Aerie Builds an Offline Marketplace for Other Brands to Connect With the TikTok Generation

Aerie’s latest marketing play is an organized effort to draw attention to other brands. Moving beyond the typical brand collaboration driven by a core product—a Barbie Burger King meal, for example—the clothing brand created a shared experience with a host of small businesses. 

Aerie’s Hidden Gem Marketplace, which featured small New York City businesses as well as other social-driven brands, was a marketing campaign for its fall 2023 line. Partners included floral boutique Brooklyn Blooms, crystal shop Palace One Eleven and granola brand Tom’s Perfect 10. Aerie collected bra donations for Free The Girls, a nonprofit that gives economic opportunities to sex trafficking victims, and offered each attendee a free bra in return.

Aerie has used its likeness to build buzz for the activation while establishing consumer recognition for the other brands. 

“Awareness is definitely an opportunity for us, but we decided to connect with local brands and amplify our messages together,” chief marketing officer Stacey McCormick told Adweek. “Most of the inspiration from our paid campaigns come from grassroots approaches or organic content from people who are just into the brand. Everything we’re doing here feels similar to that.”

A symbiotic storefront 

While marketers often consider community building an effort within their own consumer base, Aerie wants to challenge that method by uniting a variety of names under one roof. And as a brand that has significantly benefited from growth on social channels, Aerie is aligning itself with newer names like PopUp Bagels that have blown up on TikTok.

The brand handed out newspapers at the event that included Q&As and profiles on businesses featured in the market, as well as information on its own products and the birth of its Aerie Real platform. 

While the event’s title of “hidden gem” may seem to refer to the smaller brands that Aerie spotlighted in its marketplace, McCormick applies the term to the retailer itself and has been candid about making customer acquisition a priority. Research from YouGov found that Aerie is at 54% awareness for ages 18 to 35, and almost half of Aerie customers don’t buy its bras.

Though many of them found an audience on social media, the local businesses participating in the marketplace cited the benefits of connecting with consumers in person. After closing its flagship store last year due to pandemic challenges, ice cream brand Mikey Likes It said the marketplace was a valuable opportunity to reach customers offline. Dani Egna, founder of ecommerce temporary tattoo brand Inked by Dani, also recognized the perks of connecting with people face-to-face about their latest design interests while learning from other brands in a noncompetitive setting.

Asserting a timeless purpose  

In 2014, Aerie committed to a defiant role in the slow-moving intimates industry when it launched Aerie Real, which featured un-retouched photos of models with diverse bodies.

As the campaign that put the brand on the map approaches its 10th anniversary, Aerie is emphasizing the continued urgency of inclusion while focusing on new ways to differentiate when much of what it has always advocated for—unfiltered images and body representation—has become industry table stakes. 

“We like to say, ‘If the product had a bad season, then Aerie Real is still there,’” said McCormick, stressing the importance of maintaining a consistent identity that is unlinked to ever-changing purchasing patterns. “That helps us with our storytelling approach around seasonal campaigns, because we don’t fade in and out and we’re not a trend.”