Jacee Scoular, Senior Director of Brand Marketing Strategy at Hollister 

Hello, everyone. I’m here with Jacee. Could you take a moment, introduce yourself?

Hi. Yeah, thanks for having me. I’m Jacee Scoular. I am the senior director of brand marketing strategy and communications for Hollister Co., Gilly Hicks, and Social Tourist, all under the Abercrombie & Fitch umbrella.

Excellent. Your brand has made just incredible huge comeback. It’s everywhere. People love it. I know there’s a lot of trends you guys touch on. But you also give back and you also have programs that help the world at large in a lot of ways. And you were on an amazing panel. So can you tell me a little bit about how that panel went for you? What was the experience like being on stage?

Yeah, that was fun. As a marketer, you love the chance to get to talk about your great ideas and your great marketing. But when you get to connect it back to helping your consumer and doing good for them and giving back to them, that’s always a fun panel. I thought the panel was awesome yesterday. A lot of times, Chobani, when you think purpose, specifically they’re rooted in that, they’re grounded in that. That’s how they were founded. And then I thought Nordstrom, and then Hollister, of course, brought just unique, very brand and consumer-centric ways, how you can think about purpose when your ethos wasn’t necessarily grounded there. So what’s cool is that a lot of brands for all the right reasons are getting into this idea of how to better their consumers’ lives. And Hollister is no different.

I like that you touch on Gen Z specifically because we sent someone from RETHINK Retail who is a Gen Z’er, and she felt very moved by the session. It was speaking directly to her. And she said it made so much sense what you were talking about.

That’s great.

Can you talk about your program, about the Confidence Project?

Yeah, that’s great. I love hearing that. We spend a ton of time with our consumer, that Gen Z consumer, the high school teen. And so it’s great to hear feedback from them that what we’re doing is really resonating. There’s a couple of projects we touched on in that session the other day. The first one is the Hollister Confidence Project. Hollister has been activating social good campaigns for several years now. A handful of years ago, we really leaned into purpose and we stood up efforts with Glisten, with the LGBTQIA+ community. We’ve done anti-bullying efforts, bunch of things like that. And the brand and partnership with our consumers was raising a ton of money.

And what we really realized and how the Hollister Confidence Project came to be is that there’s a lot of organizations across the world who are really helping fuel teen confidence, making teens feel more comfortable in their own skin, and helping them achieve really great things in the world. And they don’t need millions of dollars or even hundreds of thousands of dollars. And when you’re a global company, you have the ability to raise that kind of money. We realize there’s a lot of them who just need a few thousand dollars to do something in their local community and for their local peers. And the Hollister Confidence Project really took that idea and we started really going after those organizations that are really helping their community, again, make that youth feel at home like they belong, that they’re comfortable in who they are, they’re finding ways to figure out who they are. And that’s through a ton of different efforts and layers there.

And that speaks to your target market so well.

100%. Yeah. So that effort is almost three years old now. And each year, we’re giving about a million dollars to today, we’ve funded over 40 organizations.

I like that it’s almost like instead of taking the easy way and picking one or two and saying, “Yeah, here’s some money. We’re doing well,” you guys are really taking the time to find 40 organizations across the globe.

And it’s really fun. These organizations apply to be part of this grant program. And you read… Our team spends whole days. We have an advisory board made up of people who really are in this youth space. We have teachers and counselors and actual Gen Z’ers on this panel, reading through these applications and unpacking all the amazing works.

That’s intense.

It is. It is.

That’s a lot of different people.

It is. They read through. I think there’s 10 or 12 people on the board who sit outside of our organization, too.

Cool.

Yeah. You get very moved with the amount of good that this generation is doing. And we’re proud to be part of their story.

I want to talk really quickly because we’ve seen a lot of trends in fashion, it’s expedited by social media. Retailers have told me it’s hard to keep up with the trends. By the time the product gets to the stores, there’s already something new on TikTok. How do you guys balance the speed with conscious capitalism?

Yeah, good question. Well, for those of us who are seeing these things come back around, we are very nostalgic, right? I think some of the ones that are brought up are like, “Babydoll tops are back, or the player jeans or low-rise jeans are back.” And that’s really cool to see what all of our efforts have in common is. Whether it’s trends or ESG or sustainability, our consumer is right at the center of all of that. So we spend a ton of time talking to them about their expectations of us as a brand, what kind of product they want from us as a brand. We spend time in their For You feeds and everywhere else. So I would say that’s how we keep up, stay ahead.

