and having funded over 800 men’s health programmes. Today, with the support of hundreds of thousands of Mo Bros, Mo Sistas and their donors, Movember is continuing to fulfil its vision: to have an everlasting impact on the face of men’s health.
