It’s no coincidence that Gen Z is drawn to Coach.
In 2021, Coach has set a strategic goal of appealing to the “timeless Gen Z” customer. After doing consumer segmentation, the company realized that this customer had a classic style, was someone they would invest in, and was someone Coach felt they could acquire.
But the coach had to find a way to reach them. Not so long ago, consumers perceived it as an older brand. “It’s more of a mom’s brand,” said Alice Yu, Tapestry’s vice president of global consumer insights, bluntly. Coach has been revamping his company’s image, but public perception may be slow to change.
Coach began meeting with shoppers to learn more about its target customers, then Coach Vice President of Strategy Jennifer Yue sat down with Fabio Luzzi, Tapestry’s head of data and analytics, to develop a plan. Ta. Using a dashboard built by our data team, we found that Tabby brings in many young shoppers who go on to deliver high lifetime value to the brand. This style first debuted in 2019, featuring a front flap with a bottom extension tab secured with a C-shaped clasp. America was losing out on affordable luxury goods to high-end European rivals. 1970s Coach Archives His style-inspired hardware and classic design appealed to his Gen Z shoppers the brand wanted to attract.
However, further validation was required. Their consumer research also found that shoppers were often drawn to Tabby by going shopping with them in a Coach store, even though they remained ambivalent about the Coach brand overall.
“You can really create a franchise with this, and this can become a true icon,” Yue said, looking back. “That had a huge impact on what we started doing in terms of product development.”
momentum increases
They briefed their design team and began releasing a new version of the bag that included a variety of sizes to offer at an entry-level price. They also began devising a strategy that centered the bag as a marketing hero product. They relied on insights from Yu’s team that this group of Gen Zers is looking for ways to become more confident. In 2022, Coach featured the bag prominently on its runways and launched its “Courage to Be Real” campaign with Lil Nas X. In 2023, the company continued with its “In My Tabby” and “Wear Your Shine” campaigns, and continued to release new Tabby products. There are different types, including a quilted version. All the while, they continued to test and refine their product and message to make sure it resonated.
Tabby quickly gained momentum. Average weekly searches for the bag in the U.S. began to rise in 2021 and jumped 368% in 2022, according to data from retail intelligence platform Trendalytics. Search volume continued to increase through 2023, albeit at a slower pace. Trendalytics also saw a spike in global engagement for his Tabby on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and Pinterest with each campaign. The biggest hit came in April 2023, during Coach’s bag-centered pop-up tour and campaign with Jennifer Lopez featuring Tabby.
CEO Crevoisella repeatedly touted Tabby’s success on the earnings call, saying it exceeded expectations in February 2024, with “nearly doubling year-over-year and above-average new and youth consumption.” “We obtained an excessive number of indicators.” [selling price]”
The impact of a single bag
This strategy may also be strengthening young shoppers’ overall impressions of Coach bags. Investment bank Piper Sandler’s semi-annual “Taking Stock With Teens” report ranked Coach as the fourth most popular handbag brand among female teens in the United States in the first half of 2021. By the first half of 2022, the company rose to his number one position and remained there until the end of 2023, with an increase in the share of people citing it as their favorite brand.
Yue said the data dashboard has helped them understand what actually works to reach their timeless Gen Z target consumers. You can slice your data in terms of price, style, or number of SKUs for different channels. In her nearly 10 years with the company, including her six years in merchandising, she has worked with teams such as merchandising and design to regularly review data in the early stages of projects. I’ve seen it start to incorporate. She benefits from higher conversion rates and higher average selling prices.
“We’ve done a much better job over the last few years of identifying areas that really impact our business,” Yue said. “Some of them may not have been as intensely focused on the consumer historically, but now, along with many of our sales goals, they are much more embedded in the consumer. I think it had a meaningful impact.”
Sometimes people aren’t immediately convinced by the data, where art and science, or in Tapestry’s preferred terminology, magic and logic collide. Yue said one of the older team members had doubts about the commercial potential of Coach’s archival style Swing Zip bag among Gen Z. But testing showed that groups liked it.
However, the goal is not for data to override everything else. It is about providing decision makers with more information and a stronger basis for choosing a course of action.
“We’re in the world of fashion, so the art element is very important in some things,” Palansky said. “Then data is created and some of the elements of a particular product or campaign cease to be art. By capturing the data, we can more reliably know what is happening and what is not happening. Because you can.”
Want to learn more about how to turn your data into meaningful customer connections? Download the case study here.