And then this whole week, conscious consumerism has been such a buzzword. We talked about it a lot on the panel the other day. And in terms of sustainability, we are on our way. Progress of our perfection, we’ve made a lot of strides in the last few years. We have really great goals to take us through the next handful. But again, going back to that consumer and rooted in a place that’s very authentic for who we are and what we can authentically give to our teens in terms of giving back and doing good, making that social impact for the better is how we’re approaching it, which is really being there for them when they’re at such a transformational part of their lives. High school is tough. We remember it. And they’re going through a lot and it’s so stressful and it’s exacerbated now. The world is wild.

Social media.

Yeah.

As much as we can be there to help them navigate some of that stuff and feel comfortable and confident in who they are and build that foundation for their life is something that feels really natural to us.

And I love that you brought up how, although you’re not a brand founded in ethos, you’re still a brand. You’re a living entity and you’re evolving with the times. And you’re not only doing things that align with your brand, but also with your consumer. And you’re talking directly to them and they’re giving you feedback in these programs. Super authentic. That’s how you do it.

Absolutely. Yeah. And as a brand, part of what completes your brand identity is who you are, and then that promise you deliver. And we make great clothes for everyday life that are versatile and have great value to them. But at the end of the day, clothes play a really important role in how you feel about yourself and look great, feel great, and all of those things. So it’s a natural tie for us. And it’s been fun.

So Jacee, Hollister was huge when we were younger. As millennials now, it’s made a huge comeback and it’s still popular, whereas a lot of brands that we knew and loved are extinct. So how did you guys stay so relevant?

It’s a good question. And I repeat this a lot and I come back to this a lot, but we truly are, from the top-down, a consumer first brand. And I think that’s how these brands are able to be so successful. We talk to them, go out, meet with them, hang out with them every day, and that’s from top to bottom. Every brand we have is really built that way. And I think that’s one of the ways brands can enjoy longevity.

These are real conversations. When you say, “We talk to them,” everyone from the C level down is speaking and engaging and asking questions.

Yeah, absolutely. Every room we’re in almost, it’s like, “Did we talk to consumers about that? Did we sit down with consumers about that?” And that is one of the reasons. I would say the other benefit that that has is when I look back at brands for the last 10 years, brands 10, 12 years ago owned their narrative. They told the story. They told consumers what you should wear and how you should dress and how you should act and the lifestyle you should live. And because we’ve been such a consumer-centric brand for a while now, understanding that it isn’t necessarily our narrative to own. They play as big a role or bigger sometimes in the story of your brand and what people think about your brand than the brand plays itself. So constantly thinking about the phrase, “It’s about us, not them,” and how you begin to enable your consumers to fall in love with your brand, and then tell that story and paint that picture for other consumers. So that’s been a really fun evolution of not just marketing, but I think these brand stories, which is cool. Yeah.

Yeah. I love how you described that because it makes sense, how it’s flipped and you guys have allowed it to flip that way.

Yeah, it’s good.

And you give the voice to the customers.

Embrace it. Embrace it. And there’s some risk that inherently comes along with that, but delivery-

It’s a sacrilegious

Right.

Because instead of going for speed, and you still have to.

Of course.

You’re saying it doesn’t matter, we always have to make sure that we’re asking the consumer and making sure this aligns with the brand.

Yeah, exactly. You are ensuring yourself you’re delivering on what they need you to deliver on based on who you are as a brand and where your place in their life is. So it’s good. It’s really good stuff.

Well, thank you so much, Jacee, for chatting.

Thank you. This was fun.

It was. It was super fun. I’m super happy that I got to speak with someone from Hollister because I’m a big fan and I remember the perfume.

Yes. I know, right?

Back in the day, right?

So good. It’s so good.

And our moms yelling at us about trying to get out of the store because it was too dark.

Yeah, come on in.

We loved it, right?

Lights were up-

These people back then loved it.

The lights are up, and the smell is down.

It was the cool place to be.

So come back in and try. Our jeans actually are really amazing.

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