Foot traffic fell 1.3% year over year at American Eagle for August, the first full month after it launched its controversial Sydney Sweeney campaign, according to Pass-by data provided exclusively to Retail Brew.
The campaign “Sydney Sweeney Has Great Jeans,” has faced criticism for allegedly having eugenics undertones and being hypersexualized, as we reported previously.
American Eagle competitors that also launched denim-themed celebrity campaigns appeared to fare better with foot traffic in August. The Gap, which introduced a viral video featuring the diverse all-female group, Katseye, on August 19 (four weeks after the Sydney Sweeney campaign launch), saw foot traffic climb 2.8% YoY for the month of August, per Pass-by. For the week that began August 25, the first full week after the Gap campaign launched, foot traffic rose 8.5% YoY. At Levi’s, which launched a campaign featuring Beyoncé on August 4, traffic was up 1.8% for the month over last August.
Pass-by uses numerous sources to collect and analyze its foot-traffic data, including infrared sensors, pressure mats, and anonymized data collected from smartphones.
The Sydney Sweeney campaign has had vocal defenders in very high places, including President Donald Trump, Vice President JD Vance, and Senator Ted Cruz. The New York Post, dismissed the campaign’s critics as a “crazed woke mob.”
In response to a request for comment about foot traffic, Rebekah Margulis, an associate vice president at Shadow, a PR firm that represents American Eagle, directed Retail Brew to comments pertaining to overall traffic from executives during a September 3 earnings call for American Eagle Outfitters, Inc (which along with American Eagle owns the brands Aerie, Offline by Aerie, Todd Snyder, and Unsubscribed). Margulis pointed out that Sydney Sweeney items for American Eagle, like a jacket and jeans, sold out in one day and one week, respectively, with items curated by the actress “performing four times better than AE’s other women’s items.”
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During the earnings call, executives made several references to traffic increasing YoY for the second quarter across its brands, but did not reference in-store foot traffic more specifically (as opposed to web traffic or a combination of both) .
We asked the company to clarify whether it had internal data that differed with Pass-by’s findings that foot traffic was down at American Eagle’s brick-and-mortar stores. It did not comment on foot traffic.
For Q2, which ended August 2, 10 days after the Sydney Sweeney campaign began, revenues increased 2% YoY for the company overall, but declined for the American Eagle brand, falling from $827.6 million to $800.4 million, a drop of 3.3%.
In a September 3 interview with Marketing Brew, American Eagle CMO Craig Brommers was triumphant about the Sydney Sweeney campaign, stating that it resulted in an “unprecedented spike” of 790,000 new customer acquisitions and nearly 320,000 new social followers.
“Sydney Sweeney is worth every single dollar that we invested,” Brommers told Marketing Brew. “Every single marketing metric that I look at is flashing a green light, and we’re only six weeks in.”