Summer intern season is going strong, and for teen apparel retailer Aéropostale, that means it’s time for the “Intern Diaries,” a serialized content series that launched in 2025. For its return this year, Aéropostale stepped up production and turned the second go around into a socially native mini-series starring teen creator Déjà Clark.
“We really want this to be different than more commercial content, or frankly, even some of the other made-for-social content that we do,” said Marisa Thalberg, chief customer and marketing officer at Aéropostale parent Catalyst Brands.
This year, Aéropostale teamed with Authentic Brands Group’s Authentic Studios and Emmy-winning director Eve Van Dyke. New episodes of “Intern Diaries” will run every Thursday across the brand’s YouTube and social channels and take a comedic look at the behind-the-scenes realities of being a content creator and intern at a fashion brand.
The first two episodes of the season notched 3.5 million views across social platforms, demonstrating the power of a creator like Clark, who has 6.2 million followers on TikTok. The episodes average about three to four minutes in length, similar in runtime if not style to the recent microdrama trend.
“We thought of YouTube as the anchoring channel, but in reality, you go where the fans are, and most views are happening on TikTok, because that’s where [Clark] has her biggest fandom,” Thalberg said of the media strategy. “The engagement’s deep. It’s a multiminute view, and people are hanging there, watching and sharing with their friends.”
Aéropostale is also iterating on a successful collection launch with creator Demetra Dias, the star of last season’s “Intern Diaries,” that last year led to a spike in app downloads and catapulted the brand’s app into a top five spot in the App Store. Clark’s collection for 2026, which includes 71 styles with prices starting at $19.95, was announced in Thursday’s episode of “Intern Diaries.” The collection will be available exclusively via the retailer’s app July 16-17 before debuting online and in stores on July 18.
“Based on the success of the Demetra collection that we had last year, we’re highly optimistic that we’re going to have another hit,” Thalberg said. “We will have more traditional marketing once the collection is live.”
Let’s go to the mall
Aéropostale’s latest collection and content series arrive as the retailer has experienced 30% year-over-year customer growth, per details shared with Marketing Dive. The growth for the mall-based retailer comes as Gen Alpha and Gen Z are helping to revive malls around the country due to an interest in in-person shopping experiences. To tap into this interest, Aéropostale has created a brand platform called “Next Stop.”
“We’ve got parents and kids shopping together… that’s very typical of Gen Alpha and Gen Z,” Thalberg said. “Young people have all these occasions in their lives, and they want to be ready for them. ‘Next Stop’ could be after school, it could be going to a sporting event, it could be just a slumber party with your friends.”
As consumer sentiment remains depressed by persistent inflation, Aéropostale is also working to make it easier to shop at stores across the Catalyst Brands portfolio. JCPenney and Aéropostale last month connected their loyalty rewards programs to form a joint program.
“There’s really nice affinity between the two audiences,” Thalberg said of the program, which had notched around a quarter of a million enrollments in just a few weeks. “We’re starting to see those cross-shop behaviors already happen.”
And while the loyalty program and content series are separate initiatives, both demonstrate how Catalyst Brands is working to turn consumer insights into shopper behaviors.
“We’re making it rewarding for [consumers] in different ways, whether rewarding from a content experience or rewarding from a shopping experience that now pays you back,” Thalberg said.
