Sam’s Club’s Remi Bader clothing collab is aimed at Gen Z shoppers | Ad Age

Oct 17, 2024

Each item in the collection ranges from size XXS to 6X online and XS to 4X in select Sam's Club stores.

The apparel section of Sam’s Club stores has spawned a TikTok niche filled with thousands of videos of young adult shoppers showing off their latest low-cost clothing hauls from the Walmart-owned warehouse chain or gushing over viral Sam’s Club clothing items, such as its $15 sweatshirts embroidered with state flowers.

Now, Sam’s Club is looking to further amplify its surging popularity among Gen Z and millennial consumers with its first-ever influencer marketing push—a 26-piece clothing collection created in partnership with TikTok​​ creator and model Remi Bader.

The “Edited by Remi” clothing line reflects Bader’s focus on body positivity and inclusive sizing across her social content, with sizes ranging from XS to 4X in select Sam’s Club stores and extending to XXS to 6X online. Sam’s Club worked with Sunrise Brands and to design and manufacture the collection. Bader’s father, Gary Bader, is the CEO of its largest division, Seven7 Jeans.

“That was very, very important to me,” she told Ad Age. “I was like, ‘I'm not even going to call this an inclusive size range unless it goes up to a 6X’ … Nothing pisses me off more than when I go on a website and see that they have an extended size category, and then they have all these hideous options that are just for larger bodies.”

Additionally, Sam’s Club set the price of each item in the collection at under $30, from a $19.88 denim skirt to a $23.46 mesh dress. The low prices across Sam’s Club’s apparel, not only its collection with Bader, have fueled the TikTok craze around the warehouse store—and that increased online attention toward Sam’s Club has, in turn, helped drive the influx of Gen Z consumers who join.

The warehouse club industry’s younger shoppers include millennials, born from 1981 through 1996, and Gen Zers, born from 1997 through 2012.The number of Gen Zers with Sam’s Club memberships has jumped 68% in the past two years, according to Sam’s Club President and CEO Chris Nicholas. And Sam’s Club isn’t alone. Just under half of the consumers who joined rival warehouse store Costco in the past year are under 40 years old, Costco Executive VP and Chief Financial Officer Gary Millerchip said during that company’s latest earnings call.

Both Gen Z and millennial shoppers are the “fastest-growing segment” of Sam’s Club customer base, said Brett Crowell, the brand’s VP of apparel and jewelry. That “evolution” of the average Sam’s Club member to a younger and more digitally-native shopper spurred the brand’s decision to venture into influencer marketing through its collaboration with Bader, Crowell said.

Sam’s Club has for years been an also-ran in club stores to Costco, and still trails in overall revenue by a $249.6 billion to $86.2 billion margin for their most recently reported fiscal years. But Sam’s Club, a unit of Walmart, has been catching up in growth, with comparable store sales growth rising in each of the past two quarters, including a 5.2% gain in the quarter ended July 31, compared to Costco’s 5.4% growth in its fiscal fourth quarter ended Sept. 1.

Sam’s Club is also growing faster in e-commerce (up 22% compared to Costco’s 18.9% for the most recently reported quarters). And Sam’s was years ahead of Costco in launching a retail media network (Costco launched one earlier this year) and has made inroads speeding checkout through the implementation of its Scan & Go app, for which Costco doesn’t have an equivalent.

A post shared by Remi Jo (@remibader)

“We started brainstorming about, ‘What do we want to do in 2024 to really try and capture that savvy Gen Z or millennial, and help serve them in a way that we’re not serving them today?’” Crowell said, adding that Sam’s Club began its collaboration with Bader roughly 18 months ago. Crowell and his team turned to Sam’s Club’s “Member’s Mark Community,” a network for customers to offer feedback on new or existing products, and noticed many shoppers complaining about not being able to find apparel in their size when browsing the aisles at Sam’s Club, he said.

More: How 50,000 customers help Sam’s Club create products

“There’s this idea that to get fashionable and quality clothing, you either have to pay a lot of money for it or you have to source it through some of these fast-fashion brands where maybe quality isn’t there,” he said. “But that isn’t true. So, when we started developing the line, it was like, ‘What if all these items were under $30, and we just provided the right size at the right price?’”

Since the “Edited by Remi” collection dropped online last Tuesday, Sam’s Club has seen a “significant uptick” in consumers heading to the apparel section of the brand’s website and app, with much of that increased traffic coming directly from TikTok and Instagram, Crowell said. Indeed, two of the best-selling items in the collection thus far are a denim skirt and mesh long-sleeved shirt worn by Bader in her TikTok video announcing the launch of the line, he said.

Many people jumping from Bader’s content to the Sam’s Club site are signing up for a membership in order to purchase items from the clothing line—and most of those new members are buying multiple pieces, Crowell said. “We’ve even had some customers that signed up and became members buy the entire collection in one basket,” he added.

A post shared by Remi Jo (@remibader)

The collection launched online last week and is set to hit 100 Sam’s Clubs today. Bader will appear at the Secaucus, New Jersey Sam’s Club location this week for a fan meet-and-greet, Crowell said.

Bader also said she is organizing a launch party where influencers will wear pieces from her clothing line. “For me, I think it’s important for my followers and people to see it on all different body types and different types of people,” she said. “I truly feel that everyone across the board, no matter what size they are, should be able to wear the same clothes.”

Bader has frequently called out clothing brands for excluding plus-size women entirely or for offering plus-size items that are simply sized-up versions of their smaller pieces, rather than items tailored to actually fit the shape of a larger body. Her series of “realistic haul” videos on TikTok, where Bader models clothing from brands such as Zara, H&M and Target and compares it to the product imagery on their websites, helped fuel her rise to online fame. She’s also collaborated with brands such as Revolve on size-inclusive clothing lines extending to size 4X.

“I don’t understand brands and retailers that make different pieces for larger people and smaller people,” Bader added. “My body has fluctuated my whole life—I’ve been a size 20 and I’ve been a size 10—but my idea of what I want to wear and my style hasn’t shifted. Why do people think that just because you’re larger, you want to wear looser, frumpier clothes? That’s just not the case.”

Contributing: Jack Neff

In this article:

Gillian Follett is a general assignment reporter for Ad Age. She writes about a variety of topics including social media, influencer marketing and the creator economy. Gillian graduated from Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications.