With its 12 Coach Play concept stores, Coach is cracking the secret to what gets Gen Z to spend time in stores.
Best described as testbeds for ideas with the potential to resonate with Gen Z, Coach Play’s “fully immersive” and “hyperlocal” stores have seen impressive levels of dwell time, with their different components translating to differing levels of engagement. In general, compared to a typical Coach store, a larger number of Gen-Z shoppers enter Coach Play stores. And among those who enter, their dwell time is often 4-8 times greater in Coach Play than in a typical Coach store — it’s even higher in Asia.
“We build the stores with [dwell time] in mind,” Giovanni Zaccariello, the brand’s svp of visual experience, told Glossy during this week’s Shoptalk conference. “There’s a sense of discovery, there are things for them to do, and there’s more space for people to just hang out. “
Usually, 10-15% of a Coach Play store is dedicated to providing an experience, through a customization station or a coffee shop, for example. At Coach Play APW, which opened in Malaysia in October, however, 50% of the store is experience-focused. Positioned in an old magazine printing company, pointing to Coach’s signature celebration of craft, Coach Play APW offers customers the opportunity to customize a tote or screen-print a T-shirt, for example. Shoppers spend eight times more time there than in any other store in Malaysia.
Likewise, on U.S. college campuses, an experience-heavy version of Coach Play, which featured both an ice cream shop and a customization shop for Coach’s hero Tabby bag, saw 12 times the average dwell time of local stores.
Coach Play stores also host events every Friday through Sunday. The events typically feature music, like a DJ; a hospitality element, like food from local cookie or ice cream vendors; and artists or expert craftsmen, to customize shoppers’ Coach pieces. The components are usually programmed by the store manager, with guidance from Coach’s events team, to ensure a local feel. But, to make a splash when entering a market, the brand’s events team typically orchestrates a grand opening for a store and invites local celebrities, including artists and musicians.
“It’s a laboratory for us to test new ideas,” Zaccariello said, regarding Coach Play stores. “We’re a legacy brand, so we need to celebrate the craft, but at the same time, we need to explore how this new consumer celebrates craft. So, we learn from these [Coach Play] stores and then translate the learnings into the larger ecosystem of the brand. It’s less risky to test something in 12 stores, versus 1,000.”
Since introducing the first Coach Play store in 2023, the concept has sparked many ideas that have both proven successful and been deemed “financially scalable,” said Zaccariello. For example, after trialing localized playlists at Coach Play stores, the company hired a music curator to replicate the offering across its store fleet. “Music is a big part of the [store] experience,” Zaccariello said. “It makes someone want to stay longer or just leave.”
In addition, the company abandoned 3D store window displays, which are often used temporarily and then discarded. The basis was Gen Z’s excitement — evident by their selfie-taking — overt Coach Play’s more sustainable storefronts, often featuring found items. The nearly 1,000 general Coach stores have also adopted edited product assortments and airy flows, more in-store customization capabilities, and more casual uniforms, to give associates the vibe of Gen-Z peers. In addition, their customer service and fitting rooms have been given a zhoosh, in response to Gen Z behavior and preferences.
Just two of the 12 Coach Play stores are based in the U.S. — on Chicago’s Michigan Avenue and in Salt Lake City’s City Creek Center. The stores typically have 1- to 3-year leases.
Still, Coach leverages a long creative process when opening Play stores to ensure its localization efforts befit the brand. Zaccariello and his team travel to meet with the future manager of a store up to a year before opening it to ensure it’s designed with the neighborhood — not the city — in mind. In addition, they enlist a local marketing team to gather a group of local Gen Zers to meet and learn more about them.
“Gen Z penetration is our No. 1 KPI; recruiting Gen Z is our No. 1 focus,” Zaccariello said. “By offering them experiences, they’re spending time on the actual sales floor. Then that generates sales. Both the emotional bond and the purchase are important to us.”
Higher in-store dwell times have been linked to higher sales, but for brands, it’s not a top metric of focus.
“We’re measuring the same things from a digital perspective: We want to know how long people are on the site and where they go on the site,” said Sarah Engel, president of marketing agency January Digital. “The same information [for stores] wasn’t available for a long time, and then it wasn’t brands’ priority — they just wanted to measure a store’s [success] by sales, maybe by foot traffic. But Coach is going one level deeper, in terms of truth-telling. … They’re doing long-term brand building and enabling deeper-level metrics for their stores, including metrics specific to Gen-Z shoppers, which makes a lot of sense.”
Moving forward, Coach plans to expand its customization offerings via additional pop-ups dedicated to Tabby bag customization, including with charms, straps, painting and monogramming. Global pop-ups dedicated to customizing the brand’s Soho sneaker will launch this fall. “We want to take the learnings from building an iconic bag and now build an iconic sneaker,” Zaccariello said.
Reported in February, in the second quarter of its fiscal 2025, Coach’s sales increased 10% year-over-year to $1.7 billion. Sales of the brand’s Tabby bag doubled, compared to the same period last year. Overall, its parent, Tapestry, acquired 2.7 million new customers in North America, half of whom were millennials and Gen Z.
