How Cole Haan is tweaking its product pipeline to become a more everyday lifestyle brand

Moving forward, Cole Haan wants to be the brand for “the nine to five and five to nine,” Cole Haan’s Brand President David Maddocks told Modern Retail. “Wardrobes were less going from uniforms to individual pieces that can be pulled together depending on the occasion,” he said. “People didn’t have hard lines between different pieces in their wardrobes, so we knew that that had to happen in footwear, as well.”

In tandem with this strategy, Cole Haan is leaning more heavily into marketing channels common with consumers today: social media like TikTok and Instagram, but also more traditional formats like television. It’s using all of these formats for its new campaign around products it launched this month: a woman’s shoe collection called The 1928 that includes pumps, flats and boots, and a men’s oxford dress shoe with increased support.

Cole Haan, formerly an independent company, came under Nike’s ownership in 1988 when Nike paid $95 million for the brand. Then, in 2012, Nike sold Cole Haan to the private equity firm Apax Partners Worldwide LLP for $570 million. Although Cole Haan planned to go public in 2021, it scrapped plans for an IPO. At the time, Cole Haan revealed that its revenue for the year ending June 1, 2019 totaled $686.6 million, up 14.1% from a year earlier.

Cole Haan has continued to grow since then. In November, Cole Haan opened its 500th store, a location in LiVat Centre in Beijing, China. Cole Haan is now sold in more than 100 countries, up from 13 countries in 2013, and has showrooms in New York City, Toronto, London, Hong Kong, Dubai and Tokyo.

Here’s what the brand’s president Maddocks had to say about the way Cole Haan is approaching new products and marketing over the next year and beyond.

Understanding Cole Haan’s core customer

“Our customers, as we characterize them, are extraordinary achievers. They are usually young professionals who have come through their twenties and are moving up in the world and heading into middle management, if not management, or starting businesses, really starting to invest in themselves or wardrobes… That insight has led us to think about our product creation architecture, in terms of how they live their lives. So we go from occasion into dress and casual and outdoor and sport. They bring us into the most important parts of their lives, whether that’s a spontaneous evening with friends, an important presentation at work or a wedding or some other destination.”

How Cole Haan has changed since the pandemic

“We understood that we needed to engineer products that could go all day, whatever the day required with the customer. The pandemic forced new ways of working, first from home and now in hybrid… and what we understand is that people’s lives are fluid. We’ve taken that insight into the way that we look at our products and engineer them and design them and how we think about different categories and zones. Everything we do is about understanding the benefit we want to bring to the customer, whether that’s underfoot cushioning or whether that’s timeless style that’s going to go with a lot of their wardrobe.”

Updating Cole Haan’s marketing mix

“We’ve been doing some addressable television because we know that [customers] watch and shop at the same time, and video as a component has become a more important part of what we’re doing. But that social point is where we’re meeting them. That’s on TikTok, certainly on Instagram. But we’re reaching them where and when they are looking for information…

We don’t think of a hard line between brand marketing and performance marketing. We think about it as a customer journey with one handing off to the other. We acquire [customers] when they’re demonstrating interest and demand, not for the brand, but for the category, and then we make sure that we’re there. We also index high in major metros, so we think about targeting folks in that way through media.”

On gearing up for the holidays

“From a shopping standpoint, we will be there when the customer is in market and address that period leading up to Black Friday and beyond. We have a pretty coordinated war room on all of that, but we also think about how we continue to reimagine traditions through the holiday. That’s such a great time for occasion and dressing up and going to parties, and that’s frankly where we shine… And then, of course, as we head into post-holiday and people wanting to head for warmer climates, we ready ourselves with product for that, usually [via] an early rollout of spring, with a focus on a couple of launches, so that we are forethought for them as they start packing for a little bit of a holiday.”