How a 57-year-old apparel company rebuilt loyalty around entertainment IP and a credit card that pays members to shop the competition.

In February 2026, Gap Inc. rebranded its unified loyalty program from Gap Good Rewards to Encore – a three-tier program spanning Gap, Old Navy, Banana Republic, and Athleta with a house file of nearly 40 million active members^[1]. That’s the headline. It’s not the interesting part.

The interesting part is what the rebrand tells us about how a legacy specialty apparel company – the same one that spent most of the last decade fighting for cultural relevance – has decided to actually run its retention engine. And there are two things worth pulling out of it.

First, the Encore Mastercard earns cardmembers 3x points on eligible apparel purchases outside Gap Inc.’s own brands. That’s the most offensive co-brand mechanic in U.S. specialty retail, and no one else is running it. Second, loyalty has been re-cast as the distribution layer for CEO Richard Dickson’s “Fashiontainment” platform – cultural moments like the KATSEYE “Better in Denim” campaign (600M+ views, 8B+ impressions, double-digit denim growth) get funneled into an Encore-gated experience economy built with Disney, NBCUniversal, and AMC Theatres^[2].

Sitting behind both moves is an unusual org chart. John Strain owns loyalty and he’s Gap Inc.’s Chief Digital and Technology Officer. Pam Kaufman – hired in January 2026 from Nickelodeon/Paramount – is Chief Entertainment Officer, a title very few apparel companies have on the roster^[3]. And underwriting all of it is a Barclays credit card portfolio bought from Synchrony for ~$3.9B in 2022 that handed Gap a $60M upfront check and roughly 80% of program economics.

This report walks through six operator-only pieces: the org design, the 3x-competitor Mastercard, Fashiontainment as a loyalty engine, the 40M-member house file, the point-devaluation trade Gap made in the rebrand, and the Barclays economics that make the whole thing pencil out. Every section ends with the specific mechanic a peer loyalty leader could take to their next quarterly review.

At most apparel companies, loyalty is a mid-level program owned by a Chief Marketing Officer or a Chief Customer Officer, and “entertainment” is a line item in the CMO’s budget. Gap Inc. runs the opposite structure, and it changes everything downstream.

John Strain, Chief Digital and Technology Officer, owns Technology, Product Management, Data and Analytics, and Loyalty and Payments – a scope that puts the customer data platform, the digital storefront, the loyalty file, and the credit card program under one executive^[4]. Strain came from Salesforce, where he ran Retail and Consumer Goods, and before that spent 11 years as CDTO at Williams-Sonoma^[5]. He’s a technologist, not a marketer. That shows up in how Encore is architected: as a data product first, a rewards program second.

Why that structure matters: loyalty in specialty apparel used to be a customer file that marketing borrowed from IT. Flip the reporting line – put loyalty under the CDTO – and now the person accountable for program design is the same person accountable for the CDP, the ML models that generate segments, and the mobile app that renders the experience. There’s no cross-functional handoff. There’s no “we’re waiting on data science.” It’s one org, one roadmap.

The CDP Gap built in-house holds first-party data on tens of millions of customers and feeds segmentation across Google, Meta, and CRM. Reported result: ~50% year-over-year improvement in digital marketing efficiency^[6]. Loyalty is what makes the CDP useful – it’s the labeled training set that tells the model which customers are worth targeting and how.

The second unusual choice on the org chart is Pam Kaufman as Executive Vice President, Chief Entertainment Officer, a role Gap Inc. created in January 2026. Kaufman spent decades at Paramount/Nickelodeon and reports directly to CEO Richard Dickson. Her job is to build the Fashiontainment platform – Gap Inc.’s strategy for licensing, content, music, film, sports, and cultural collaborations. Gap has opened a Los Angeles office on Sunset Boulevard to physically embed the company inside the entertainment industry. And Dickson himself was CEO of Mattel – he’s the guy credited with the strategy that turned Barbie into the $1.4B Warner Bros. film^[7]. He’s running the same playbook at Gap, and the org chart reflects it.

Takeaway for operators. Loyalty sits closer to data and technology than to marketing at Gap Inc. Here’s the honest question to ask yourself: does your loyalty leader own the CDP, or are they dependent on another team for it? If it’s the second one, they’re not running a retention engine – they’re running a coupon program that’s waiting on someone else’s segmentation model. Reporting lines are strategy. Fix the reporting line first.

