A few years into her time overseeing American Eagle’s Aerie division, Jennifer Foyle felt the loungewear and intimate apparel brand needed to stake a flag in the ground to stand out in a crowded sector.
It was 2014, at the twilight of Victoria’s Secret’s cultural dominance before a consumer backlash against unrealistic supermodel-led body standards had started to hurt the lingerie brand’s sales. Aerie was ahead of its time among mass-market brands: It had leaned into body positivity before that became a mainstream term by offering larger sizes earlier than peers, and focusing on comfort and fit, rather than sexiness in service to the male gaze.
Foyle, now president and executive creative director of AE and Aerie, decided to take it a step further: Aerie announced the “Aerie Real pledge” to stop retouching photos of models, a pioneering stand in the apparel industry at the time. “I said, ‘This is it. This is our moment. We are going to be disruptive in the intimate apparel space,’” Foyle recalls in a recent interview with Fortune in an Aerie store in New York’s SoHo. “It was a magical moment when it came to life.”
Last month, Aerie launched a fresh campaign doubling down on that long-established policy of celebrating realistic beauty, with an ad mocking the limitations of AI. Featuring actor Pamela Anderson, known now as much for her no-makeup stance as for her time in the 1990’s as a Baywatch star and tabloid celebrity, the ad juxtaposes the bland lifelessness of AI-generated models with the vivacity of real women, culminating in the slogan “Real matters” and a reiteration of the brand’s pledge, with an addition: “No AI generated bodies or people.”
“Aerie Real was just celebrating women for who they are,” says Foyle, “and so now we are going to go to the next level with it.”
Understanding the zeitgeist and what Aerie consumers really want, or might want, has long been one of Foyle’s superpowers as a retailer and it has helped her build Aerie into a nearly $2 billion brand, one that has doubled in revenue size in just five years and which is now the engine of growth for its AEO parent company, despite still being a much smaller brand than American Eagle itself, which took in $3.4 billion in 2025. (Last quarter, comparable sales at Aerie rose 23%, but only 2% at American Eagle, which is competing in the hyper competitive denim market with tough rivals such as Gap Inc, Abercrombie & Fitch, and Levi Strauss.)
Now Foyle will have to tap that ethos to keep building Aerie at a time rivals like Victoria’s Secret are finally recovering from past missteps and new competitors are emerging. A merchant at heart, Foyle worked at Bloomingdale’s early in her career. Long a veritable talent factory in the apparel world, she cut her teeth there alongside her now-rivals, the CEOs of Gap Inc, and Abercrombie & Fitch Co, Richard Dickson and Fran Horowitz.
Foyle still displays a love of the product, and an eye for a great piece. As she gives me a tour of the store, she gets particularly excited by a little flowy skirt she sees on the lower level. “Everyone’s been knocking this off since we launched it,” she tells me. “It’s so cute to work out or play in, I think we can have even more fun,” she says, speaking a mile a minute.
Room to grow for Aerie
When Foyle joined AEO in 2010 to head Aerie, her mandate was to build what was then a $225 million sub-brand of American Eagle into a thriving stand-alone business.
So, Foyle has always been thinking about what categories could be the next big avenue of growth. In 2016, Aerie ventured into bralettes very successfully, followed by a foray into activewear with the Offline areas of its stores, selling activewear and athleisure. She got the idea for Offline a few years ago when she saw Aerie leggings doing very well. “The legging business that we had tucked inside of Aerie was $100 million and I thought, ‘this could be its own business!’” she recalled. “And we launched Offline… It couldn’t have been more perfect.” When the pandemic hit in 2020, the “comfy-cozy” positioning of the brand was perfectly timed as people stayed home in soft, stretchy clothing.
That part of Aerie’s brand has grown into a $750-million-a-year business that Foyle wants to take much further—and its growth explosion has coincided with the North American sales declines at Lululemon Athletica and Gap Inc’s Athleta.
Foyle says there is no shortage of new products Aerie can get into, as long as they are consistent with Aerie’s ethos. Take fleece, now a major category for Aerie. She became interested in the category when she saw a stylish young woman at an Ariana Grande concert in 2019 wearing an oversized fleeced top that went halfway down her leg. “I thought, ‘that looks great,’” she recalls. “There’s a natural adjacency to just lounging and being at home, and we went for it.”
It has helped that Aerie a decade ago developed “Real Soft,” an extremely soft fabric that is not heavy and holds up well after multiple washings. It was key to building Aerie’s mammoth sleepwear business. And the Gen Z and Gen Alpha cohorts will mix pajama bottoms with hoodies when going out in public. Foyle says that Aerie’s success stems from not only winning over 21-year-olds, but their moms too.
Many apparel chains strive to be fast followers and jump on the trend of the moment rather than get too far ahead of their shoppers. Foyle says Aerie and American Eagle should be stylish but not “crazy trendy”—but she still thinks the brand can make educated bets that push customers into new categories that they might not be clamoring for in focus groups. “Sometimes you don’t need to ask permission. Sometimes the customer needs to be told, and you have to go for it. There was a white space for us in fleece.”
“Hunt mode”
As Wall Street sees it, Aerie is in the driver’s seat in terms of expanding its business. “They are in “hunt” mode and are in control of taking market share,” Barclays analyst Adrienne Yih wrote in a recent research note. She praises Aerie for forging its own path and not trying to imitate competitors.
Even as other brands heed market data suggesting they stay in their own lane and not expand their offerings too widely, Foyle believes there’s still lots of room to build Aerie’s brand across categories. She feels emboldened to go into Aerie categories that could seem like a stretch. Ultra-light puffer jackets, for instance, are a category everyone from Lululemon Athletica to Levi Strauss have rushed into. Aerie has them too, but Foyle says her designers have made sure the products they put out fit with the brand.
“If it was up to our customer, Aerie could be a department store,” she says. “I think about personal care; we haven’t even scratched that yet. I think of skincare. They want more from us.”
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com