Name: Why Gen Z Fell In Love With Coach
Uploaded: 2025-06-24T02:48:28.000Z
Duration: 9 min 30 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Coach purses were a staple in the early 2000s, worn by teens at the mall and celebrities on the red carpet.

The monogram design with a double C logo was everywhere.

But by the 2010s, the brand fell out of favor.

Its luxury reputation suffered and sales plummeted.

The company wiped out about 60 percent from its market cap between its 2012 peak to mid-2014.

Mainly among Gen Z consumers who are driving a lot of its growth.

Fashion always looks to the youngest generation for inspiration, and then every other generation follows.

So we knew if we could win with the timeless Gen Z, we can win with everyone.

And in 2024, Coach surpassed Michael Kors to capture second place in the U.S. luxury handbag market.

He was named the fifth hottest fashion brand in fourth quarter 2025, climbing 10 spots from its previous ranking.

In this sector, it's really rare to take a kind of mediocre mall brand that has been tarnished and then elevate it to be a credible luxury contender.

Coach was founded as a men's leather goods business in 1941.

Over time, a baseball glove's patina is enhanced.

And that's why today you see 10, 20, 30-year-old Coach bags, but across the globe, still having that beautiful, sustained patina.

In the decades that followed, the brand transformed into a woman's fashion house, opening its flagship store on Madison Avenue in 1981, and then boutiques in Macy's department stores across the country.

The brand distinguished itself as accessible luxury, high craftsmanship at affordable prices.

In the late 90s to early 2000s, its iconic logo-covered bags became an it-girl item.

But as logo mania fell out of favor, Coach suffered.

Its heavy discounting and over-presence in outlet malls cheapened its reputation.

Consumers traded the brand for competitors Tory Burch, Michael Kors and Kate Spade.

And, you know, the brand had kind of almost been diluted in terms of its heritage and the value of the product.

Between January 2012 and January 2015, Coach shares lost 40% of their value.

There was a time when you'd walk in the store and you were just handed a 20% off coupon, and that was a site-wide or a store-wide discount.

And over time, that drags down the brand equity of the brand overall.

By 2013, the company recognized the need to course-correct.

Nearly all of its North American sales are direct-to-consumer.

So Coach had great access to long-term data.

The company hired a new executive creative director, Stuart Vevers, who came from high-fashion brands Mulberry and L'Oeuvre, to introduce a more youthful aesthetic.

He shifted Coach away from the heavy logo designs.

The company also closed underperforming stores and moved away from discounting.

They, you know, pulled everything back, went completely back to the drawing board and thought,

They also, you know, looked at their products and realized, yes, we need to scale back.

The company also made several acquisitions.

It bought designer footwear company Stuart Weitzman for $574 million in 2015 and former rival Kate Spade in 2017 for $2.4 billion.

That October, it renamed its holding company, Coach Incorporated, to Tapestry.

It wasn't so much a light switch as it was building on a little bit of success to success to success.

We focused on fewer ideas, both in product and storytelling.

We became very focused on this timeless Gen Z climb globally.

We stopped telling ourselves some stories that businesses tell themselves, that every business unit, every market is a snowflake.

I think those underpinnings and those principles, coupled with culture, make a huge difference.

In 2021, longtime Tapestry executive Todd Kahn took the helm as CEO and president of Coach.

The brand's sales grew 16 percent that year and 15 percent from pre-pandemic levels.

Seventy-four percent of Tapestry's revenue that year came from Coach.

Over the last five years, Tapestry's market cap has expanded by about 140 percent.

Bags like the Brooklyn, Rogue and Tabi became bestsellers in part because of powerful social media campaigns with influencers and celebrities like Megan Thee Stallion and Lil Nas X.

As Y2K fashion came back in style, Coach seized on the moment by leveraging nostalgia.

It rebranded older pieces for a new audience and re-released classic designs and launched bags at different price points to meet demand for every budget.

Should somebody have to save three or four months of salary to buy a handbag?

Is that really the world we think is great?

I love the fact that you don't have to do that for Coach and you don't have to do that across the globe.

Coach has also benefited from Gen Z's love for customization.

Its brooches and bag charms have been hits.

It's also been experimenting with in-store experiences.

It launched immersive concept stores called Coach Play to help boost Gen Z visits and Coach coffee shops.

Coach's revenue grew 15 percent in Q3 2025, compared to the same quarter a year prior.

It also outperformed the industry in Europe and China and achieved a 77.1 percent gross margin,

More than two-thirds of its nearly 900,000 new customers in North America were Gen Z and millennials.

The Brooklyn bag was named the hottest product of Q4 2024 by global shopping platform List.

Demand for its products overall was up 332 percent year over year.

Coach's sales grew double digits two quarters in a row.

While, for example, LVMH, the owner of several luxury brands, witnessed declining sales.

And the share price of the two companies reflects this difference, too.

You're seeing a very clear market share shift where those brands are declining and they're particularly calling out the affordable luxury consumers.

They have said repeatedly that they have not seen any deceleration in the trend year to date in 2025, which is quite surprising given the environment we're in where the consumer is being more cautious.

Coach generates about 60 percent of its sales in North America, but its international appeal is growing, especially in Asia.

It currently has nearly 1,000 stores in 21 countries.

With the rise of social media, small up-and-coming direct-to-consumer brands are encroaching on its territory.

Looming tariffs could also impact the brand.

More than half of Tapestry's goods are manufactured in Asia.

Planned reciprocal tariffs on those imports are as high as 49 percent.

Yet its supply chain is diversified, with no single supplier accounting for more than 10 percent of production.

Based on what we know today, we will be fine.

We have relationships for 20, 30 years with our suppliers.

We really are involved in every aspect of the process.

That helps us navigate these kind of issues.

Long term, Coach could diversify its offerings to compete with peers.

Women's handbags and other accessories account for about 70 percent of its sales.

I think sometimes brands go too quickly into line extensions and category expansion.

And what ends up happening is they go into lower margin categories that maybe have more fashion risk, more obsolescence risk.

And so they end up actually diluting the equity of the brand by doing too many things all at once.

So I like that Coach is being slow and measured with this.

And we see that just on the demographics.

If you think about next year and for the next five years, there will be 25 million women who turn 18 globally, who can, in the markets that we play, who can afford over a $100 handbag.

When you just think about that opportunity to bring them into the Coach vote, to have that first bag be a Coach bag, that's tremendous growth.

So I don't necessarily need to be great in everything.

We like to be great in everything, but we really need to be great in our core categories.