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On her desk at Anthropologie’s Philadelphia headquarters, CEO Tricia Smith keeps a palm-sized rock wrapped in a paper sleeve, neatly tied with a bow. It’s packaged as if it would be sold at the retailer, with a price of $1,000. Her team made it for her after a woman’s TikTok went viral in September, in which she unboxes a rock from outside, pretending it’s a pricey new decoration from Anthropologie in front of her boyfriend to see his reaction.
As the video gained traction, Anthropologie’s social team swooped into the comments to ride the viral wave — custom for brand accounts these days. But Smith credits the quick reaction to recent years spent investing in digital marketing. “No one can expect or anticipate it, so how do you respond when something like the rock comes up?” Smith says. The prank, after all, is poking fun at how Anthropologie has become known for quirky, high-end decor, like a $300 wicker poodle. “Digital marketing is where we’ve seen the most rapid change and evolution, and I think our team has a really great understanding of that. You have to make light of yourself as a brand — I think younger generations want to see brands participate with an authentic voice.”
Smith was charged with introducing the Anthropologie brand to a younger consumer when she joined the company in 2021. Founder Richard Hayne recruited her from California-based retailer Tilly’s, where she had spent a year as executive vice president and chief merchandising officer during the Covid shutdowns and supply chain crises. Prior to that, Smith spent her career at Nordstrom, where she worked her way up from the shop floor in Brea, California, to EVP and general merchandising manager for womenswear and designer.
Hayne was looking for someone who could bring Anthropologie into its next era. The company turned 30 in 2020, making it as millennial as its main customer cohort — potentially proving an issue for Anthropologie’s growth prospects. The internet wars have divided Gen Zs and millennials, with the former branding the latter as cringe for its earnestness, crew socks and side parts. Anthropologie’s distinct aesthetic — eclectic, bohemian, universal, but in a substitute teacher kind of way — helped it establish at foothold in the market. Though without some refreshing, it risked alienating the younger customers that could carry it into its next phase of relevancy.
“You have a younger consumer who is looking for pieces they can wear to work, but it needs to be in their price range and it needs to not feel too boring,” says Jessica Ramírez, retail consultant and founder of The Consumer Collective. “Anthropologie has done this, making it feel aspirational without alienating.”
While Smith says her job wasn’t to “age down” the company, she and Hayne recognised that being peak millennial in a Gen Z and youth-obsessed world would eventually mean its core customer base would age out. How could Anthropologie make its bohemian basics speak to a new generation, while setting the floor for a fresh wave of sustainable growth?
Laying the groundwork
Smith says her first 10 months were spent celebrating and making noise about the company’s 30-year anniversary, marked by campaigns and a coffee table book. Then, she says, she got to laying the groundwork for what needed to come next.
First, the retailer wanted to introduce more newness and moments outside the traditional seasonal calendar. Next, was to build a digital marketing team, the kind that could jump in when an alleged Anthro rock was going viral. “We had no customer acquisition strategy,” Smith says. And finally, Smith was to slash Anthropologie’s reliance on promotions and discounts, returning the brand to full-price sales.
Five years on, Anthropologie has ballooned to $2.4 billion in fiscal 2025 from $1.6 billion in 2020, making it parent company Urbn’s largest brand (Urbn also owns Free People, Urban Outfitters and rental company Nuuly). The company is a fashion-lifestyle flywheel, with connected brands across the women’s, bridal, home and outdoor categories. It’s a complicated ship to steer, Smith says, and attributes it to Urbn’s supply chain as well as the executives leading each division, who she believes are experts in their categories. But she also has bigger goals in mind: Anthropologie Home, for example, is on track to double sales from $500 million to $1 billion in the next few years, a goal shared with investors in 2023.
“I’m so incredibly proud of our team because we are on our fourth year of consecutive [sales] increases, and we’ve grown our customer base by 50 per cent,” Smith says. “Within that, we grew both our existing customer base along with our new customers, which I think is hard to do if you specifically target just a younger consumer.”
And earlier this year, Smith made a bold play when the company spun out its bestselling own label, Maeve, into a standalone brand. The first store opened in October in Raleigh, with another slated for Atlanta in January. Smith won’t share sales projections for Maeve, but sees potential for growth, and notes that the idea for a spin-off stemmed from the company’s financial team, who overlooked its margins.
