J.Crew grew new customers by 10% with its USA Swimming collaboration. Now it’s heading back to the Olympics with U.S. Ski and Snowboard
Good morning! College presidents convene on a challenging political climate, Revolut’s U.K. CEO wants to go global, and J. Crew gets into skiing.
- On the slopes. When J.Crew partnered with USA Swimming last summer on a collection ahead of the Paris Olympics, the retailer was blown away by the response. It saw a 10% spike in new customers and a double-digit increase in website traffic, and added a second collection to meet demand.
Those results convinced J.Crew Group CEO Libby Wadle that sports—and especially Olympic sports—were a promising area of collaboration for the J.Crew brand as it continues to find its post-bankruptcy footing in this decade and cement itself as a classic, enduring American brand. (J.Crew Group also includes Madewell.)
Today, J.Crew announced a collaboration with U.S. Ski and Snowboard. That organization has a parallel goal of its own: to engage more with the lifestyle side of ski culture, capitalizing on après ski fashion and vibes, rather than focus exclusively on the elite side of the sport.
Their three-year partnership, which Wadle calls the "biggest we've ever done," will kick off next week with a J.Crew "warm-up station" at a ski final in Sun Valley and lead up to the 2026 Winter Olympics in Italy. (With its USA Swimming partnership, J.Crew found a way to be part of the Summer Games without becoming an official Olympic sponsor.) "We really anticipate this being not only about the product, but a very important brand platform for us to amplify J. Crew as a great American brand on a global platform," Wadle says.
To design men's, women's, and kids' collections, the brand tapped the U.S. Ski archives to find vintage patches and other elements to incorporate. There will be sweaters, loungewear, and winter accessories. "I don't think any sports transcend into lifestyle like snow sports," argues U.S. Ski and Snowboard president and CEO Sophie Goldschmidt. The two partners haven't named any athletes who will be part of the collaboration yet; some of the sports' biggest names include Mikaela Shiffrin and Lindsey Vonn, who just began a professional comeback.
Over the past year, the J.Crew brand has launched some creative and unexpected campaigns, including the revival of its print catalog and photoshoots with writers like Patrick Radden Keefe. This one, however, Wadle sees as a continuation of the brand's own legacy. "We have a real history with our iconic catalogs of doing incredible locations in the winter—not with performance gear, sometimes tuxedos on a chair lift," Wadle says. "But we have a real history with the mountaintop."
Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com
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