Paris • New York
American Vintage: from the inbox to the store floor
2024 – Present
How I opened a new growth channel for American Vintage
American Vintage is a store-first brand: around 70% of its business happens in its shops. Its growth depends on bringing people through the door in the cities that matter, while building a community in the markets it wants to win, starting with the US.
Instagram was where the audience spent its attention, but it wasn’t a sales channel. Likes and comments didn’t say who those people were, where they lived, or how to bring them back.
I turned it into one: a social CRM that knows every member by city, and reaches them in one message.
The challenge
A store-first business. With most sales happening in store, online reach only matters if it moves people into a shop, and every shop serves a different city.
Strategic territories. France is home, but growth sits in markets like the US, Spain, the Netherlands, Italy, the UK and Germany, where the brand is still earning recognition.
Organic first. The mandate was to grow in the brand’s own voice: earned reach, authentic content and word of mouth, not just paid acquisition.
The approach
1. Recruit. Every campaign opens a conversation: a keyword in a story, a comment on a post, a reply to an ad. Each one brings a new member into the AMV Inner Circle.
2. Locate. Members share their city and country, and their email with consent. The community becomes a map the stores can use.
3. Activate. Pushes are timed to brand moments and sent to the right city: an opening voucher before a new store, an invitation to an event in Milan, early access to the outlet sale, or the next drop online.
The journey
One continuous storyline, campaign after campaign. Valentine’s Day opened the year with a Grand Jeu de l’Amour, entered with a single heart. AMV Men built the male community, one DM at a time. Bonjour Tbilisi counted down to a store opening with an opening voucher to win. Spring Is Calling teased the SS26 collection and invited people into the Inner Circle. Mother’s Day turned into a three-question quiz. The Outlet Sale recruited ahead of the braderie, then gave members first access.
Between campaigns, the conversation never stopped: AMV Journal articles, city guides, drive-to-store invitations, limited collections like the AMV Sports Club tee.
What it built
Six figures
69K
47K
40%
What I learned
For a store-first brand, social isn’t just awareness. Once you know who your followers are and where they live, Instagram becomes a way to fill the shops, city by city.
The biggest lever wasn’t any single campaign. It was consistency: one storyline that runs all year, a steady rhythm, and a playbook simple enough to repeat. The next step is to grow the list more through organic reach, and to give each market its own code so every visit and sale can be traced back to the conversation.