The standalone stores extend the Anthropologie universe: more boutiquey, they’re merchandised differently and much smaller, meaning the brand can open on shopping streets and neighborhood destinations separate to Anthropologie. Maeve reaches a multi-generational audience, the brand says. The Raleigh opening inspired a collaboration with a local coffee shop that sold lattes with Maeve logos sketched into the foam. Smith says fans of the brand lined up down the block for the opening, dressed in Maeve pieces, like the brand’s bestselling Colette pant.
While Maeve becomes its own entity, Anthropologie stores are filling up with new label launches. In the last five years, Anthropologie has introduced swim brand Celandine, activewear brand Daily Practice and intimates brand Lyrebird. “We have more to work with in each store,” Smith says. The focus, as per her early conversations with Hayne, is on full-price sales, so newness is imperative. One of Smith’s first moves was to wipe clean the company’s existing promotional calendar, which she worried would spook store managers. But she says they embraced the change.
Stores are a crucial piece of Anthropologie’s retail and growth strategies, with sprawling spaces that span the company’s full category mix and carry both in-house and third-party labels. At a time when multi-brand retail is going through a reckoning, Anthropologie is offering a new kind of department store, carrying brands like Agolde, Clare V and Damson Madder. Smith — with a long background in merchandising — has taken care to invest in stores, something that dates back to the pandemic, when she saw other companies investing heavily in digital tools without prioritising store space. Though digital tools weren’t excluded; Anthropologie recently rolled out a concierge tool for one-to-one clienteling.
“I talked to our teams around when I started, and said coming out of Covid, we should be the place in which our service exceeds those of our competitors, as does the experience that we invest in visually, as well as the product assortment,” says Smith. Store turnover has grown 20 per cent since 2020, while operating profits have risen, too. “I think that’s because our teams are really focused on the customer. That investment in service — thinking about the mix of product and how we diversify regionally — has lent itself to a position where we feel like we can take a bigger swing at opening more stores now,” says Smith. In the past six weeks, beyond the Maeve rollout, Anthropologie opened a 3,500-square-foot store in Nashville’s Gulch neighborhood as well as a 7,000-square-foot store in Flatiron, Colorado. “Both had great results, but different expectations of what the product assortment would be.”
What’s next
Anthropologie plans to grow its store fleet from 243 to 270, with additional plans for another Maeve store following the Atlanta opening. Smith says there’s opportunity abroad for expansion — the retailer currently has 17 locations in the UK, but no international footprint beyond that — but that it’s still mining the US for new places to open. With a strategy that’s five years in the works, Smith is thinking about new white spaces. I ask about the obvious one: menswear.
“It’s one we talk about a lot here,” she says, before quickly pivoting to the main growth opportunity, Anthropologie Home, the brand targeting $1 billion in sales. Anthropologie customers are particularly enthusiastic around the holidays, collecting the iconic juice glasses with ghost or Christmas bow decals, and other seasonal collections that roll out each year, seemingly earlier than the last.
One point of focus for product assortments is tariffs and the costs associated. Smith says that while the company does have plans for price increases, she thinks it will be marginal enough that most customers won’t feel it. She adds that Anthropologie is opting for higher quality fabrics and production to help justify the uplifts, as well as investing in lower entry categories like beauty to meet more consumers at price points that work for them. “We’ll manage through it. You have to be ready and nimble and we have a team that can trust and collaborate.”
It also helps to drive consistent buzz, whether it’s for a Taylor Swift-inspired juice glass that launched alongside her Life of a Showgirl album (and was turned around in eight weeks, evidence of a shortened production cycle under Smith), or a Maeve line that featured different dog breeds on hats and sweaters for pet-obsessed shoppers. Collaborations, like one with the New York City Ballet, keep a steady thrum of collectible releases that square with Smith’s 2021 task of creating a digital marketing engine. In today’s market, product launches that can be promoted on TikTok by creators who have turned consumption into something of a hobby, provide both sales and a brand halo that’s critical for success.
“The assortment has crossover in its generational appeal,” says Ramírez. “That ability to create products that inspire content is something you either have or you don’t.”
This It-factor is represented by the Anthropologie rock on Smith’s desk, though other viral moments are actually available for purchase.
“We were not where a younger consumer was,” Smith says of her early days. “That’s changed now.”
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