Why Gen Z Brands Like Coach and Edikted Are Pulling Young Shoppers Back Into Malls For Good
As Gen Z shoppers seek social spaces and immersive shopping experiences, these brands are delivering.
The generation raised on smartphones is walking back into the mall. Gen Z brands are watching foot traffic surge as shoppers ages 14 to 29 trade endless scrolling for something they can touch, try on and share with friends in real life. That shift is reshaping which retailers thrive and which get left behind, and a handful of names have figured out exactly what this crowd wants.
Gen Z is not abandoning online shopping. But young shoppers are increasingly showing up at malls for immersive store designs, exclusive pop-ups, limited drops and, more than anything, a reason to be somewhere that is not their bedroom.
“You can kind of make a day out of it, you can go for a couple hours, get something to eat, maybe get a matcha or a coffee,” Tyler Hartman, 20, told local news outlet WXYZ Detroit of his trips to the mall.
“The mall is an experience,” Annabelle Saco, 24, of Bloomfield, Michigan, told USA TODAY. “You go there and you see all different kinds of people and it’s just getting out of your isolation in your home.”
Elizabeth Lafontaine, director of research at Placer.ai, told USA TODAY that “the resurgence of the mall category directly correlates with Gen Z shoppers’ desire for community and in-person connection.”
Why Gen Z is choosing stores over screens
For a cohort that grew up online, the mall has become a low-stakes way to socialize, kill an afternoon and compare what is real to what only looks good on TikTok. Retailers that turn a store visit into a hangout, complete with cafés, photo moments and merchandise that mirrors social feeds, are the ones winning wallets.
Urban Outfitters bets big on Gen Z experiential retail
The Urban Outfitters Gen Z experiential retail rollout is one of the clearest bets any major chain has made on this trend. The brand plans to bring a new Gen Z-focused store format to seven more U.S. locations this year after debuting the concept in Houston, Texas, Glendale, California and Bethesda, Maryland, in 2025.
The new layout features brighter, more spacious fitting rooms, expanded beauty inventory and what the company calls “a more immersive and tailored shopping environment,” according to a company press release.
“Our goal is to be the go-to brand and destination for the categories and brands that define our customer’s style, and a source of inspiration through our creativity,” Shea Jensen, president of Urban Outfitters, said in the release. “This new format gives us the freedom to shape our stores around our customers, their lifestyle, and the moments that matter most to them.”
Urban Outfitters cites its own UO Insiders community data showing 72% of Gen Z consumers are shopping in malls.
How Edikted turned viral TikTok fashion into flagship stores
Edikted, a TikTok viral fashion label that launched online in 2020, has become one of the fastest growing physical footprints in fashion. The brand opened its first store in New York City in 2023, then expanded to Los Angeles and Minnesota’s Mall of America, the largest mall in the U.S., the following year. It doubled its store count in 2025 and is targeting 30 to 40 flagships nationwide.
“Everywhere we are opening stores in the same city, the store usually generates more revenue than online sales in that city,” CEO Dedy Schwartzberg told Modern Retail. “It’s a win-win situation.”
“They want to touch the brand,” Schwartzberg said of Gen Z customers. “I’m always hearing customers in stores say, ‘Oh, this is the set we saw on this or that influencer.’”
How Coach reinvented itself for a new generation
Coach, long associated with older shoppers, has become one of Gen Z’s most talked about labels. As Jenny Singer wrote for InStyle, “Over the past five years, Coach has dug into its archive, embraced new trends, aligned with celebrities, locked in on TikTok, found an eco-conscious angle, and rode the wave of Y2K nostalgia.”
“This is not the Coach that I’d known previously,” Erin Keel, a 26-year-old in Los Angeles, told InStyle. “I think that’s attributed to their positioning towards Gen-Z.”
Tapestry, which owns Coach along with Kate Spade and other labels, reported double digit in-store sales growth for the quarter ending December 27, 2025, driven largely by Gen Z, according to PYMNTS.com. The brand also opened four Coach Coffee Shop locations in 2025, pairing purse shopping with lattes and sweets in a clear Gen Z experiential retail play.
“Since Covid, particularly for this younger generation, there’s a return to in real life shopping and malls and outlets are part of that equation,” Coach CEO Todd Kahn told CNBC. “They see the TikTok image. They see what they want. They’re like, ‘I want to go get that.’”
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