Summary
I stood amid pristinely manicured displays of fine leather goods with a few other journalists at the Coach house flagship in New York City, tapping away at PC displays set up for us alongside the shelves. In the spacious open floor plan of the brand’s iconic Fifth Ave storefront, surrounded by tens of thousands of dollars in handbags and clothing, I was playingRoblox.
Earlier this year, Coach launched its campaign Courage to Be Real, which seeks to reach a new generation of consumers where they hang out the most: in the digital space. Gen Z is on a “journey to find their real selves”, said Kimberly Wallengren, vice president of marketing for Coach’s North American division.
Coach’s Courage To Be Real And Find Your Courage Campaigns
The Find Your Courage portion of the campaign follows a virtual influencer named Imma who ventures through different, colorfully themed worlds, meeting real-life celebrities who help her figure out who she wants to be. Participating in the campaign are rappersLil Nas XandYoungji Lee, actressesCamila MendesandWu Jinyan, and modelKoki, each offering Imma their own message of self-expression as she passes through. Wallengren highlighted the authenticity of the stories told by the celebrities in the campaign, each telling a piece of their own story in finding success.
It’s the vibrancy and colors of the worlds in these campaign videos that inspired Coach’s aesthetic in its upcoming entry into the gaming sphere with both Roblox and Zepeto collaborations launching on July 23, aiming to make the brand “additive to the experience” of the games, said Wallengren. On site at the Coach flagship store, we played Fashion Famous 2 and Fashion Klosette, the two titles Coach is entering by bringing bags, clothing, and accessories into the games’ list of avatar customization options. As the Roblox group waited for our experience to load, we watched the folks playing Zepeto dress their avatars before posing them, taking snapshots, and sharing the pictures to the game’s in-universe social media.
Fashion Famous and its sequel were created by Sandbox Studios, and studio developer Elisha Trice told me that working with Coach was a dream collaboration. They’ve made a concerted effort in the sequel to their smash-hit Roblox experience to allow for even more avatar customization than ever before, something the campaign for individuality was keen to highlight. Players are able to implement “diverse body types, dynamic facial expressions, and adjustable clothing placement” in Fashion Famous 2.
Deck Out In Coach Gear And Walk A Neon Underground Runway
The collaboration with Coach is but one part of a massive world in Fashion Famous 2, which drops your undressed avatar into a shopping mall with four minutes on the clock to get dressed according to a given theme for a fashion show. There are regular shops to check out, but a large, glowing portal in the center of the space leads into a shop inspired by Coach’s different Courage to Be Real influencer worlds from the campaign videos. Here, you can equip pieces of real-life Coach merchandise, and you can even grab a pair of fairy wings from the brand, too.
Once everyone is dressed, then the show begins. One by one, your avatars strut into a neon subway underground, bathed in pinks and purples with the sign on the wall spelling out Coach in the traditional NYC subway line iconography. You enter an empty subway car and show off for the others in the game, and wait for other players in your lobby to vote on your look. After everyone has walked, the winners are presented on a podium to showcase their style one last time before the game resets, the theme refreshes, and you’re back in the mall to do it all over again.
When I sat down with Wallengren and Coach’s senior vice president of global visual experience Giovanni Zaccariello, Wallengren shared that they had worked with an external team to bring the brand into a new sort of digital space to help ensure they did it right, that the games and experiences they chose “led into self-expression,” she explained. The collaboration was about a year in the making before its summer 2024 launch.
Zaccariello emphasized that the brand is eager to learn from this experience and is seeking to “meet Gen Z where they are”, which impacted the choices made for the Coach pieces included in this new digital space. “Gen Z has told us that Tabby is the icon bag of the moment,” Wallengren said with a grin, and the bag’s reach in the games is impossible to miss. Not only does a puffy Tabby-shaped cloud hang in the sky in Fashion Klosette, but you may equip the bag for your avatar in Fashion Famous 2 as well.
And equip it, I did – several times, in addition to a few other Coach bags, not realizing I had kept every single purse I picked up instead of switching them out until my avatar entered the subway with thousands of dollars in Coach bags on her arm. But if you want to carry three purses at a time, why not? Find Your Courage to do so, and Coach will help make it happen.
The other press folks, thankfully, hadn’t kept with our given safari theme, either, so my stack of purses, puffy pink winter jacket, and complete lack of pants and shoes didn’t feel entirely out of place. One went for a rock star vibe with wings and an electric guitar, while another got preoccupied talking to someone during our dressing phase and entered the subway wearing his default avatar outfit. We might not have nailed the safari theme, but damn it if we didn’t crack each other up decking out in fancy new Coach gear and strutting our stuff on the subway together – and isn’t having fun what games are all about?