The single most striking mechanic inside Encore is the credit card’s earn structure. Cardmembers get 25 points per $1 (5% back) at Gap Inc. brands, 15 points per $1 (3% back) on eligible apparel purchases anywhere else Mastercard is accepted, and 5 points per $1 (1% back) on everything else^[8].

The 3x on non-Gap apparel is the part that matters. J.Crew, Loft, Levi’s, Zara, Uniqlo, Lululemon – all 3%. That’s the highest apparel-category earn rate offered by any major U.S. retail-branded card, and it explicitly incentivizes cardholders to shop at Gap Inc.’s direct competitors.

The obvious question: why would you give away points on a competitor’s sale?

Because the person paying for it isn’t Gap. Under the Barclays program agreements, Barclays is the issuer and the interchange revenue on non-Gap purchases is a source of program economics that flows back to Gap through revenue sharing^[9]. Every time an Encore Mastercard holder buys a $150 pair of jeans at Levi’s, three things happen. Barclays earns interchange. Gap earns its share. And – the part nobody talks about – Gap gets a first-party data signal about that customer’s out-of-brand apparel spend that no competitor’s SKU-level POS data can match. It’s a paid data-acquisition scheme dressed up as a loyalty perk. Say what you want about the ethics of it; the mechanic is clean.

The economics scale, too. Barclays’ 2023 annual report flagged that the Gap portfolio was material enough to affect Barclays’ overall customer digital engagement metrics, because Gap Inc. customers showed lower digital activity than the rest of the U.S. cards book. That means the Gap portfolio – roughly 10 million cardmembers when it launched under Barclays^[10][11][12] – is one of the largest U.S. co-brand books Barclays runs. Every point of interchange share Gap negotiates on that book is real, recurring revenue. Making the card more attractive to use everywhere – including at competitors – isn’t generosity. It’s share-of-wallet mining across an entire spend category.

There’s a defensive read too, and it’s worth walking through. Specialty apparel loyalty has been eroded on the retention side because switching costs collapsed. Consumers now default to whichever brand happens to be discounted that week. A private-label store card that only earns 5% at one retailer is a weak counterweight when a shopper is standing in a J.Crew store, phone out, deciding between two $80 sweaters. But a card that earns 3% at J.Crew and 5% at Gap Inc. gives Gap the top-of-wallet position even for the competitor purchase. Every swipe reinforces the habit. And habit – not points, not tiers, not the app – is the moat.

Takeaway for operators. If your co-brand card only earns at your own brand, the customer only pulls it out when they’ve already decided to shop with you. If it earns at your entire category, the card wins top-of-wallet on every category purchase and you get first-party data on where else your customer shops. The margin cost is real. But the incremental revenue and the data flywheel are both larger. Gap is telling the market this trade is worth it, and – honestly – I think they’re right.

On August 19, 2025, Gap released “Better in Denim,” a 90-second dance ad starring global girl group KATSEYE choreographed to a re-recorded version of Kelis’s “Milkshake.” The numbers on the campaign are worth listing in full, because they set up the operator question underneath:

Sources: The Drum campaign case study; SoapCentral (Q3 2025 earnings); Hollywood Reporter/Luminate; Global Brands Magazine; Wikipedia summary of Q3 earnings.

Those are extraordinary numbers for any campaign, and especially for a 57-year-old apparel brand that spent most of the 2010s losing cultural relevance^{[13][14][15][16]}. But the operator question isn’t “how did they make a viral ad?” Anyone can luck into virality. The operator question is: how do you convert 8 billion impressions into a defensible business asset?

Because impressions are rented. They belong to TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube. The value evaporates in 90 days unless you capture the audience somewhere you actually own.

Gap’s answer is Encore. The program was announced six months after the KATSEYE campaign peaked, and it was framed – explicitly – as the platform that would extend Fashiontainment moments into member-exclusive experiences: early access to product drops, “brand moments,” and partner experiences with Disney, NBCUniversal, and AMC Theatres. Pam Kaufman’s language on the launch is the clearest statement of intent: “Encore is a powerful new tool to bring our Fashiontainment platform to life. Through partners like Disney, NBCUniversal and AMC Theatres, we can translate what people love on screens and stages into experiences they can actually access – from early drops and exclusives to cultural moments you can’t get anywhere else.”

