Aerie: How Fortune Cookies Became This Clothing Retailer’s Perfect Fit

You’d be hard-pressed to find a woman under 40 who’s never set foot in an Aerie. With over 310 signature stores spanning the U.S. alone, the intimate apparel brand started as a spin-off to popular parent retailer American Eagle, but quickly outgrew its undergarment-only station.

We’re talking sales growth outpacing American Eagle itself year after year since 2017.

At a time when most mall-centric retailers sit on life support, Aerie continues to claim a sizable slice of the woman’s lifestyle retail pie. The brand maintains its signature lines of underwear and lingerie plus athleisure and loungewear, pajamas, swimsuits, and more.

Its immense brand familiarity foothold amongst women ages 18-34 has shown few signs of faltering — but competition is always waiting to catch you with your pants down.

What happens when familiarity becomes a fault? This was the question ballooning in the minds of Aerie’s core marketing crew beginning in spring of 2023.

Prepping for its latest seasonal holiday collection (and its most important annual sales quarter), Aerie knew they needed to get out ahead of hedonic adaptation, otherwise known as “brand boredom.”

Hedonic adaptation is a particular thorn in the sides of brands vying for the minds and wallets of women ages 18-34 — a.k.a the demographic Luxardo cherry on top of the apparel retail target market sundae.

Like a his-and-hers set of matching underwear, OpenFortune became Aerie’s perfect match.

No one wants to smack their audiences over the head with the same stale holiday ads, yet everyone wants to be top-of-mind. Aerie needed a strategy hyper-appealing to core consumers and tantalizing them to get into stores, yet strong enough to stand out amidst the ad deluge that is the Q4 holiday quarter.

Working with OpenFortune’s immense network of partner restaurants, Aerie released 277,250 holiday collection-focused fortune cookies across Los Angeles.

The fortunes? Playful messages speaking to young women (average age 25) and distributed intentionally to eateries within 5-mile radiuses of Aerie L.A. stores.

Making things even more seamless? Each fortune offered an underwear freebie if you brought your slip to a participating store. In one ad, OpenFortune and Aerie perfectly sewed together every stage of the funnel, from awareness to consideration through nurturing better in-store performance.

Who knew the perfect fit between fortune and fashion comes wrapped in a crispy golden crunch?

Aerie’s OpenFortune campaign drove in-store visits during its make-or-break holiday season. Three-quarters (74%) of recipients had unaided brand recall. One in 6 (16%) searched Aerie after incentivization from their slips, while another 1 in 5 were more likely to recommend Aerie after the clever (and cost-saving) freebie promotion.

Three out of every four consumers (74%) who received a cookie presented unaided product recall. Nearly a quarter (22%) kept their Dude Wipes’ branded slips as a quirky collectible; another 7.5% actually posted their Dude Wipe fortunes on social media. Toilet paper could never.

Rarely do brands so successfully build live moments of playfulness into their ads, nor capture and hold prolonged attention, nor reach target consumers right at the perfect moment of low-resistance — happy and content with a belly full of crab rangoon — all within a short trip to the Aerie store.