AE + Aerie

AE + Aerie is the shopping app for two American Eagle brands, so it mainly serves people who already buy into that clothing style and want the catalog in their pocket. By our assessment, the strongest point is the brand pairing itself: it gives direct access to AE and Aerie items without making the shopper bounce around a bigger marketplace. The trade-off is obvious too — it is a brand store, not a broad shopping tool, so its universe is limited to those labels and their stock. In use, this kind of app is mostly browsing, sizing, wish lists, and checkout, with more focus on the store’s own lines than on discovery across the web. AE + Aerie sits well inside branded retail, and it is less for deal-hunting than for staying inside one house of products.