Inside the Coach Hype Machine

Coach has done what few brands have been able to, but many desperately want: Convince young people it’s cool.

Reports of the 100-year-old brand’s relevance aren’t exactly greatly exaggerated—rather, they’re incomplete. It’s not just that Coach has had a viral hit (though, it has), developed a celebrity fan base (though, it has), or changed its look (though, it has). It’s that, since designer Stuart Vevers joined in 2013, it has expanded Coach’s whole world.

“I felt it was an important season to look forward,” Vevers told InStyle ahead of Coach’s New York Fashion Week show on September 15. “We had a great last season. It had a really strong reaction. But sometimes that's a trigger for me—I have to evolve, I have to do something new.”

What that means for Vevers is taking what people are responding to and having that guide what Coach does next. According to the designer, it’s “things that feel innately Coach because of the spirit they have—a certain ease, a certain straightforwardness, a certain cool, and a bit of attitude—rather than necessarily being a direct archival inspiration.” A great example of this is the now-famous Brooklyn bag: “I pick it up, and it's a very Coach object, but it's not directly referenced to the archive in any way. It just has a spirit.”

Released last summer, the Brooklyn—a slouchy and spacious leather shoulder bag that comes in a range of neutral colors and finishes—became the accessory of the season after Bella Hadid was photographed sporting it all around town. The bag helped boost demand for Coach overall; 332 percent year on year to be precise, according to the Lyst Index for Q4 2024, which ranks brands’ desirability based on searches, product views, sales, and more. (The Brooklyn was deemed the hottest product of that quarter.)

Products like the Brooklyn have made Coach a massive and important growth driver for its parent company, Tapestry, Inc. The brand’s revenue was up 10 percent in the most recent fiscal year; in the earnings report, Tapestry highlighted how it brought in more than a million new customers in the last quarter of FY25 (their fiscal year runs from July to June), the majority of whom were Gen Z and Millennials.

Coach has been feeling the love in the secondhand market, too. In its 2025 Resale Report, released earlier this month, The Real Real revealed that the brand saw the biggest jump in searches of any carried on their site year over year, up 160 percent. Coach wasn’t even on The Real Real’s designer directory until last summer, when the resale platform added it back in after noticing customer interest and spikes in searches. The two most popular styles currently are the Brooklyn and the Empire bags.

Noelle Sciacca, associate director of fashion and strategic partnerships at The Real Real, believes this to be a result of Coach’s multi-faceted approach to bringing in new customers. First, there’s the wide breadth of people being tapped to promote the brand: “Charlie XCX has been seen wearing the bags. Bella Hadid, in her cowboy era, is wearing the Brooklyn. Even New York City fashion It girls like Brie Welch and Gabriella Karefa-Johnson—which if you know, you know,” Sciacca says. There’s also the coffee shop in New Jersey and the emphasis on customization, long before the bag charm craze of 2025. Then, there’s the brand’s ownership of and responsiveness to its mistakes: When a TikTok video claimed Coach was destroying unwanted inventory in 2021, it updated its policies, expanded its (Re)Loved program, and, in 2023, introduced a circular sub-label called Coachtopia.

Thomaï Serdari, clinical associate professor of marketing and the director of the luxury and retail MBA at New York University Stern School of Business, has witnessed the impact of Coach’s evolution for herself: While riding the subway recently, she saw a group of young women all carrying Coach bags (similar shapes, but in different colors) that they’d accessorized and styled in a way that made them their own.

“Coach has tapped into something that allows it to create a product in volume, but to also present it to young women as something very personal and very customizable,” she says. “We know that younger consumers want things to be made specifically for them, but it's a daring stance for a brand that had been much louder before to move away from that and hone in on the stronger qualities that can still serve as pillars. You see that in how they style their bags: The bag is recognizable because of the shape—it’s not about loudness, the logo, or any of the things that it was doing in the previous chapter.”

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Gen Z really connects with this idea, she continues, because these consumers “want a sense of safety that of course doesn't exist right now in the world. That’s one emotion you can translate into something useful in the creative studio—to create product that enhances the personality of each individual consumer and makes them feel safe. As a result, you increase the bond this person has with the brand.”

Serdari believes Tapestry’s long-term investment into consumer insights (research that allows a brand to better understand not just its existing customer, but the feeling of the general public) has been key to developing its winning strategy. “This is how good marketers think about their business,” she says. What’s especially remarkable, she says, is seeing a brand with such a vast existing reach (930 directly-operated stores worldwide) implement these learnings: “It’s a very interesting tension that you need to navigate: to manage a big brand and make it feel intimate, personal, and individual.”

Data aside, the runway is really where Coach and Vevers are able to play and experiment. “This is a creative moment, it's a moment to try things,” he says. “Some we’ll get wrong, some we’ll get right, but it's a moment to be very instinctual.” For Spring 2026, we see a lot of that happening in footwear, moving away from boxier, tougher styles to spotlight a softer leather lace-up shoe: “It almost reads like a dance shoe, which is giving something quite romantic and soft,” Vevers tells me.

Vevers says there’s “a certain optimism and lightness” with the Spring 2026 collection. There are throughlines carried over from fall, including some of the most popular elements of that collection, such as the trousers, the wider silhouettes, and the kiss locks. The latter are drawn from the archives, and the way they’ve been implemented (in those oversized pouches last season; more petite clutches and pendants for spring) feels playful and modern.

The mini kiss-lock pouch pendant adorning many of the looks seen on the runway is our prediction for the item most likely to pop off this season. The reason is threefold: It’s functional, able to hold your keys and some cash for, say, a quick bodega run. It’s a continuation of summer’s biggest jewelry trend (cord necklaces, in case you didn't click), seen on everyone from Jennifer Lawrence to your favorite fashion editor, that has appeared on various other runways this season, including Ralph Lauren and Michael Kors. And it’s a natural successor for the bag charm (though, fear not, those remain), the now-inescapable outfit accoutrement Coach was an early proponent of. (This go-around we saw them take the form of metal pieces, such as an envelope that opens to fit a love note.)

These types of add-them-yourself touches speak to a desire to inject more of ourselves into our wardrobes, Vevers argues: “It's like the sense of found objects that have been collected that become a way for them to express their personality. I think that's why people love charms—the combination you create is very individual.”

The balance his Coach is able to strike, Vevers continues, is between “a reference to beauty and classicism that has a timeless quality” and “a youthful attitude.” And that, he says, “is what Coach really stands for today.”