With Coach’s readable book charms, the medium is the message | Canada Voices

Hello Sunshine, the Reese Witherspoon-founded media brand, recently launched a next-gen subset of its popular book club aimed at Gen Z women. The new community, Sunnie Reads, purports to “obsess over the words, the characters, and the stories we can’t stop thinking about,” complete with playlists, mood boards and curated reading lists.

At launch, Hello Sunshine’s vice-president of brand, Mukta Chowdhary, told Publishers Weekly that their research found that reading is one of the top five leisure activities among Gen Z women, with 74 per cent reporting they regularly read books.

The Sunnie Reads community is sponsored by Coach, the American fashion company known for its leather handbags and accessories. The brand’s new spring campaign, “Explore Your Story,” promotes and engages with reading via gold hardware book charms ($120 each) created in collaboration with behemoth publisher Penguin Random House.

Now that affordable mass market paperbacks have been discontinued and supplanted by the more expensive (read: profitable), higher-quality trade paperback format, physical books are inching toward the realm of luxury products. Turning them into actual luxury accessories marketed alongside Coach’s bestselling Tabby handbags isn’t that much of a stretch.

Unlike Labubus, these charms aren’t merely decorative – the shrunken books are readable, “transforming beloved literary works into wearable expressions of individuality,” according to Penguin.

Coach’s chief marketing officer, Joon Silverstein, said earlier this month that the campaign concept came from the insight that in a world shaped by “fragmentation, digital overload, and constant acceleration, many described books and long-form storytelling as a refuge – a way to slow down, reflect, and feel a sense of belonging.”

Ultra-fast fashion giant Shein also got in on the trend with a digital storefront partnership with secondhand book marketplace Alibris in November, after its data similarly concluded that Gen Z was driving a print reading revival (see also: Dior’s Book Tote collection).

Silverstein has a background in cultural anthropology, and as she explained to the Wall Street Journal, part of her process involved visiting the homes of Gen Z women – Coach’s target demographic – around the world. If young women buying their first accessible luxury handbag of adulthood are the intended audience, the company’s strategy is showing momentum: Coach sales surged 25 per cent in the last quarter, according to its recent earnings call.

Simone Lee, of Calgary indie bookseller Pages, has noticed an increase in young adults buying physical books in the past few years. She attributes this to the fact that they’re one of the first generations to grow up fully digital – no CDs, cassettes, VHSs or DVDs.

“Physical media is viewed as a collectable novelty, and this includes books,” she said.

Collectability also plays a role. The cover of Coach’s Sense & Sensibility charm, for instance, is instantly recognizable as the elegant edition designed by Anna Bond of stationery and lifestyle brand Rifle Paper Co.

“The collaborations we’ve seen appear to be retailers’ efforts to profit from this phenomenon,” Lee said. “It’s similar to the recent increase in ‘limited edition’ books being republished with sprayed edges.” Coach is simply the latest brand to notice this shift.

Yet according to a survey from late 2025 by leading global web platform Wattpad, Gen Z marks a stark generational shift in modes of literary consumption and attitudes owing in large part to the normalization of digital reading – specifically reading on phones. “About 67 per cent of Gen Z respondents say they read on their phones, compared to 51 per cent of older generations who say they still prefer turning the page manually on a physical book, magazine or newspaper,” it found.

Gen Z’s selective embrace of physical media is notable, but celebrations may be premature – or at least point to a paradox. For the digitally inclined demographic, being part of a bookish community has become more of an identity than a behaviour, blurring the line between lifestyle and literary consumption.