Here’s how the flywheel is supposed to work: viral cultural moment → 8B impressions → 15M Instagram views in 24 hours → traffic spike (store traffic jumped 2.8% YoY in August and 8.5% in the week after launch, per one industry analysis^[17]) → Encore signup during checkout → membership relationship → repeat exposure to the next drop through owned CRM channels → tier progression → All-Access via the Encore Mastercard. The campaign is the customer acquisition tool. The program is the customer capture layer. The credit card is the retention monetization. Each layer feeds the next one.

This is a genuinely different theory of loyalty from the industry default. Sephora runs loyalty as an experience economy that stands on its own. Amazon runs Prime as a subscription-services bundle. Gap is running loyalty as the customer-owned distribution channel for a licensing and content strategy – which is closer to how Disney thinks about D23 (its fan club) than to how any apparel peer thinks about a points program. Whether it works is still an open question. But it’s not a copy of what anyone else is doing, and that’s rare enough that it’s worth watching closely.

Takeaway for operators. If your marketing team can produce culturally resonant moments, the return on those moments is bounded by how fast you can move the audience from a rented platform into an owned relationship. Loyalty is that owned relationship. Design your program so that a viral moment produces a sign-up spike, not just a sales spike. Then design the post-signup experience so that the second engagement – early access, exclusive drop, event ticket – reinforces the cultural affinity that drove the first click. If you get that flow right, culture actually compounds. If you don’t, you’re renting attention over and over.

Encore launched with nearly 40 million active members across Gap Inc.’s four brands, migrated automatically from the predecessor Gap Good Rewards program. That’s one of the largest apparel loyalty files in the U.S., and it wasn’t built in one launch – it was built through a specific sequence of program design decisions that operators should understand:

• 2020: Gap re-launches loyalty as brand-specific programs (Navyist, Gap Good, Banana Republic Rewards, Athleta Rewards) that share a single points ledger – 9.5M BRIGHT Rewards members auto-migrated^[18].
• September 2020 – August 2021: 19M new customers enrolled in less than 12 months^[19].
• July 2021: Integrated program launches with unified tiers (Core / Enthusiast / Icon), combining credit card and loyalty members into one 37M-member file^[20].
• June 2022: Barclays takes over the credit card portfolio from Synchrony; 10M existing cardmembers migrated.
• February 2026: Encore rebrand; house file at ~40M active members.

The important word in all of that is “active.” Retail loyalty programs report file sizes wildly inconsistently – some count every person who ever signed up, some count everyone with a purchase in the last 24 months, some do a rolling active definition. Gap’s “active” is tied to a specific mechanic: points expire after 12 months of inactivity, but any purchase at any Gap Inc. brand resets the clock^[21].

That last clause is the design choice. It means Gap’s active file benefits from cross-brand shopping in a mechanical way. A Gap customer who buys once at Old Navy for a family birthday just reset their points clock at Gap. The four-brand portfolio isn’t just a distribution advantage – it’s a retention mechanic that keeps the file “active” through cross-brand liquidity. That’s a subtle move, and most people who talk about Gap’s loyalty file miss it entirely.

The tier-status portability rule is the same idea, run at a different layer. Under Encore’s terms, your membership tier and benefits travel with you to any of the brands regardless of where you enrolled. A member who hits Premier through Old Navy purchases can walk into Banana Republic and shop with Premier benefits – even if they’ve never bought there before. That’s engineered cross-brand traffic. The loyalty program is creating a reason to try a sister brand at zero acquisition cost to the sister brand. Gap management has been public about the value: former CEO Sonia Syngal in 2021 framed the objective as “the customer values cross-brand shopping and values the benefit of the portfolio.”^[22] This isn’t a hunch. They have the number.

Underneath, Gap runs a proprietary CDP built in-house that combines first-party data from all channels with third-party demographic overlays. It produces roughly a dozen behavioral segments used to inform merchandising and marketing across the four brands^[23]. Here’s why that matters: the CDP is the reason Encore can actually deliver tier portability without breaking. A single customer identity across brands is a solved problem at Gap in a way it isn’t at most multi-banner retailers. If you’ve ever tried to unify customer records across a portfolio, you know how hard this is. Most companies talk about it. Very few of them ship it.

Takeaway for operators. A large loyalty file is a scoreboard. A cross-shopping loyalty file is a moat. If you run a portfolio of brands or store banners, there are exactly two design choices that turn the file into a moat: (1) portable tier status across banners, and (2) any-banner activity resets the expiration clock. Both are trivial to implement technically. Both dramatically extend the useful life of the average customer relationship. Gap has been iterating on these two mechanics for six years and Encore is the current end-state – it’s the piece of the program most worth studying, and the piece competitors will copy first.

