Holiday Season is American Eagle’s highest sales volume period. So AE needed to be both at the top of their kids’ minds and at the top of their wish lists. As a youth culture brand, it is critical for them to be present where their kids are shopping and where they are getting their shopping influence. AE needed to find a way to create an exciting, interesting, relevant and easy way to shop and experience American Eagle.

American Eagle saw an opportunity to merge the in- store experience with a digital experience that went beyond just driving users to AE.com. AE decided to bring their store to their Gen Z customer through the creation of a virtual store on Snapchat, a key platform for our shopper. AE utilized Augmented Reality Lenses to create a virtual AE store that allowed users to browse products and checkout - and even included interactive elements for the user to explore. A total of three virtual stores were created during the campaign to keep the merchandise in the store fresh and keep the shopper coming back to see what was next.

AE knows that their target audience is not only heavy digital media users but also spend a lot of their time on social platforms. This behavior has only increased during COVID as kids are spending a lot more time at home and connecting with their friends even more through social platforms. American Eagle selected Snapchat as the platform they wanted to partner with given they have seen increased usage during COVID and reach a large portion of our target audience (approximatey 90% of Kids 13- 24). AE has also seen an increased focus in the marketplace on social commerce, which led to incorporating Sparkle as the partner that could help us create a bespoke landing page featuring only the select items featured in our AR store.

AE’s Marketing and Store Design teams worked together with Snap to create an experience that had the look and feel of AE stores. The AR store featured a selection of key Holiday items and a selection of our popular jean styles. The AR store drove to a curated landing page using Sparkle social-commerce enabled technology to make it easy for a user to buy the specific items featured in the store. Interactive elements like fireworks, turning on/changing colors of holiday lights, fun animations of characters and Addison Rae, and falling snow encouraged users to explore the shop as though they were walking around in a real store. Personalization was included in the form of a welcome sign that displayed the user's name, and in the final refresh as a personalized stocking. Users discovered the AR stores through a Camera placement on Snapchat.

Turns out, the Gen Z consumer really did want to shop virtually. The Virtual stores drove over $2.1M in purchase value (28/1 attribution window). ROAS was 157% higher than previous paid American Eagle Lenses on Snapchat. The Swipe up rate was +133% vs Snap average benchmark, and the Playtime was +86% vs Snap average benchmark. Multiple articles were written in the press to highlight the success of our program and innovation AE developed with Snap.