Wait! Is Gap cool again? Its collab mastermind reveals his strategy behind the brand’s big comeback
It’s not just you—you really have been seeing a lot more of Gap lately.
Over the last few years, the brand has embarked on a broad business turnaround. It hired Richard Dickson, Mattel’s former CEO who turned Barbie into a phenomenon. Then it brought on Zac Posen as its new creative director. It launched an elevated sub-brand, GapStudio, and it’s bringing back nostalgia-driven styles like low-rise jeans.
But perhaps more effective than any single business decision has been Gap’s unabashed embrace of collaborations. Again and again, Gap’s partnerships have surprised shoppers by tapping into corners of culture and fashion that expand the audience for the classic American brand. There have been collabs with women’s fashion brands Cult Gaia and Dôen (twice), Black design advocacy platform Harlem’s Fashion Row, luggage company Béis, and cool golf-wear brand Malbon.
For people who doubted Gap’s fashion bona fides, these collabs were meant to prove them wrong.
Is Gap actually plugged in?
Mark Breitbard, the president and CEO of Global Gap Brand, has been trying to answer that question with a resounding yes for the last five years. When Brietbard joined Gap in 2020, he was dealing with a crisis of relevance. “Having been around the business for a long time, I always felt that the brand just needed more,” he says. “The brand deserved better, and the brand had good creative just dying to get out.”
Now, dozens of collabs later, a different company has emerged from the cryogenic freezer—one that consumers are starting to actually care about.
A new era for Gap
Step by step, the Gap brand started to carry cachet. “That’s really the story—more than one partner, one campaign—it’s the story of all of it,” says Breitbard, referring to the steady “drumbeat” of storytelling he and his team are building through its partnerships and marketing campaigns. Relative to the story that a revived Gap is trying to tell, “all of this creative is the narrative,” he says. And is intrinsic to its aim of “restaking our claim as an American icon.”
But strong creative requires a solid foundation to work from. In 2020, when Breitbard moved from his role as president and CEO of Banana Republic to join Gap in his current role, the casual-wear brand had nowhere to go but up. In fact, the last time Gap was in the conversation, low-rise jeans were in style (think 2000 to 2010).
Breitbard has incredibly broad responsibilities. “I lead the Gap brand business. It means everything that you see that is Gap is under my purview,” he says. Product, marketing, stores, e-commerce, partnerships, and “all the experiences that go along with that,” he adds. The Gapaissance is made up of many creative decision-makers, but at the end of the day, Breitbard is the one who makes the final call.
When he stepped into the role, he first noticed that the brand needed a cleanup. “Gap had a number of problems, starting with relevance,” Breitbard recalls of the company’s health when he first joined. “The business model was broken in some ways.”
A brief summary of his to-do list:
- Reduce the Gap’s “overstored” retail footprint (they closed 350 stores)
- Reinvent product
- Cut the number of stock-keeping units (SKUs)
- Reinvest in quality
- Multiple rounds of layoffs, all of which took place through 2022
- Followed by new creative hires in 2023, including its head of creative, Calvin Leung, and agency partner, Invisible Dynamics.
CEO Dickson, credited with Barbie’s pink tsunami of a comeback during his time as president and COO at Mattel, also joined in 2023. At that point, the company felt established enough to move on from digging itself out and start building up positive momentum. In 2024, Gap tapped Posen to head up its new, higher-price-point sub-brand, GapStudio, itself a relevance play through red carpet and celebrity dressing.
That’s also when the collaboration strategy started in earnest. (There were a few early collabs: the ill-fated, 10-year YZY partnership in 2020, which ended in 2022, followed by the more successful Gap x Dapper Dan collab in 2022.) According to Gap, the company rarely engaged in brand partnerships prior to Breitbard’s onboarding: about 24 collaborations over a span of 40 years, from 1979 to 2019.
Since Breitbard joined the company, Gap has launched more than 15 partnerships (about three per year—a five-fold increase over the prior average of about two every three years). By mid-2025, Gap is running six to eight major partnerships per year.
In 2024, Gap started to drop more frequent—and surprisingly covetable—collabs, like with Dôen and Cult Gaia. The kind that might cause you to text your friend a link with at least five question marks: “Gap?????”
The company also began launching classic Gap ads with new talent: Troye Sivan, Tyla, and most recently Katseye, choreographed by Robbie Blue. All of this offers multiple approaches to reinvent its “icons,” as Breitbard describes it.
The strategy is meant to reestablish its own core styles and its own brand relevance through affiliation with partners that carry fashion and cultural credibility. “We had the business starting to fire in ’23 with a lot of the pieces there,” he says. “Then a combination of all the different moves we’ve been making. We ramped every single one of them up—ramped up the marketing campaigns, ramped up the collabs, ramped up the storytelling, and got more and more focused.”
That includes a focused partnerships strategy. According to Breitbard, any new partnership requires a few things: a clear internal understanding of established brand codes (described as “rooted in denim” and the “authentic voice of Americana”), value alignment with potential partners, a strong creative team, and a differentiated story and audience.
“That happens when a story can only be told with that partner, and that the partner can only tell with us,” he says. But for Breitbard, it ultimately comes down to a basic relevance formula, which I call the “group chat litmus test”: “Is it new? Is it unexpected? And is it cool?” he asks.
Relevance and its cousin, authenticity, are brand qualities that are both difficult to define and universally chased. Every brand wants to be part of the cultural conversation, because that ultimately establishes credibility in the eyes of the consumer and creates a wide marketing funnel through which to engage potential customers. Think of it as branding soft power.
What unites all of these partnerships is the idea of authenticity and upholding Gap’s DNA. “We do go through great pains to ensure that the brand codes remain upheld in everything we do,” Breitbard says. “But having a strong creative team very locked in on who we are allows us to take more risks; it allows us to have interesting partnerships that feel new and unexpected. So that’s it. We rely on great creative talent.”
The halo effect
Brand relevance leads to brand equity, which leads to sales. Collaborations help establish that: 29% of customers who make a collab purchase are new to the brand, according to Gap. But partnerships also offer a halo effect for its core product: 20% of consumers who made a collab purchase also added a Gap item to their cart, according to the company. And partnerships have also proven important to establishing longtail business leads. Collab customers skew younger—under age 40.
I questioned friends about their current perception of Gap.
“I’ve noticed how Zac Posen has turned the ship. But not until this Katseye ad, have I been interested in actually buying from them,” a 33-year-old PR professional based in L.A. told me.
“Froth,” says a 35-year-old Australian consultant based in New York. “I loved the [Katseye] ad and walked into a Gap store for the first time in my life.”
“I think it’s getting cooler again, and they have trendier things in store,” a 39-year-old New York-based fashion designer told me. “I’ve bought a few things recently.”
According to Breitbard, no one partnership best captures the resurgent era of Gap. Rather, it’s the strategy as a whole. “Great creative begets great creative in the same way with talent and bringing more talent,” he says of his team and its recent output. Reflecting on the recent partnerships and distinct campaigns, he says: “All of this creative is the narrative.”
Right now, the creative is setting the pace—and it’s adding up to a comeback no one saw coming.