This is the section a peer loyalty leader most needs to see, because operators typically get pitched on new programs by reading the launch press release. And the launch press release rarely mentions what was cut. There’s a reason cardholders on Reddit found out about the trade-offs before industry press did.

Three trade-offs are worth naming clearly.

1. Points were devalued 5x. Under Gap Good Rewards, cardmembers earned 5 points per $1 at Gap Inc. brands and 100 points = $1 reward – a 5% back rate. Under Encore, cardmembers earn 25 points per $1 and 500 points = $1 reward. The math is still 5% back. The psychology is not.

Non-cardmembers went from earning 1 point per $1 with a 100-point/$1 conversion to earning 5 points per $1 with a 500-point/$1 conversion^[24]. Same rate, longer accrual, different feeling. A shopper who saw their balance jump from 45 to 145 after a $20 sock purchase feels one thing. A shopper who watched it climb from 900 to 1,000 after the same purchase feels a completely different thing. Gap is betting the visible-progress benefit from bigger point totals exceeds the friction of the longer accrual cycle. Defensible bet. But I don’t think it’s obviously right – and the Reddit reaction suggests customers noticed the shift.

2. The Premier tier threshold dropped from $500 to $350. This is a giveaway to mid-frequency shoppers who previously didn’t qualify for the middle tier, and it’s a reasonable move if the goal is to move more customers up the tier ladder faster. The trade-off is subtle: the old middle tier was earned. The new middle tier is easier. That expands the pool of Premier members, but it also reduces the status signal Premier sends. Is that worth it? Depends on whether you want “middle tier” to be aspirational or transactional. Gap chose transactional. That’s a real philosophical position, whether or not the press release calls it out.
3. Some non-cardholder benefits contracted. Cardmembers on r/Oldnavy noted that non-cardholder rewards became less generous relative to cardholder rewards^[25]. The All-Access tier now requires the Encore credit card – it used to be spend-qualifiable, and now it’s not. That pulls the top-of-program benefit behind a hard wall. Free shipping for non-cardholders stays at $50, while cardholders drop to $35 – which is a meaningful gap for lower-AOV Old Navy shoppers^[26]. The obvious read: Gap wants to convert free members into cardholders. The less obvious read: Gap is willing to accept some non-cardholder churn to accelerate that conversion, because a cardholder’s LTV is dramatically higher than a free member’s. That’s not a bug in the redesign. That’s the redesign.

Let me be direct about what this rebrand actually is. It’s not a strict Pareto improvement. Gap made a deliberate design decision to concentrate program value at the top tier (All-Access via credit card) at the expense of some free-tier generosity, and to reset the point-currency’s face value in a way that lengthens the perceived accrual cycle. The right way for a peer operator to read this is: Gap is optimizing for cardholder acquisition and premium engagement, not for maximum breadth of loyalty file participation.

Which means – and this is the part most reporting on the rebrand missed – if your program’s job is mass reach and you have low credit card penetration, do not copy this move. If your program’s job is to convert mid-tier customers into high-LTV cardholders and drive premium engagement, this is what that redesign looks like. Both are legitimate goals. They just require different program designs, and Gap picked one.

Two subtle upgrades are worth naming for completeness. Extended return windows (60 days for All-Access, 45 for Premier) are a real customer benefit and a real inventory-planning burden – Gap has the scale in reverse logistics to absorb it, most peers don’t. And the family-birthday-bonus feature (Premier members get a bonus for a family member’s birthday; All-Access gets three) is a small mechanic that treats the household as the unit of loyalty rather than the individual – which, for Old Navy’s family-shopper base, is the right unit.

Takeaway for operators. When you redesign a loyalty program, write down the trade-offs internally before you launch. If your executive team can’t state in one sentence which segment is being asked to accept less value in the new program, the redesign isn’t ready. Gap’s trade – free members give up a little, cardholders gain a lot – is coherent because it aligns with a stated business goal (cardholder penetration and share of wallet). Programs that redesign without a coherent trade end up with a slightly worse version of everything, and a lot of angry Reddit threads.

