Collaboration Is the Strategy. Target's Designer Relay and Lacoste's $272 Million

The clothing of a designer who won the 2015 CFDA Swarovski Award for Womenswear is hitting the shelves — this time not at a boutique but at big-box retailer Target. Target has unveiled a limited-edition collection spanning fashion and home goods with designer Rosie Assoulin. This approach of bringing high-end fashion down to mass-market prices is a longstanding Target tradition that began with its 2003 collaboration with Isaac Mizrahi.

This collection is one scene in the brand's ongoing multi-year turnaround. This year Target has rolled out a string of collaborations — the DTC swimwear brand Andie in April, LoveShackFancy earlier this month, and a second collection with the premium home line Parachute in July — and Assoulin extends that line. It has also reshaped its organization. Target named Tara Russell, who led the May renovation of its SoHo store, senior vice president of merchandising, apparel and accessories, and installed Gena Fox, who spearheaded the Kate Spade collaboration, as senior vice president of design.

Russell framed the collaboration as an example of Target's 'merchandising authority', describing it as 'fresh designer-inspired style' that customers can make their own. Behind these moves are the five-year partnership with Ulta that ends next month, and the expansion of an invite-only marketplace that has newly brought in Forever 21, Clarks, JanSport and others.

Source · Retail Dive, "Target debuts Rosie Assoulin collab"

Over the ten months from January to October 2025, the Media Impact Value (MIV) generated by Lacoste reached $272 million (about 380 billion won). This is not revenue but a metric that quantifies the 'value of exposure' the brand earned through media, influencers and celebrities. Founded in 1933 by tennis player René Lacoste, the brand is rapidly replacing its dated image with collaborations and digital content.

The key driver is its ambassador campaigns. 'Play With Icons', shot by photographer Tyler Mitchell, features Novak Djokovic, Venus Williams, actor Adèle Exarchopoulos, singer Wang Yibo and others. The buzz they created in their respective fields translated directly into numbers. Over the same period, Adèle Exarchopoulos delivered $1.89 million and Wang Yibo $1.79 million in MIV to the brand.

Offline events followed the same formula. On the final Sunday of Paris Fashion Week, Lacoste turned the Roland-Garros clay court — the emblem of the French Open — into a runway. The show ranked 7th among the top 20 brands at Paris Fashion Week with $17.9 million in MIV, and Oscar-winning actor Adrien Brody, seated in the front row, amplified the buzz. Across the overall performance, France was the largest market at $67 million.

Source · Launchmetrics, "Lacoste's Winning Marketing Strategy"

RealSnap's Location Snap is a feature that creates model outfit shots against a real location chosen from Google Street View. Depending on where an outfit stands, the same look tells a different story — treating the backdrop location itself as an input is the starting point of this feature. When you specify the model's face, the clothing to be worn, and the backdrop location, the three elements are combined within a single frame.

This approach proves useful when you want to use a street or plaza that's hard to shoot in person as the stage for an editorial, or when a seasonal campaign needs the air and texture of a specific city. Swapping in different locations lets you review the same outfit against various backgrounds repeatedly, naturally leading to the step of comparing which location best brings out the clothing.

In the left panel, the model's face sits in Selected Model, a single shot of the real place to be used as the background sits in Location Reference, and the clothing to be put on sits in Clothes & Items. Along the input line at the bottom, alongside a prompt field for describing the scene in words, sit options for generation quality (RealSnap Lookbook Pro), aspect ratio (4:5), and count (1/10). The key point here is that the background slot is separated from the model and the clothing. By keeping the model and the clothes fixed and swapping only the location, the experiment of moving the same outfit onto a different background is designed in from the setup stage.

On the finished screen, several shots are laid out side by side — the model in the same white dress standing against different backgrounds, such as a plaza with a tower and a tree-lined downtown street. Since the outfit and the model stay the same and only the location changes, you can compare in one place which background best sets off the silhouette and color of the clothes. This approach of lining up several location versions and choosing among them helps in composing a lookbook series that expands one concept across multiple backgrounds.

RealSnap's Location Snap treats the backdrop location not as a shoot schedule but as a choice. You can start by fixing the model and clothing, then setting a street or plaza you want to capture as a reference to create and compare several background versions. Since a background combination you like can be carried over into your next task, it's worth opening first as a draft exercise that stages a single outfit in the air of several different cities.