Shadowing Practice: Inside Gap Inc.’s Plan To Rewrite Its Story for Gen Z | Behind The Business - Learn English Speaking with Video
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Three, two, one.
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In the 90s, Gap ruled American retail, opening a store nearly every day.
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Everybody loves Gap.
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They just wondered what happened.
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Then, fast fashion beat it on speed and over-discounting cut its margins.
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Its market value fell more than 90%.
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By 2020, dwindling demand led Gap to warn it could run out of cash.
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The Gap fell into the classic trap of getting too big for their own good.
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So Gap bet on the CEO who revived Barbie.
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You'd come into our stores and we were more about price than product.
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It was about stuff, not story.
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His strategy?
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Pairing Gen Z celebrity, nostalgic music, Five, six, seven, let's go!
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La la, la la and dance designed to go viral.
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30 dancers, all different dance styles.
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Eight billion impressions later, Gap brand grew 10%, becoming the portfolio's fastest growth machine, while the other three brands lagged behind.
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So can cultural relevance revive a legacy brand?
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Originally built to bridge the generation gap, Gap has always fused culture with commerce.
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Any other line but the Gap is childish.
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We took khakis and made it a cultural conversation.
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That type of heritage is one that gets very inspiring for people to think, well, what can we do with that as a canvas for cultural conversation moving forward?
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In 1999, Gap's market cap hit its $43 billion peak, more than Nike and Amazon combined at the time.
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By 2020, Gap had lost more than 90% of its market value.
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So how did Gap fall into a long decline in the first place?
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The Gap fell into the classic trap of getting too big for their own good.
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The Gap tried to be everything to everyone.
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When you do that, you become very little to anyone.
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Outpaced by fast fashion, Gap fell into a cycle.
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Too many stores, excess inventory, and over-discounting that taught customers to wait for the sale.
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The Gap brand lost nearly half of its sales and closed more than 60% of its stores globally.
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We weaned ourselves off of the over-promoted, over-signed offerings.
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It doesn't mean that we're not a value-oriented brand at all.
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In fact, we love our distinction as a value-oriented brand.
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Great prices, great style, and great quality.
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After cycling through four CEOs in four years, Gap hired Richard Dixon.
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He helped revive Mattel's Barbie to a record $1.7 billion cultural phenomenon.
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Part of the challenge when we started this reinvigoration, you'd come into our stores and we were more about price than product.
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It was about stuff, not story.
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And so we took these and said,
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okay, let's edit the stuff into a story and let's start to tell our product story in a way that is primary. On set with Cab.
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Ready and camera.
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Well, here you have it.
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Yeah.
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And this is a great detail.
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It is the Haley Jean.
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It's inspired by the year that she was born in 96.
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It's created enormous amounts of excitement and ultimately, obviously featured here prominently in the center of the store.
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To fix the company, Dixon Cut Inventory, closed doors, slash discounts and bet on cultural relevance to drive foot traffic.
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These are decades old, but yet they seem so culturally relevant and timeless.
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And then you can look at the Hailey Bieber shot and think, you know, we can put her into this mix and it is completely part of the, you know, now archival history.
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It's consistent.
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And we brought back that discipline to really own Gap style and to really celebrate it.
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Down, up, down, up.
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And we're going to make this work.
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It's just been an uncontrollable passion.
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He launched the fashion-tainment strategy in 2024 with Tyla and scaled it with Troye Sivan.
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But global pop group cat-size Better in Denim was where the hype paid off.
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400 million views in three days and sales went up 7% that fall, up sharply from the preceding quarter.
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Why the focus on cultural relevance from the get-go?
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Brands are stories and to some extent those stories have to be relevant and connect with an audience.
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And in the context of our history across our portfolio, we started and had great storytelling brands but somewhere along the way,
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lost the story and became more about the stuff.
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And the stuff, while it's sold in the context of turning on sales, we lost the connection of the storytelling of our brand.
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And so cultural connection and cultural relevance is actually a fundamental part of brand management.
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What is the purpose of cultural relevance?
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In theory, it should be to drive revenues.
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It may also drive pricing power.
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We're on this precipice of finding out, are these idiosyncratic actions
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that are getting us to think about GAAP as being cooler actually going to drive an ongoing improvement in revenues?