Underneath every retail loyalty program is a set of credit-card program economics that most operators – everyone outside the CFO’s office – never actually see. Gap Inc.’s deal with Barclays, disclosed in fragments across earnings calls, SEC filings, and Barclays’ own investor materials, is worth reconstructing carefully. It explains what Gap can afford to give away, and why. And it’s the part of this story that would never make it into a loyalty case study but should.

The deal has three pieces.

1. Portfolio acquisition (2022). Barclays purchased Gap Inc.’s roughly $3.8B credit card portfolio from Synchrony Bank in Q2 2022, at a ~2.5% premium to receivables – roughly $3.9B in total consideration^[27]. Gap’s existing 10 million cardmembers got migrated to Barclays cards. This was Barclays’ largest U.S. co-brand acquisition since it started building its U.S. cards business – material enough that Barclays disclosed it moved the bank’s overall CET1 ratio by ~20 basis points. For a bank the size of Barclays to disclose the deal, that’s not a small book.
2. Upfront payment and revenue recognition. Gap Inc.’s Q1 fiscal 2026 10-Q discloses that as part of the Barclays and Mastercard program agreements, Gap received a $60 million upfront payment prior to the May 2022 program launch. That payment is being recognized as revenue over the term of the agreements. As of May 2026, Gap Inc. carried a $259 million deferred revenue balance for credit card program obligations, of which $85M was recognized as revenue in Q1 fiscal 2026 alone. That’s real, recurring, high-margin revenue that sits right alongside merchandise sales on the income statement. It’s not a rounding error.
3. Revenue sharing. Gap Inc. gets ongoing revenue sharing from Barclays on both private-label and co-branded cards. Under the prior Synchrony arrangement, Gap took approximately 80% of the card program’s revenue – including interest and interchange – in exchange for bearing approximately 80% of the program’s costs. The Barclays terms aren’t fully disclosed publicly, but the 10-Q language and Barclays’ own reporting suggest a comparable share-of-economics structure.

Stack those three pieces together. You get a program that produces (a) $60M in upfront cash Gap deployed against the program launch, (b) $85M in high-margin deferred-revenue recognition in a single quarter, and (c) an ongoing revenue share on every card swipe. That’s the P&L that pays for the 3x-competitor-apparel earn rate, the Encore Market experience budget, and the Fashiontainment partnerships. The reason Gap can afford to reward cardmembers for shopping at Levi’s is that Barclays is writing a check for it – and Gap gets a cut.

For a peer operator, the diagnostic question is simple: what percentage of your loyalty program’s economics are subsidized by your card partner? If the answer is “none” or “we don’t know,” the program is expensive to run and every reward is coming out of gross margin. If the answer is meaningful – and at Gap it’s a nine-figure line – then a lot of program-design choices that look generous from the outside are actually neutral or accretive to the retailer’s P&L. Card program economics shape the shape of the loyalty program. It’s the single most under-discussed factor in retail loyalty design, and it’s the one your CFO probably wishes you’d bring up more often.

One extra nuance worth naming: Barclays has flagged that Gap Inc. customers show lower digital engagement than the rest of Barclays’ U.S. card book. Translation: Gap’s co-brand base skews toward customers who use paper statements, call for service, and are less prone to app-based engagement. That’s a real operational cost for Barclays. So the Encore rebrand’s push toward app-based redemption, digital receipts, and mobile-first engagement isn’t just a customer-experience move. It’s a service-cost move that benefits the card partner. Which is another reason Barclays is willing to fund the migration – it makes the underlying portfolio cheaper to service. Everybody wins, and nobody talks about it, because it sounds boring in a press release.

Takeaway for operators. Before you redesign your loyalty program, sit down with your co-brand card issuer and ask three questions. What upfront and marketing funds are available to support a relaunch? What’s the incremental revenue share if we lift active card penetration by 5 points? What service-cost savings can we split with you if we move customers from call center to app? Every one of those conversations shapes what your program can afford to give away – and most loyalty leaders never have them. Have them.

Gap Inc.’s Encore isn’t the most elegant loyalty program in retail, and Gap Inc. isn’t the most operationally excellent retailer in the U.S. Both of those things are true. But the program is doing something specific that most peers aren’t: it’s being built as the customer-owned distribution layer for an entertainment strategy, funded by a co-brand card that rewards customers for shopping at competitors, run out of a Chief Digital and Technology Officer’s org rather than a marketing team, and anchored to a 40-million-member cross-brand house file with portable tier status.

There are five moves inside that stack worth stealing.

