Coach this week launched its spring 2026 campaign, “Explore Your Story,” in support of its Tabby bag and a new collection of readable book charms. The campaign was cocreated with communities around the globe and informed by listening to Gen Z, tactics discussed during a Feb. 25 virtual event hosted by Marketing Dive featuring Coach CMO Joon Silverstein and VaynerX CMO Avery Akkineni.
“Listening is so important to us. We do deep immersions all around the world to deeply understand our consumers,” Silverstein said during the event. “What social has taught us is, it's not just about these deep immersions, which are so central to how we think about building our brand. It's a daily discipline. It's constantly listening and engaging with consumers on social, in comments, and it's incredible to see how culture and community form within those spaces.”
“Explore Your Story” includes two campaign videos directed by Marcus Ibanez that feature brand ambassadors that span film, music and sports: Academy Award-nominated actor Elle Fanning, Emmy-winning actor Storm Reid, Korean musician Soyeon, Japanese singer-songwriter Lilas, WNBA star Paige Bueckers and Chinese singer Shan Yichun.
In both videos, each ambassador sees their world transformed around them after reading a book. The campaign comes as Coach introduces twelve miniature, readable book charms based on titles including Jane Austen's “Sense and Sensibility” and Maya Angelou's “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” that were chosen collaboratively with Gen Z consumers.
“It is our most cocreated campaign to date, from start to finish,” Silverstein said of the campaign. “It has been done in cocreation with Gen Z communities, from the U.S. to China: defining the insight, crafting the narrative, selecting the books, defining how it shows up in culture and in communities.”
The Coach brand in fiscal Q2 2026 saw revenue increase 25% and helped drive growth at parent company Tapestry, Inc., per its most recent earnings report. The brand increased marketing spend by approximately 40% versus the prior year in support of top-of-funnel brand building to support customer acquisition.
"Our relevance with Gen Z is influencing all other generations, and we're driving healthy gains from existing customers, reflecting broad and increasing brand desire and reach," Tapestry CEO Joanne Crevoiserat said on a call about the earnings.
Cocreating with community
The charms and spring campaign were inspired by cultural trends around long-form storytelling, especially as Gen Z turns to books to explore identity and self-expression in a time dominated by short-form, digital content. Coach’s conversations with Gen Zers around the world has revealed a generation of dualities that has driven how the brand engages with the cohort.
“When it comes to social, they're a generation that is extraordinarily connected globally through social and digital, but also often feels incredibly isolated,” Silverstein said, noting how an insight around the power of storytelling to connect people and bring people together informed “Explore Your Story.”
To support the campaign, Coach partnered with Gen Z-led communities and platforms around the world, including Sunnie, the Gen Z-focused arm of Reese Witherspoon’s Hello Sunshine brand; media organization China Youth Daily; publishers including Penguin Random House in the U.S. and independents shops in China, Japan and Korea; the WNBA; and Bilibili, China's top Gen Z video platform.
“We believe in the opportunity to cocreate our brand, hand in hand with our consumers,” Silverstein said. “We're increasingly building Coach that way. It's so much more powerful when our consumers see themselves in the brand and feel like they are helping to build that brand together with us. I think our spring campaign is a great example.”
“Explore Your Story” features an experiential component in the form of a college tour in the U.S., Asia and beyond, retail activations that turn customization bars at its stores into Coach Book Nooks and events as part of the Coach Foundation’s annual Dream Day.
And while it was launched this week, “Explore Your Story” was seeded by the brand at New York Fashion Week earlier this month. The book charms were teased during the brand’s runway show, but also on partner bags in the front row and on the subway on the way to the event, providing an opportunity for the brand, creators and consumers to create content around books and storytelling.
“What was so powerful was not the content and how much content, but it was the conversation and community happening in those comments. Consumers were tagging authors. Authors were connecting with other authors across the globe,” Silverstein said. “That's how momentum is built, and that's how we see our ability to be relevant, because we're helping spark conversations, and we're thinking about our brand as a platform for community.”
