For parents of young children, the odds are pretty strong that there’s at least one piece of clothing in the laundry bearing the name Cat & Jack.
The children’s apparel brand Target launched back in 2016 has exploded in popularity, reeling in more than $3 billion in annual sales for the Bullseye.
Cat & Jack is “the biggest kids brand in America,” said Jill Sando, Target’s head of apparel merchandising, during the company’s earnings call on Tuesday.
“We sell well over 300 million units of Cat & Jack a year, which comes out to about eight Cat & Jack items for every child in America under the age of 12,” she added.
Sando also said the brand is a key driver of store visits as parents size up, stock up, and glow up with seasonal designs.
Of course, some of those repeat visits are also from parents taking advantage of Target’s unusually generous one-year return policy, which extends to all of the company’s 45 private-label products, including Cat & Jack.
“If you’re not satisfied with any Target Owned Brand item, return it within one year with a receipt for an exchange or a refund,” the policy states.
While some parents have pushed this policy to its limits, returning bags of worn-out clothes for hundreds of dollars in refunds, some stores have gotten more strict about their interpretation of the word “satisfied.”
Recent videos on TikTok touting the trend increasingly receive comments lamenting how their own attempts were unsuccessful.
Other TikTokers have pointed out that shoppers can improve their odds of acceptance by checking a manufacturing label for the item’s age and by using Target’s Circle membership to track their purchase history.
Still, even though it may be technically legal to use Target’s policy as a de facto subscription service for kid’s clothing, parents might want to think twice, retail analyst Hitha Herzog previously told Business Insider.
“These are people admitting on social media that they were actually quite satisfied, but they are just finding a loophole,” Herzog said. “If the return policy allows you to do that, I guess you can. But ethically, should you? I wouldn’t.”
More importantly for Target, policies like extended returns help instill confidence in its brands, generating a degree of loyalty that Sando says Target is keen to tap into long after a shopper’s child has outgrown her last Cat & Jack t-shirt.