1. Put loyalty under the CDTO/CTO, not the CMO. Gap’s structure – Strain owns loyalty, payments, tech, and the CDP – means program design is co-owned with data infrastructure. That’s how you build a program that’s a data product, not a rewards catalog.
2. Reward cardmembers for shopping at your category competitors. The Encore Mastercard’s 3x on apparel anywhere is offensive, not defensive. It wins top-of-wallet across the whole category, generates first-party data on out-of-brand spend, and it’s paid for by the card issuer’s interchange share. If your co-brand card is single-merchant only, you’re leaving both wallet share and data on the table.
3. Design your program as the funnel for your marketing moments. Fashiontainment produces 8 billion impressions. Encore captures them. Every high-cultural-relevance moment – KATSEYE, Kendall Jenner at the Met Gala, Zac Posen as creative director – should have a loyalty-enrollment gate immediately downstream of it. Impressions are rented. Membership is owned.
4. Engineer cross-portfolio shopping with portable status and shared expiration clocks. If you run multiple brands or banners, tier status must travel and any-brand activity must reset the file. Both are simple technically. Both dramatically extend the useful life of an average customer.
5. Understand your co-brand card economics before you redesign your program. The three questions to ask your issuer – upfront funds, revenue share upside from higher card penetration, service-cost split – will tell you what your program can afford to give away. Most loyalty leaders don’t have this conversation. Gap clearly has.

Richard Dickson framed the transformation as moving Gap from “a legacy retailer trying to survive” to a company “firmly back in the cultural conversation.” The loyalty program is how that conversation gets monetized. And that – not the points, not the tiers, not the app – is the operator lesson worth taking into your next quarterly review.

You just read how Gap Inc. turned a legacy rewards program into the distribution layer for an entertainment strategy, complete with a credit card that pays members to shop at Levi’s and Zara. You can see the moves: the org chart that puts loyalty under the CTO instead of the CMO, the co-brand card engineered to win on competitor spend, the cross-brand file built to stay active on autopilot, and the card economics quietly funding all of it.

But knowing the playbook and building it yourself are different challenges entirely.

If you’re running a loyalty program and need help translating these operator insights into your specific context, maybe you’re stuck on structuring a co-brand card that actually earns its keep, deciding how much value to concentrate at the top tier before you lose the free-tier base, or figuring out whether your card partner’s economics could be funding more of your program than they currently are, we work with brands at every stage of growth on exactly this.

Contact Us to start building your vision today.

^[1]Gap Inc., “Gap Inc. Launches Encore, a New and More Rewarding Loyalty Experience,” Feb. 24, 2026 – https://www.gapinc.com/en-us/articles/2026/02/gap-inc-launches-encore,-a-new-and-more-rewarding-

^[2]The Drum, “Inside Gap’s music-led denim comeback with KATSEYE and a Kelis re-record,” June 5, 2026 – https://www.thedrum.com/awards-case-study/inside-gap-s-music-led-denim-comeback-with-katseye-and-a-kelis-re-record

^[3]Gap Inc., “Gap Inc. Creates Chief Entertainment Officer Role, Tapping Pam Kaufman,” Jan. 15, 2026 – https://www.gapinc.com/en-us/articles/2026/01/gap-inc-creates-chief-entertainment-officer-role,-

^[4]Robins School of Business (University of Richmond), Gap Inc. case study (John Strain bio, 2025) – https://robins.richmond.edu/files/Robins-Case-Network/2025/Gap.pdf

^[5]Constellation Research, John Strain speaker bio – https://www.constellationr.com/business-transformation-150/2021/speakers/john-strain

^[6]Forbes, Veronika Sonsev, “How Gap Inc. Personalizes Marketing To Boost Results,” Oct. 8, 2018 – https://www.forbes.com/sites/veronikasonsev/2018/10/08/how-gap-inc-personalizes-marketing-to-boost-results/

^[7]PR Daily, “The Scoop: Gap CEO connects brand’s cultural relevance with concrete turnaround goals,” May 11, 2026 – https://www.prdaily.com/the-scoop-gap-ceo-connects-brands-cultural-relevance-with-concrete-turnaround-goals

^[8]Old Navy, Encore Membership Program FAQ – https://oldnavy.gap.com/browse/info.do?cid=1178224

^[9]Gap Inc., Q1 fiscal 2026 10-Q (via Stock Titan summary), May 29, 2026 – https://www.stocktitan.net/sec-filings/GAP/10-q-gap-inc-quarterly-earnings-report-78127a3d32ac.html

