For more than 60 years, Claire’s was where girls grew up: first ear piercings, first jewelry, the purple carpet at the mall. But as shopping habits shifted online and Gen Alpha grew up in a creator-first world, the brand needed a new way to connect with its audience. In 2025, investment firm Ames Watson took over the 64-year-old brand and set out to bring it back for a new generation.
Now it’s rebuilding from the inside out for a new generation of girls, treating six decades of history like a fresh start and relaunching online with a creator-led drop model built for Gen Alpha.
Leading the comeback is chief brand officer Michelle Goad, who joined in early 2026 after building direct-to-consumer businesses at Nike, Athleta, and her own venture-backed company.
Her read on the opportunity is sharp: Gen Alpha girls are growing up faster than any generation before them, with more information and fewer places that are actually theirs. As Michelle puts it, “Girls have access to so much information at such a younger age that you’ve started to see girlhood almost collapse. They’re going from Moana to shopping at Sephora, and they didn’t have a space for themselves.”
Her objective for Claire’s is to be that space again.
We’re building a modern, inspiring playground for modern girlhood.
The challenge
When Ames Watson took over in 2025, Claire’s made a deliberate choice to focus on its strongest assets: roughly 900 mall stores and the ear-piercing experience that has defined the brand for decades. Ecommerce was paused so the team could reestablish the in-store experience before expanding digitally.
That left them with a blank page to rebuild on. Claire’s previous custom ecommerce site was gone, and their temporary site could book ear-piercing appointments but couldn’t sell anything. As the team built buzzy new collaborations their customers would love, they needed a way to put those products in front of girls who couldn’t get to the mall, without rebuilding a massive always-on store across 900 locations overnight.
Added complexity is not something anybody needs when they’re trying to build back a business.
The solution
Claire’s chose Shopify to relaunch its ecommerce presence, and chose to start small on purpose. Instead of a full, always-on store, they’re opening with a drop site: limited releases tied to their biggest cultural moments.
The first drop is a collaboration with Lana’s Life, a Roblox creator with more than 9 million YouTube subscribers, timed to a major activation at VidCon, the world’s largest celebration of digital culture and its creators.
Shopify has such an incredible reputation of working with brands, whether they’re 50-plus years old or upstarts, and making it dead simple to stand something up and experiment.
The drop model is built for speed and experimentation. Claire’s serves a customer who is often too young to have her own credit card, so the checkout process has to work for both the girl who discovers a product on social media and the parent who buys it.
Shop Pay keeps that checkout fast, especially on mobile, where most of these purchases happen. Each drop launches alongside a cultural moment like VidCon, so the buzz points straight at the site, and a built-in store locator turns online discovery into store visits.
Shopify also gives Claire’s room to experiment. Because so many creators and brands already run on Shopify, Claire’s can use Shopify Collective to test collaborations and bring fresh products to their customers without committing inventory upfront.
The same drop site takes over their ear-piercing appointments too, so booking and buying run in one place instead of across separate tools, with technology partner Perpetua Advisors handling the build. Stores stay at the center of the business, and Shopify keeps the digital layer light and fast enough to match how quickly Claire’s wants to move.
What’s next
The drop site is the first move, not the finish line. The bigger plan is always-on commerce in 2027, with deeper inventory and new investment in their membership program. Each drop gets them closer, a chance to learn what their customers want and show up where those girls already spend their time.
For Michelle, the bigger goal is reintroducing a brand that had drifted into the background.
Defibrillating the brand to come back in a big way starts with digital and leads her to connect in physical–this connected journey is the most important thing we can do to meet the consumer where she is.