Leather Goods / Ecommerce (DTC)
How a $20M leather-goods brand out-cited COACH in
An independent leather brand became the label AI models mention most in its category, beating a household name using only non-branded, transactional demand.
Overview
MentionStack took an independent leather brand past COACH in AI share of voice, with a 75% lift in LLM mentions and citations and top-10 rankings on the transactional searches that drive net-new sales.
32%
Daily share of voice (ahead of COACH's 25.8%)
+75%
Improvement in LLM mentions and citations
+645
Monthly visits from one keyword ("leather tote," position 9 → 2)
Outsized by legacy names
Latico Leathers is a $20M independent brand competing for attention against COACH, Fossil, Madewell, Dooney & Bourke and other names with decades of recognition and budget. When shoppers ask an AI model for the best leather totes, crossbody bags or work bags, those legacy brands dominated the answer. Latico had the product and the reviews, but not the citations. And in AI search, citations are the shelf space.
In the category legacy brands built, the AI answer was still theirs to lose.
Winning the transactional questions, one article at a time
We ran Latico through the T.R.U.S.T. framework and targeted purely transactional and commercial searches, no branded terms, so every gain was net-new demand: "leather tote," "leather crossbody bag," "soft leather handbags," "best leather bags." We built article-first content designed to be cited, not just to rank: head-to-head comparisons ("Latico vs. Portland Leather Goods"), buyer guides ("leather bag styles worth investing in," "sustainable leather done right"), and glossary coverage. Then we seeded semantic mentions across Reddit and Quora, the sources LLMs pull from most. Across the engagement we tracked 1,051 keywords, all of them non-branded.
No branded keywords. Every citation we won was a customer who'd never heard of them, right up until the model said their name.
More cited than COACH
By late August, Latico held 32.0% of daily share of voice in its competitive set, ahead of COACH at 25.8% and Fossil at 13.8%. LLM mentions and citations both improved 75% (523 brand mentions across 1,694 responses; a 9.2% citation rate). Transactional rankings surged into the top 10: "leather tote" jumped from position 9 to 2, adding 645 monthly visits; "leather shoulder bag" moved from 48 to 2; "leather crossbody bag" and "leather fanny pack" each added 200+ visits. Organic top-10 positions roughly doubled, and every one of those keywords drives a net-new buyer.
A $20M independent brand is now the one AI recommends first, ahead of COACH.
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