This week, I spoke with Mack Weldon CEO Brian Berger about the Ace Collection, a line that has become the No. 1 driver of both customer acquisition and loyalty, and the brand’s plans to expand it. We also touched on tariffs and how brands can navigate price increases.
At a time when the consumer market is anything but certain, a consistently selling product that keeps customers coming back is every fashion brand’s dream. Mack Weldon, the men’s comfort apparel brand, has spent the last decade cultivating just that in its popular Ace Collection line, and it’s paying off now.
With more than a million pairs of sweatpants sold, the Ace Collection has become Mack Weldon’s defining product line. But it has also become the brand’s single biggest customer acquisition tool. With prices ranging from $60-$130, the Ace Collection drove a quarter of the brand’s entire revenue in 2024 and converted over 50,000 first-time buyers into repeat shoppers. One out of every three Mack Weldon shoppers has purchased an Ace Collection item, and people who buy the collection also have the highest average repeat purchase rate. In its marketing, Mack Weldon heavily focuses on the quality of the material used in the Ace Collection, which is a micro-brushed French terry cotton. This has helped drive the line’s success, outperforming Mack Weldon’s other collections like the warm-weather line Tech Linen and upscale Silver collection, despite only making up around 10% of the brand’s assortment.
Now, Mack Weldon is expanding the Ace Collection into new categories. While the collection is primarily focused on styles like sweatpants and crewneck sweaters, all made with the same soft, micro-brushed French terry material, the brand has experimented by including styles like blazers and bathrobes in the line. But starting today, the Ace Collection will also include new product categories like outerwear in the form of full-zip bomber jackets made from the same material.
“The Ace Collection gives us some license to expand to new categories while keeping the brand equity we’ve built up intact,” said Brian Berger, CEO of Mack Weldon.
In other words, the success of the Ace Collection, which brings customers back again and again, means the brand feels confident trying out new experiments within that range. The blazer began the same way, as a prototype that the design team brought to Berger. It was given a small production run in the Ace Collection last year that sold out in a week, prompting the brand to make blazers a more permanent part of the collection.
But the Ace Collection’s core products — sweatpants, crewnecks and T-shirts — still make up the majority of sales. The experiments, like blazers and outerwear, work best as a way to get new customers to try the brand so they come back for the core product, Berger said. Those new products are also coupled with a more aggressive marketing strategy. This year, Mack Weldon released a large-scale campaign called Comfortable Everywhere that saw it investing in more top-of-funnel channels like TV and pulling back from programmatic ads on Meta and Google.
Having a solid product line with proven loyalty has been a valuable asset at a time when customers are cutting back on spending and being more cautious about what they buy, Berger said. But there is a limit to what people can handle, especially if prices increase.
Mack Weldon has only significantly increased prices once, during Covid, and Berger said no price changes are happening immediately in response to the looming August 29 tariff implementation. Mack Weldon manufactures in a number of countries around the world, including China, Vietnam, Thailand, Peru and Egypt, all of which have different tariff rates.
“On the one hand, we need to do what we need to do, [in terms of price raising], but on the other hand, we need to recognize there’s a limit on what people will spend,” Berger said. “If we end up raising prices, we’ll be super transparent. We’ll announce it ahead of time and encourage people to stock up beforehand.”
Berger said, for members of the brand’s loyalty program, the brand may even offer the pre-tariff price rate for a limited time after prices go up for the rest of the customer base.
“Hopefully, we can get to a place where people can plan again,” Berger said. “There’s a lot of uncertainty around production, and moving your production is not easy. Tariffs have made the whole environment for brands and consumers a lot more uncertain.”
Stat of the week
The AI shopping boom may be upon us. According to new data provided to Glossy by Adobe, AI-powered shopping has grown substantially in recent months. In July, generative AI traffic to retail sites was up by 4,700% year over year. Between November and December, that figure was 1,300%. Users who come to a shopping site through AI search tend to stay on the site 32% longer, as well.
News to know
- Guess is the latest brand to be bought by Authentic Brands Group. In a $1.4 billion deal, Guess is going private and joining Authentic’s portfolio which includes a wide variety of other brands, from Champion to Reebok to Brooks Brothers and more.
- Ricardo Bellini, managing director of the holdings group Mayhoola, is taking on another role: He’ll be the CEO of Mayhoola’s prized possession, Valentino. Bellini previously worked at fashion houses like Maison Margiela and Chloé. He will work alongside Alessandro Michele, who took over as creative director in 2024.
- While retailers like Target have shown poor performance in recent earnings reports, TJX, parent company of the discount retailer TJ Maxx, outperformed others. The company beat all earnings expectations and raised its full-year outlook, sending its shares to a record high. Analysts have said that a tougher consumer market is pushing more people to trade down to discount retailers like TJ Maxx.
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