This week, a look at some of the fashion brands that are tapping into the appeal of niche and upcoming music artists at a time when budgets are tight but top-of-funnel marketing pushes are king.
On the same night this week, two brands held remarkably similar events less than two blocks apart in New York City.
On Tuesday, Everlane, one of the original 2010s DTC apparel brands, hosted the opening of a pop-up shop in SoHo, with the rising jazz-pop star Laufey in attendance. The event commemorated a capsule collection created in collaboration with Laufey, who also starred in an accompanying brand campaign.
Meanwhile, just down Lafayette Street, another DTC brand, Dagne Dover, hosted a streetside concert with the singer-songwriter Holden McRae, brother of singer Jensen McRae, which led to a party inside the brand’s store. The event celebrated the launch of the brand’s latest fall-winter collection. McRae scored the collection’s accompanying campaign.
Both brands told Glossy that they’re at a stage where they’re focusing on more attention-grabbing, top-of-funnel marketing efforts and that working with musicians and artists is one part of the strategy. And both brands chose to collaborate with rising stars on the upward arc of their careers, rather than established megastars.
It’s part of a trend of brands focusing on partnerships appealing to a specific, niche customer, rather than those with broad but shallow appeal. Influencer marketing data consistently shows that brands in 2025 are spending more on micro-influencer campaigns, whose engagement rates are nearly double those of macro-influencers.
For Everlane CEO Alfred Chang, Laufey’s appeal to a younger consumer was a factor in wanting to work with her.
“She has generational appeal to young people,” Chang said. “Her artistry, her individuality, it’s very unique.”
Laufey has over 10 million followers on TikTok, where she first came to prominence for her covers of jazz standards on social media and her unique, Ella Fitzgerald-inspired vocal delivery. Over three albums, her star has swiftly risen, but she’s still in the early stages of her career.
“We’re Everlane — not a big-box brand, not a big-budget brand,” Chang said. “Part of our strategy is to find these rising stars, find the perfect intersection with our brand values and do something that’s deeper than just a quick photo shoot.”
Chang, who was the CEO of Fear of God until October of 2024, acknowledged that Everlane has been “a little bit quiet” in the last few years. Everlane’s revenue was $200 million last year, and the brand hopes to hit $260 million by 2027.
“Our consumer has told us they want more from us,” Chang said. “We need to be more strategic, from a brand standpoint, and build up the lifestyle piece. One of the ways to do that is through these bigger swings, collaborations and brand moments.”
Dagne Dover’s executive team, including COO Deepa Gandhi, CEO Melissa Mash and creative director Jessy Dover, similarly described their brand as wanting to lean further into top-of-funnel marketing plays like collaborations with musicians. That includes working with Holden McRae, who is even earlier in his music career than Laufey.
“In a year when everyone is struggling to find good marketing channels that work, we’re really happy that we’ve been able to do profitable partnerships, like our recent one with Sephora,” Gandhi said.
A Dagne Dover sling-bag was the official free gift-with-purchase for Sephora’s recent Savings Event, which Gandhi said was more profitable than its regular performance marketing spend.
“CPMs are skyrocketing, and paid digital channels are getting harder to scale,” Gandhi said. “So, we’re focusing on these bigger-picture brand marketing options and then supporting them with direct marketing and retention work. And we’ve found that it’s working. The lifetime value for our more recent customer cohorts is up. You really see the shift of performance marketing giving way to brand marketing.”
Both Everlane and Dagne Dover are broaching collaborations for the first time. For Everlane, Laufey is the first recognizable celebrity face to be featured in the brand’s marketing. She herself has only done a few collaborations, including with the jewelry brand Catbird. Other fashion brands pursuing niche music collaborations include Diesel, working with the radio station NTS, and Adidas, partnering with music discovery platform Colors.
The Dagne team also said that collaborations are new to them.
“We’re working on infusing cool things from culture into the brand,” said Mash. “That includes working with musicians like Holden and having them create Spotify playlists for us. We’ll be doing a lot more on the collab side in 2026. Until now, we’ve mostly kept it pure with our own designs, but this is the first time where we feel secure enough about our brand that we can start to collaborate.”
The team couldn’t divulge what other collabs they have coming up, though Dover said they’re working on something related to women’s sports next year. The brand has recently collaborated with Sephora and the fitness studio Forward Space.
“It’s kind of intrinsic how we decide who to work with,” Dover said. “It’s strategic in a sense, but it’s often about the three of us agreeing unanimously that something feels right. And if it’s not unanimous, we don’t do it. With Holden, we knew as soon as we heard him that we wanted to work with him.”
Stat of the week
43%: That’s how many Americans say they don’t trust tech partnerships to ensure fairness and transparency, according to new data provided by the digital commerce platform VTEX. The survey was tied to the upcoming deal to sell TikTok’s operations to a group of American business interests.
The loss of trust between consumers and tech platforms could have an impact on the upcoming holiday season, when many consumers will likely be using new platforms like ChatGPT to aid their shopping.
News to know
- Parade, the DTC underwear brand founded by Cami Tellez and made popular by its Gen-Z audience, announced this week that it is shutting down. It joins a growing list of brands unable to survive the tumultuous economic landscape of the last 9 months.
- Amazon announced the layoffs of over 14,000 people this week as it leans into AI. It’s the largest layoffs in the company’s history. Most of the job losses were in the corporate sector.
- Adidas’s sales in North America fell by 5% this past quarter, the company revealed this week. Tariffs are the main culprit, with global revenue growing by 3% in the same period.
