Gen Z Loves Coach

The leather accessories brand is so back thanks to a new generation of fans.

Smooth leather, brass details, the ideal size—Hannah Krohne, 22, had never seen a purse quite as cute as the shoulder bag she spotted in Nordstrom. It was clearly well-made and came in pink. She liked that it didn’t have any flashy branding. There was just one tiny leather tag on the end, bearing a single, surprising word: Coach.

“I hadn’t thought of Coach at that time as a brand that would appeal to me,” she says about spotting the bag in 2021. “Coach, before then, was the brand that all the moms were getting their bags from.” According to her, the company was “where our parents and our grandparents grew up shopping.”

To all the Millennials and Gen-X-ers reading this: You might be feeling the crushing weight of years spent filling our Y2K-era C-encrusted totes with oversized sunglasses and T-Mobile Sidekicks, but it’s true. Like most things on TikTik, Zoomers are "discovering" the fashion trends of the past and reclaiming them as their own.

Anyone who has been through the hero’s journey that is middle school in the 2000s knows that Coach’s image shifted profoundly. The brand was founded in 1941 and opened its flagship Manhattan store in 1985. Early Coach purses were inspired by baseball mitts: durable leather, careful stitching, all American. But in 2001, Carrie Bradshaw armed herself to walk straight into hell (Aidan’s upstate cabin) by dragging a C-covered Coach weekender bag all the way from Manhattan, and everything changed.

Two years later, Ashley Tisdale walked a red carpet in flip-flops and chunky highlights, a Coach logo bag dangling from two fingers. In the pilot of Gossip Girl, Serena van der Woodsen shocks the Upper East Side by appearing at Blair Waldorf’s party, carrying a hazelnut-colored leather Coach bag. I remember watching the gentle slap of the Coach wristlets on the arms of the popular girls as they assembled to eat lunch at a safe distance so everyone could watch them with an unobstructed view. Paired with a Juicy Couture sweatsuit and Ugg boots, the 2000s Coach logo bag said: My parents are afraid of me, and so are many of the teachers.

Every new style is fated to one day become vintage or simply dated. The brand eventually hit peak cultural saturation. Coach bags filled department stores and outlets; they were no longer something you lusted after but something you stuffed in the back of your closet, full of dried-out gel pens and frosty lip glosses.

But now, Coach is so back. The brand brought in over a billion in revenue recently, hitting new records, with a particular uptick in Gen-Z and millennial consumers. Google searches for “Coach purse” have surged in the past two years. On TikTok, Coach bags feature in numerous content categories: tantalizing unboxings, bag “styling” with chains and charms, footage of thrifters scavenging for vintage gems, super satisfying bag cleaning and restorations, and bag collection reveals. Shedding its image as a relic of the 2000s, Coach recently earned a coveted place on the Lyst Index Hottest Brands ranking, just under brands like JW Anderson and Alaïa.

Coach has reinvented itself with alarming success, charming its way back into shoppers’ arms. Over the past five years, Coach has dug into its archive, embraced new trends, aligned with celebrities, locked in on TikTok, found an eco-conscious angle, and rode the wave of Y2K nostalgia.

“They created this perfect, heavenly space for young women that is between a luxury timepiece and a cheap bag,” Krohne recently enthused to her TikTok followers. In worshipful videos on TikTok and YouTube, these new Coach bag lovers (who never lived through the horrors of America’s Next Top Model or gaucho pants) whisper that the company’s rebrand “needs to be studied.”

Stuart Vevers, Coach’s creative director since 2013, has helped make Coach trendy and desirable again. So has a nimble marketing strategy that deploys celebrities with a choreographer’s precision. A 2020 campaign with Paris Hilton winked at the last time Coach was considered “hot.” The next year Megan Thee Stallion carried a custom Coach mini purse to the 2021 Met Gala. Recent collaborations have had Jennifer Lopez showing the kind of brand loyalty to Coach that Ben Affleck shows to Dunkin’, and Vevers referring to Selena Gomez as his “muse.”

Kiana Bonollo, a 25-year-old living in Raleigh, North Carolina, grew up looking at Coach bags at outlet malls with her mom. But after a few years of seeing new Coach designs on her TikTok For You Page, she says, “I like the designs of the coach bags more than any even high-end, luxury bag that I’ve ever seen.” She cites the brand’s quality leather, craftsmanship, and price point relative to luxury bags. Influenced by a video by Brandon Nguyen, a Coach employee who shows off the brand’s bags on TikTok with the hypnotic skill of a QVC icon, Bonollo not only went out and bought a Coach bag, she bought a palm-sized second Coach bag, which she looped around the bigger bag’s handle as a functional accessory.