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Or did the GAAP see the same tariff-induced lift to pricing that everyone else saw across the world?
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Let's talk about storytelling.
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How is that different now as you try to reach Gen Z?
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I think the platforms that we have to create assets for are very unique and different.
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Clearly we're in a digital dialogue with our consumer attention span.
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It is very short and so you have to be incredibly impactful and effective.
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Before Dixon, the path to reclaiming relevance was littered with expensive misses.
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The company spent more than a billion dollars on advertising trying to buy back its cool with little to show for it.
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The misfires piled up, a new logo dead within a week, a flopped dress normal campaign, and and a high stakes deal with Kanye West that collapsed,
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resulting in a $53 million write-off.
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So Gap cut ad spending by over $250 million, betting big on music videos with Gen Z creators.
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My name is Young Miko.
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I'm Indian Everettie.
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My name is Barbie Ferreira.
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Celebrity collaborations are nothing new and they're not unique to the Gap.
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Why is it that some of them catch on and others do not?
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It's the same question, how do certain products catch on, how do they not?
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It needs to be relevant at the right time with the right product.
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And so you need all three.
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You need product, storytelling, and distribution. And luck. And luck.
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Definitely luck.
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Our efforts in our campaigns and our storytelling is resonating, is driving cultural conversation, is driving trends.
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Three years ago, we never would have sat here and said, Gap is going to be a trending brand on TikTok.
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And yet, here we are, you know, trending on TikTok, driving incredible impressions and cultural conversations, and the business of the business is starting to reflect that.
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Now, Gap is hoping that these viral videos will convert passive scrollers into paying customers, driving foot traffic, specifically Gen Z shoppers.
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So you've had a lot of success in your social campaigns, but how does that translate on the ground in stores like this?
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What are you seeing?
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We see customers coming in in droves, Gen Z consumers coming in groups, having fun, engaging in the product,
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trying it on, having conversations, taking pictures of themselves, posting it.
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We created an event.
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And to the extent that we've driven this interest and traffic, when they get to the store, we've got to deliver that experience that they expect.
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Dixon also hired designer Zach Posen as the first creative lead across all four brands, bringing red carpet couture in-house.
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While walking in the Gap flagship, I noticed the absence of discount signs.
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So I asked Gap Brand CEO Mark Breitbart how they got customers to pay full price more often.
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Moving from a cycle where we were in tougher business
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and the voice of discount
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and the brand just felt overpowering to now being in the strong part of the cycle where we have great product stories.
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I feel the power of our storytelling is driving the business versus any discounting driving the business.
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Across the portfolio, store sales are up and comp sales have been growing for more than two years.
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Relevance is translating directly to the bottom line, but it's not a straight line.
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It's not straight math.
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You have to trust the creative process.
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And if we are believing in our creative teams
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and we're continuing to drive the amount of creative output we are in the brand
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and have confidence in our products and the way we're telling the story and executing, then the P&L takes care of itself.
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Yet for Gap Inc to complete a true turnaround, the real stakes lie in its biggest brand, Old Navy.
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While cultural buzz is lifting the gap, Old Navy ultimately determines the financial bottom line.
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This is the biggest, quietest, but perhaps most important part of the business, not the most culturally loud.
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But this is the part of the business that can keep the underlying afloat, can keep growing, can drive the cash needed to affect all these turns.
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The question hanging over Old Navy, however, is more complex.
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For a brand targeting lower-income shoppers, can the Gap Playbook be applied in the same way?
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If you want to be really big, you can't be really special.
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because the amount of people that are needed to buy eight billion dollars is just
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so much broader than being able to retain a certain identity.
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And so what they need to bear is can they become this huge
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and special business or do they just stay more of a mass player?
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We've got a lot of work to do to continue to put these brands in the center of the cultural conversation.
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Retail is detail.
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There's always something going wrong.
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Obviously we want more things to go right than wrong.
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It's a challenge but it's an optimistic period where we feel like we're making a lot of progress
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and lots of opportunity ahead.
About This Lesson
You're practicing English with "Inside Gap Inc.’s Plan To Rewrite Its Story for Gen Z | Behind The Business" using the Shadowing technique — a method originally developed for professional interpreter training.
Focus on sounding like the speaker — not just repeating words. With 15–30 minutes of daily practice, you'll build real-world speaking confidence.
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.