J.Crew represents a cornerstone of the American aesthetic, serving as a definitive blueprint for a lifestyle that balances heritage with modern sophistication. As a brand with an established social media presence, they set out to expand reach and impact by testing creator partnerships on YouTube Shorts for the first time, using premium, platform-native content to showcase its Summer 2025 collections.
For YouTube and Influencer, the objective was to demonstrate how integrating Shorts can deliver incremental reach and views, adding meaningful visibility to J.Crew’s existing advertising efforts and paid social strategy.
While J.Crew’s established online presence set the foundation, it was the combination of YouTube Shorts and carefully selected creators that ultimately drove unprecedented benchmarks during the brand’s YouTube Shorts pilot campaign in May 2025.
Influencer quickly established J.Crew’s presence on Shorts by leading the brand’s enrollment in two key initiatives. The first initiative was the YouTube Accelerator program, a turn-key solution to identify relevant creators, produce new content, and amplify the content with paid media.
The second initiative was the YouTube Readiness Program to fund creator sourcing and content production, which was essential for jumpstarting the test and proving the value of this new approach.
To identify the right creators, top-performers from J.Crew campaigns on other platforms with established or growing YouTube followings were selected. This group included established fashion authorities who had already found success on other social platforms, as well as YouTube-native creators who understood the unique technical nuances of the Shorts format. These individuals were chosen for their ability to produce elevated, high-quality content that mirrored the brand’s own commitment to classic styling and sophisticated imagery.
New YouTube-native creators were also identified to expand reach and ensure content would be correctly tailored and optimized for the Shorts format.
This dual approach was designed for J.Crew to reach new customers through the Shorts platform by driving awareness across both emerging and core fashion categories, resulting in Influencer sourcing a curated mix of five creators—male and female fashion creators known for producing high-quality, cinematic content with eye catching scenery aligned to J.Crew’s top performers on TikTok, and classic, elevated styling that seamlessly aligned with the brand.
The creators were asked to produce one video each, for a total of 5 videos, showcasing J.Crew's summer collections. The videos were boosted with a Shorts-only VVC via Partnership Ads, which directly increased visibility from the creators' channels.
YouTube Shorts proved to be a highly engaged platform, with viewers actively asking creators where to purchase the J.Crew pieces featured in their videos. Across all creator content, comment sections reflected clear shopping intent and interest in specific items, signaling that the audience wasn’t just watching, but ready to take action. In total, the five creator videos reached 1.7M people and generated 1.5M views, 21K engagements, and a 1.4 percent average engagement rate.
As Courtney Landolfe, Paid Marketing Director at J.Crew, shared: “Using YouTube Shorts for our J.Crew summer collections was an exciting test! We wanted to reach more of our target audience, and the YouTube Accelerator program helped us to scale quickly. The results were clear: better ad recall, lower cost per view, and much higher view-through rates. It's a proven way to drive results and make our ads go further on YouTube.”
The performance reinforced that impact. Influencer and YouTube delivered a campaign with a 3.9 percent absolute ad recall lift, alongside 189 percent stronger view-through rates than social benchmarks and a 30 percent more efficient cost-per-view, driven by the creator assets developed by Influencer and amplified in partnership with long-time agency collaborator PMG.