^[10]S&P Global Market Intelligence, “Barclays to boost US income with $3.8B Gap credit card portfolio,” Aug. 30, 2021 – https://www.spglobal.com/market-intelligence/en/news-insights/articles/2021/8/barclays-to-boost-us-income-with-3-8b-gap-credit-card-portfolio-66354477

^[11]Barclays PLC Annual Report 2023 – https://home.barclays/content/dam/home-barclays/documents/investor-relations/reports-and-events/annual-reports/2023/Barclays-PLC-Annual-Report-2023.pdf

^[12]Gap Inc., “Gap Inc. Launches New Credit Card Program in Partnership with Barclays and Mastercard,” June 9, 2022 – https://www.gapinc.com/en-us/articles/2022/06/gap-inc-launches-credit-card-program-in-partne

^[13]SoapCentral (quoting Gap Q3 2025 earnings call), Aug. 31, 2025 – https://www.soapcentral.com/pop-culture/love-girls-internet-buzzes-katseye-s-better-denim-campaign-breaks-records-400m-views-8b-impressions-says-gap-ceo

^[14]Hollywood Reporter/Luminate, “‘Milkshake’ Streams More Than Double After KATSEYE’s Viral Gap Denim Ad,” Sept. 4, 2025 – https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/music/music-news/milkshake-streams-double-after-katseyes-viral-gap-denim-ad-1236359237/

^[15]Global Brands Magazine, “KATSEYE: Incredible Insights into Gap’s Denim Campaign,” Aug. 29, 2025 – https://www.globalbrandsmagazine.com/gap-katseye-denim-campaign/

^[16]Wikipedia, “Better in Denim” (Q3 2025 earnings call summary) – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Better_in_Denim

^[17]LinkedIn analysis (Kheertisha L.), Gap “Better in Denim” campaign performance breakdown, Sept. 4, 2025 – https://www.linkedin.com/posts/kheertisha-l-b6981922a_gapad-katseye-marketing-activity-7369397710912733184-gux0

^[18]Gap Inc., “Gap Inc. Expands Loyalty Program Nationwide,” Sept. 24, 2020 – https://www.gapinc.com/fr-fr/articles/2020/09/gap-inc-expands-loyalty-program-nationwide

^[19]Retail Dive, “Gap Inc. further streamlines loyalty across brands,” July 22, 2021 – https://www.retaildive.com/news/gap-inc-further-streamlines-loyalty-across-brands/603778/

^[20]Gap Inc., “Gap Inc. Announces Launch of New Integrated Rewards Program,” July 22, 2021 – https://www.gapinc.com/es-us/articles/2021/07/gap-inc-announces-launch-of-new-integrated-rewards

^[21]Rivo.io, “GAP Good Rewards Program: A Complete Breakdown” (Encore rebrand overview), Apr. 8, 2026 – https://www.rivo.io/blog/gap-good-rewards-program-complete-breakdown

^[22]Sourcing Journal, “Gap Inc. Bets on Yeezy, Loyalty Programs and New Categories” (Syngal quote) – https://sourcingjournal.com/denim/denim-brands/gap-yeezy-kanye-west-loyalty-athleta-old-navy-plus-size-266345/

^[23]Salesforce/Gap Inc. case study, “Retail Personalization Grows Gap Inc.’s Online Sales 60%,” June 3, 2021 – https://www.salesforce.com/blog/gap-grows-q3-online-sales-60-percent-with-personalization/

^[24]Miles to Memories, “Points and Miles Required Reading, Volume V,” Mar. 7, 2026 – https://milestomemories.com/points-and-miles-required-reading-volume-v/

^[25]Reddit r/Oldnavy, “Dang, they just said screw you to a bunch of cardmembers” (Encore launch reaction), Mar. 9, 2026 – https://www.reddit.com/r/Oldnavy/comments/1rpbs45/dang_they_just_said_screw_you_to_a_bunch_of/

^[26]Gap.com, Encore Membership Program & Credit Card FAQ – https://www.gap.com/customer-service/encore-program-credit-card-faq?cid=1099006

^[27]American Banker, “Barclays buying $3.8 billion Gap card portfolio from Synchrony,” Aug. 27, 2021 – https://www.americanbanker.com/news/barclays-buying-3-8-billion-gap-card-portfolio-from-synchrony