‘Unwrap the chaos’: Carter’s new CMO pushes for more emotional, relatable marketing
Carter’s new CMO, Sarah Crockett, has led marketing efforts at a number of consumer brands including DSW, Dickie’s, Backcountry and Burton Snowboards.
But when she joined the 160-year-old children’s apparel brand this summer, she was attracted to the opportunity to get real about parenting and childhood. Some of that shows up in the current Carter’s holiday campaign, “Unwrap the Chaos,” which shows off kids playing with cookie dough or unraveling gift wrap.
“The world that is portrayed as motherhood, in a lot of cases, are tropes, and we’ve played into them,” she said. “That’s not to say they’re not factual in some instances. But it’s a little bit like that Instagram effect, where all the glory is shown and all the mess is hidden. And now we’re saying, ‘You know what? Actually, sometimes the mess is the thing that brings the brightest smile to our faces.'”
Crockett joined Carter’s at a pivotal time for the company that has five children’s brands in its portfolio — the newest, Otter Avenue, is aimed at toddlers learning to dress themselves. It’s also the 130th anniversary of OshKosh B’Gosh, known for its classic denim and overalls. But the company recently announced the layoffs of around 300 workers and is closing down 150 stores over the next few years as it weathers tariff costs and changing consumer habits: Its net income in the third quarter of 2025 was $11.6 million, compared to $58.3 million in the third quarter of 2024.
Crockett said her teams are focused on bringing out the value and relevance of the brands’ products — not just the price, but also what it means to have products that can hold up to kids playing hard and getting messy. They’ll lean into nostalgia, emotion and budget-consciousness in a bid to capture more millennial and Gen-Z parents.
“It’s all about creating more authentic connection with our consumer base,” she said. “That is a sharp, sharp point for our organization across our entire portfolio.”
Modern Retail sat down with Crockett to go over the company’s holiday strategies, the overall challenges facing marketers and why she still believes in the marketing funnel. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
What’s the biggest challenge for Carter’s in reaching your core demographic?
“Like everyone, our customers’ dollars are being stretched right now, and this period of time specifically can represent a pretty stressful strain on the wallet. So we know our brand fans are likely looking for that capital-V value, which we define as not just price, but it also has to be really compelling: great style, great quality and for a great price. Take our family matching pajamas. It’s such an important part of our holiday strategy as something we’ve been known for, for years, and you can find family matching pajamas at Carter’s for $8. We know that is a one-year expense, because those kiddos aren’t gonna fit into those pajamas next year. We recognize that.”
How are you gauging success for your current holiday campaign?
“We look at things like: Are we attracting our existing customers? Are they coming back to us? Are we attracting the right new customers we aspire to build relationships with over time? We can look at each marketing channel in isolation and understand our strategy in that channel — the content we’re showing up with, and the targeting, and the placement. Is this a story for Pinterest, or is this a story for Meta? All of those things are trackable, in how they [point] to a consumer coming into our business through our stores, our e-commerce site or through a third-party wholesale environment, which is incredibly important to our business, as well.”
What’s Carter’s approach to Meta advertising at a time when some marketers are weighing the benefits with increased costs?
“I’m a marketer who still believes that the funnel exists. But I do believe that customers just move through it a heck of a lot faster than they used to. So Meta, as an example, is a great platform where we can show up to meet a new customer for the first time and bring them all the way through to joining that loyalty program, having their first experience with us, and then priming them to find another reason to come back and visit us within the next few months. You can do all of that within one platform.
But I think it’s really about leveraging their platform and their capabilities to again enhance that rich storytelling and compel our consumers with emotion and relatable content. There’s so much amazing user-generated content, and the creator space that’s active on this platform inspires us every single day. We’ll continue to work with creators to highlight their voice in the category, as well, because it’s incredibly relevant. And then, of course, when we have a great value story, we want to make sure consumers are hearing about that within these platforms. It’s just recognizing how much time is being spent with our consumers on these platforms and making sure that we’re taking the chance to connect with them on the topics they’re telling us they’re interested in.”
Using the OshKosh anniversary collection as an example, how did you approach the campaign across different channels?
“We heard from our consumers, and we did a lot of good research to understand the relationship that they have with the brand. What came out loud and clear is that there’s a power and nostalgia that just bring joy to consumers who can recall [wearing] the OshKosh brand. That is not something that a lot of brands can say. Therefore, our brand relationship, being with the parent and the grandparents, is one that we can fully leverage. So we did in this moment, and we got a lot smarter about what emotions the brand evoked for them. We built a reissued collection, where we reintroduced a subset of the archives in a very scarce approach that sold out within 17 minutes on our site.
For our organic social base for OshKosh, we teased the reissue collection with them before it was available, because we knew that was the consumer who had raised their hand, chose to follow us on Instagram or Facebook, and then decided to continue to follow along.
And then you’re able to have that, sort of, “curtains-up” moment where all of the channels are supporting the message at one given point in time. Each channel plays a distinct role. We can leverage something like our app’s push messaging to connect with our loyalty customers and give them an early advantage. Or SMS is a really successful channel for us that customers are finding value in and using to stay up to speed with what we have to offer. We’re able to leverage that for the existing customer while also ensuring we’re leveraging platforms and channels like Pinterest or streaming TV to find that new customer who’s interested in joining our brands.”