About STATE Bags

STATE Bags was founded by Jacq and Scot Tatelman after a formative experience running a nonprofit summer camp for kids living in under-resourced communities in New York City. Many of the kids arrived carrying their belongings in trash bags, a reality that left a lasting impression. Inspired to help, Jacq drew on her background in fashion to co-found STATE Bags. What began as a one-for-one give-back model has since evolved into a broader social impact mission, with every purchase helping support American children and families through the brand's charitable initiatives and community programs.

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Today STATE Bags is a fashion-forward bag company spanning kids and adults, with backpacks anchoring the lineup. June through August, back-to-school season, is its most important commercial window. The product has earned a celebrity following and a steady stream of inbound creator interest, but until recently STATE was running creator marketing reactively.

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Nicole Fisch, STATE's CMO, joined in June 2025. She came from Lalo, where she had been SVP of Marketing and a daily Archive user. When she arrived at STATE, she found Archive already in the stack but underused: the same tool she had come to rely on, waiting to be put to work.

The Challenge

Like many lean DTC brands, STATE had a Meta diversification challenge. The team had a strong in-house creative engine, but studio content, no matter how varied, tends to produce a narrow band of creative signals. Meta's algorithm rewards format diversity, which meant creator content wasn't a nice to have; it was a performance lever. To break the plateau, STATE needed real creative diversification: video, third-party social proof, and authentic UGC, moving at the speed Meta rewards.

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“No matter how good your branded creative is, it only covers so much ground on Meta. To have a successful campaign, you really need creative diversification. For me, the biggest thing I wanted to shift to immediately was understanding how creator content becomes a bigger part of our overall marketing strategy. Specifically, our Meta diversification strategy.” — Nicole Fisch

The brand was already getting inbound creator interest at scale. What it didn't have was the infrastructure to capture, organize, request rights for, and turn that content into ads fast enough to matter inside STATE's narrow seasonal windows. Before Archive, that work mostly lived in spreadsheets and manual DMs.

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“The hardest part is finding, organizing, and managing all of that content and getting it to the right place.”

The Solution

Archive became STATE's content-discovery engine and the connective tissue between creator marketing and paid media. Nicole built a weekly rhythm around it: every Monday, STATE's head of brand creative reviews every new post captured since her last login and compiles what the team should engage with. Seeding work is organized into Collections by season and product, so when Back-to-School 2026 planning starts, every piece of creative from Back-to-School 2025 is one click away.

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The bigger unlock has been speed. A single Instagram Story Nicole spots in Archive can move to a whitelisted paid ad in hours, because Usage Rights and whitelisting run from the same place she finds the content.

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“It's so fast. The lifecycle from me seeing a piece of content in Archive that I want to use to having it live as a whitelist is hours or a day. Versus going through that process manually, which could take a week or two.”

Reviewing organic content has also turned Archive into an additional product-research tool. By watching what creators actually say, STATE has surfaced customer-led product narratives it never planned for. With their Wellington Cabana Bag, they even found new use cases:

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“I saw a lot of creators posting, 'This is the best packable beach bag I've ever had because it folds flat.' We had never even thought to talk about how it's packable. If that's important to people, we need to start talking about it more, on the product page, in emails, everywhere.”

Spotting recurring sentiment has even produced net-new ad hooks, like the “Are STATE bags worth it?” question that kept showing up in Instagram Q&A boxes.

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“After I saw that in Archive two or three times, I was like, we need to lean into 'this bag isn't cheap, but here's why.' So Archive is also letting me discover hooks based on what our customers are really saying about the product, and then leveraging that in other parts of the funnel.”

When the team wants to go beyond the creators already posting, Creator Search surfaces small-but-mighty creators making STATE content organically, a jumping-off point for bigger partnership conversations rather than a cold-discovery engine.

The Results

Building creator content into STATE's Meta strategy delivered the creative diversification the brand had been pushing toward. UGC-to-paid-ad turnaround compressed from one or two weeks down to hours through Usage Rights and whitelisting, and in July 2025 STATE's captured content count was up more than 200% year over year. Replacing manual tracking with an organized workflow gives the lean team at least three hours back every week, with the head of brand creative, influencer marketing manager, and CMO all working from Archive weekly. Along the way, customer-discovered product narratives like packability and waterproofing now shape merchandising and on-site copy.

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“I can give a login to anyone on my team and they can be up and using it in less than an hour. That's my favorite thing about it.”