At Aerie, much of the momentum and success has sprung from doing the unexpected — at least according to Jennifer Foyle, president and executive creative director of Aerie as well as American Eagle.
The intimate apparel brand, which includes the Offline by Aerie subbrand for activewear and athleisure, has experienced outsized growth, quarter after quarter. In the second quarter of 2026, revenues rose 25 percent to $535.8 million, with comparable sales surging 19 percent. In the first quarter this year, revenues jumped 33 percent, and comparable sales rose 25 percent.
“We have to innovate everyday. So we’re playing around with new ideas right now,” said Foyle speaking at the Wharton Baker Retailing Center CEO Summit in Manhattan, in conversation with Phil Wahba, senior writer at Fortune.
Last July, Aerie launched an innovative “sleepwear-to-streetwear” concept called Overslept, featuring clothes you can sleep in and run errands in. “We want to round out our assortments. The Aerie girl keeps on crying for more,” Foyle said, describing the motivation for the launch. “Now we haven’t launched [Overslept] necessarily as a brand yet, but we’re certainly allocating more square footage to it because it’s doing that well right now.”
Sleepwear, she said, started “taking hold” last year at Aerie, prompting the Overslept launch.
“I love building our own brands within our portfolio,” Foyle said. “It’s hard. It’s very different. Not everyone approaches business that way. You see a lot of collaborations out there. I’m more in the business of trying to create [more of] our own business within a wonderful portfolio of brands that I think we’ve only just started.
“Sometimes you stand out by doing what people are not doing, doing what your competition is not doing. That’s how Aerie has won, and that’s how we are relevant today,” Foyle said. “I’m constantly focused on where is that next white space.”
Success, she said, starts with “belief in your brand….Without that belief you’re not going to win. It’s a crowded field out there. There’s a lot of competition every day. I stare at it, and getting your team rallied around the idea of the brand and what it stands for is probably the most important thing you can do.”
“Disruption’s an overused word, but we did need to disrupt, and I think white space is probably something where we realized we could win.”
When Aerie was launched in 2006, “We went up against the behemoth,” Foyle said, referring to Victoria’s Secret. “We knew we had to be that disruptor” in big and small ways.
Like never airbrushing models, and using customers “as our feelers out to the world, to generate content. They were like our first influencers,” Foyle said. “AI is happening. But you know there are more natural ways to get your customer into your brand, and I’m very passionate about that. But I also think in this AI world, we are going to participate, like with demand forecasting and tools. And then there’s the human touch. I think Aerie does that well.”
And she goes pretty far with it. “Look, I chase my customers down the street when I see an Aerie bag. I get really excited about it. I ask, ‘What’s in your bag?'”
Aerie was initially focused on intimates but subsequently launched cozy loungewear, and during the pandemic, launched Offline by Aerie. “One morning I woke up, and I’m really liking this name: Offline. I don’t know where I came up with it. I just woke up, and I went to my legal and I said, ‘Can we get this trademarked?’ I thought if everyone feels comfortable in Aerie and all the offerings of our assortment in Aerie, I’m like, why would they not feel comfortable in their leggings? Adding leggings was a no-brainer because there’s business out there. I saw that white space. I thought we could disrupt from a price-point standpoint. I thought we had a sweet spot in Offline and could be that disruptor again.”
During COVID-19, she decided to launch Offline inside Aerie stores. She said that there are currently more than 100 Offline freestanding stores. “It’s an activewear line, and we launched it during COVID,” at a time when online shopping exploded and many stores, including Aerie, were closed. “I said everyone’s shopping online, let’s have the courage to do that. It was doing what people would not expect. But why wouldn’t we be driving something forward, entertaining our customers and doing something that I think was unheard of? I mean launching a brand during COVID was sort of brave.”
At American Eagle, which like Aerie is operated by American Eagle Outfitters, “Denim is the core out of everything we do. Jeans are the core,” Foyle said. Aerie, she said, started with intimates and undies, as the core which expanded to leggings and Offline.
“When you have that distinctive core business, there is some crossover [between] brands, but we go back to our core to make sure that we’re always thinking about that and wardrobing her.…Trends are happening so fast. We just have to be getting in front of it and seeing where we think that customer is going next.”
But she stressed, “Stay with your product. Sometimes you have to ride the tide a little bit, but make sure you’re savvy about how you ride that tide. Make sure you plan conservatively, but know that there’s an outcome, and look for that outlier — how you’re going to get through that hump? It will happen. In today’s world, you do have to pivot fast. But again, I do think a brand is a marathon, not a sprint. Kudos to Ralph Lauren. Look at what Ralph has done recently. They wouldn’t have come back if they didn’t have the soul of that brand, and they look great.”
Foyle said she’s stepping on the gas at Aerie and Offline while there’s still work to be done at American Eagle which has been underperforming lately. “Look, American Eagle is still so relevant. There’s 80 percent awareness out there. The customer still loves us. They want us to win, so that’s all good news. But there was some work to do. It’s still underway. We just hired some new strategic hires I think [will] really help me now accelerate and move American Eagle into the future.
“We have over 21 million customers in our portfolio of brands. We still have an opportunity to get the American Eagle customer to shop Aerie and to get the Offline customer to shop American Eagle. There’s a lot of growth opportunity for American Eagle, and again, we’ve pulled back. We’ve had some store closures. We’re in some tough malls. We want to be in the best malls. We want to show up. We want our customer to have that experience. Go to SoHo. It’s the best example of all three brands. There’s still opportunity while at the same time we’re going after market share. In today’s world in retail, there’s not a lot of growth. There’s mild growth. So it is a market share game.”
At American Eagle, Foyle added, “We’re just getting some of that cultural relevancy, working through our marketing, and I’m excited about what’s to come. But again, some of this doesn’t happen overnight. If you do it right, and if you do it with care and thoughtfulness, you’ll come out stronger.”
The Jay H. Baker Retailing Center is an interdisciplinary industry research center at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. It was established in 2002 through a generous gift by Jay and Patty Baker. Jay Baker, former president and director of the Kohl’s Corp., is a graduate of the Wharton School, class of 1956. The summit drew a crowd of 150 including retail and brand CEOs and presidents, industry consultants and media, and at the dinner the night before, honored Martha Stewart with Wharton’s Retail Excellence Award.