“I’ve known about [Coach] through my mom, of course,” says Erin Keel, a 26-year-old living in Los Angeles. For years, Keel wasn’t interested in the brand—she disliked the flashy, 2000s-era logo. But when the new Coach Tabby bag—a design inspired by '70s-era Coach—started popping up all over TikTok, she was intrigued. “This is not the Coach that I’d known previously,” she said. “I think that’s attributed to their positioning towards Gen-Z.”

Coach was aware of its reputation as “more of a mother’s brand,” Alice Yu, the VP of global consumer insights at Tapestry, Coach’s parent company, told Business of Fashion. However, the company slowly built on the success of the Tabby by leaning into vintage-inspired styles, consciously creating more affordable designs, and making Lil Nas X one of the brand’s faces.

“I think Coach really knows the Gen-Z audience and what we kind of like and what we dislike,” says Keel. She loves “the sustainability, the quality, and the price point," referencing Coachtopia, a Coach offshoot that promises more sustainably made bags, and Coach Reloved, the brand’s luxury consignment wing.

Keel, once Coach-indifferent, now owns more than twenty Coach bags, many of them thrifted. The least she’s ever paid for Coach is $14 for a secondhand purse. The most is $495 for the Quilted Tabby in a print resembling lipstick kiss marks. She scours TJ Maxx and the purse racks at thrift stores, looking for hidden gems. Coach-loving Moms will have the last laugh here (as they should)—sleek '70s and '80s Coach styles are in increasingly high demand. In fact, the Swinger bag that Krohne spotted in Nordstrom was inspired by a Coach design from the 1980s.

Those gems are hard to keep in stock, says Hellen Moffitt, the 29-year-old owner of ThriftPony, a secondhand and vintage store in Charlotte, North Carolina. “There is like a cult following for the really buttery leather vintage ones,” says Moffitt. Whenever she can find Coach bags made in the 1970s through 1990s, she knows it will sell: “Those ones people go crazy over.” (Taylor Swift wore these kinds of vintage, cross-body leather Coach bags in her dating-a-Kennedy era, and continued wearing them into her dating-Harry-Styles era.)

Moffitt vouches for last-century Coach bags holding up well over time: “The oldest ones are incredible,” she says. “The leather is great quality.” The early 2000s bags “can get a little bit dirtier, but in terms of the way they stay together and structural integrity, they’re very solid.”

What Coach did, says Moffitt, is something no other brand has pulled off. Coach “kind of fell off between 2010 and 2018,” she says. “And then, as they were rebranding, their legacy bags had been around long enough that they were starting to become vintage and cool again.”

On Instagram, where the store sells some items, Moffitt says, “We’ve gained a following of random people across the country who are obsessed with Coach.” From the perspective as a secondhand seller, Coach shoppers can be sorted into three categories. First, the sophisticated, somewhat older women who want the classic leather Coach bag. Then, the high school and college girls following the Y2K trend who like thrifting the logo-branded bags. And then, the Millennial and Gen-Z women shopping the rebrand, who are following trends but would love to find a budget version of the pillowy Tabby.

How can it be that the logo-blasted cloth Coach bags of the early 2000s—the ones that drove the company to its nadir—are now sought after again in thrift stores? “Those bags are now almost like vintage treasures,” says Krohne. “It brings a vintage, thrifty aesthetic to Coach.”

When Gen-Z shoppers do invest, says Krohne, they have reason to turn to Coach rather than fast fashion and cheap dupes sold on TikTok Shop and Shein. “Coach has maintained their branding to feel very upscale,” says Krohne. At the same time, she says, “Coach’s price point really caters to a young audience who wants a nice bag that feels like an investment but doesn’t want to spend thousands of dollars at a designer store—Coach really sits in the middle.”

In roughly 2007, a generous aunt took me on a glorious mall shopping spree, which culminated in her buying me navy blue Coach logo slip-on sneakers. I wore them until they smelled evil and looked run over because I was so enamored by that interlocking C logo. In the decades since, I have occasionally thought about those shoes and what kind of branding, trickling through the social hierarchy of my middle school, could have possibly resulted in me wanting the type of footwear a mid-divorce amateur golfer would wear to lunch with his attorney.

But recently, as TikTok serves up more and more Coach—from ASMR-ish unboxings in which influencers run their manicured hands over a Coach dust bag while saying the word “colorway” to Brandon Nguyen showing off the Empire Carryall and Bella Hadid carrying the Brooklyn Shoulder Bag—I find myself thinking about buying a Coach bag.

I imagine slipping the leather out of the luxe packaging, feeling The Swinger lightly smack me as I run for the bus or trying to tuck a Macbook into a slouchy Shoulder Bag. I wonder how cool my Gen-Z neighbor would think I am if I emerged from my apartment with The Quilted Tabby. They got me—the dream of Coach, dormant for decades, is back again.

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