The holidays trigger the most wasteful behavior of the year. For Gen Z, the tension between their love of fashion and the impacts of the industry are especially pronounced during this time.

In an industry characterized by overproduction and discounts that stimulate overconsumption, Coachtopia never goes on sale or promotion. This is a challenge and an opportunity during the holiday period, where promotional levels are deepest and loudest.

How can we galvanize a global Gen Z community around our circular mission with an engaging message around waste during the most wasteful time of year? The campaign amplifies Coachtopia as a disruptive circular brand co-created with Gen Z and creates aspiration to purchase its products. With an emotionally resonant message, the campaign also stands out in a crowded market by challenging holiday fashion norms.

Business KPIs

• Brand awareness among Gen Z

• Acquisition of Gen Z

• Holiday sales goals

The holidays are a time filled with cheer, but also a time when our culture of overproduction and overconsumption is most pronounced.

This campaign flips the traditional narratives of the holiday season and gives new meaning to waste in an emotional fable that serves as both a magical origin tale for Coachtopia itself and a message of hope addressing the heightened tensions of its Gen Z consumers during the holidays.

In this tale, we meet Wasty—itself made from Coach waste, a loveable incarnation of Coachtopia’s mission—and Lola Tung, a young woman feeling increasing climate anxiety. Together, they discover the potential of reimagining waste, and their unexpected friendship forms the start of the Coachtopia community. Ending with a simple message, “Have a Wasty Holiday,” the campaign rewrites the standard holiday greeting with waste at the forefront, reinforcing Coachtopia’s vision for a more circular future in a new, unexpected context.

Our target audience is Gen Z consumers who care about fashion and sustainability (from those beginning to be conscious of fashion’s impacts to climate activists). Since the very outset, Coachtopia has been co-created with these consumers through a global Beta Community of designers, thinkers, makers, and activists, now more than 300 members strong.

This holiday campaign was inspired by conversations with this community, with whom the brand engages and collaborates on a daily basis. Our community shared that they are increasingly uncomfortable with the trade-offs they are forced to make in fashion—between their desire for self-expression and their moral values around sustainability—and that these tensions are most pronounced during the holidays.

In this campaign, Coachtopia—with its mission of circularity and products made from waste—disrupts from within and challenges the traditional narratives of both fashion and the holiday season in order to build a more hopeful future.

The objective was to drive awareness of the nascent Coachtopia sub-brand, which was only six months old, while emotionally engaging our audience around the seldom-discussed issue of waste triggered by the holidays.

The campaign ran for two months (November/December) with a 95s hero film and a variety of cutdowns, targeting Gen Z across online video and social platforms in North America, UK and Japan. Despite limited budgets (as a startup), the campaign drove 300M+ impressions and very strong view rates (75% VTR, 60% VCR on YouTube). A robust array of social content—from BTS content with our community members to the making of Wasty—and an editorial hub on our website amplified the storytelling of the film. Our audience fell in love with Wasty, and playful social content such as Lola meeting her co-star for the first time went viral, with 3.8M organic views on Instagram and 12.5M on TikTok.

The creative resonated powerfully with our target audience in pre-testing, and its impact as measured through brand lift studies was exceptional. On TikTok, a core platform given our Gen Z target audience, ad recall increased +15 pts (+119% relative lift) and brand awareness increased +13 pts (+102% relative lift). On Meta, ad recall and awareness increased +7.2 pts (+80%) and +6.4 pts (+100%), respectively. The campaign sparked robust conversation, with a 73% engagement rate on YouTube and 36M video views on our organic social platforms.

Coachtopia is a 100% pure business, meaning there are no promotions or discounts even during Black Friday. Therefore, we knew the holiday quarter—the most intensely promotional time of year for both Coach and the industry—would be challenging. However, fueled by this significant increase in brand awareness, holiday sales surged +80% over the prior quarter and increased +50% in penetration to total business.