Slide Show The Summer of 'Jack' CreditKatherine Taylor for The New York Times
One morning last month, the ferry from Hyannis, Mass., to Nantucket Island carried sun-hatted tourists, seasonal laborers and two young blond British women who were three weeks into what was quite possibly the best summer of their lives.
Fee Meynell and Ella Crockett plopped their bags down for the one-and-a-half-hour ride. Ms. Meynell, 23, was lively and talkative. Ms. Crockett, 21, was conserving her energy, having recently spent four days sick in bed. "I'm very fragile," she said, slumping over a table.
Ms. Meynell and Ms. Crockett are "Seasonnaires," the term the British clothing company Jack Wills uses for its summertime brand ambassadors. They had been cho sen from 3,000 applicants and sent to live for two months in a location with a Jack Wills shop; for Ms. Crockett, it was Nantucket, for Ms. Meynell, Martha's Vineyard.
"When I applied, it was a pipe dream," Ms. Meynell said. "You never expect to get it, do you?"
She recalled that as a teenager she had a poster in her bedroom of Jack Wills Seasonnaires jumping up and down in front of a lighthouse. Her relationship with "Jack," as she called the brand, had been "very fan-girly."
"I probably took it quite far," she said. "I'd go out in Jack Wills pajamas."
Jack Wills is still little-known in America, one of those preppyish brands like Vineyard Vines or Kiel James Patrick that's a shared secret among the boat-shoe crowd from Annapolis, Md., to Kennebunkport, Me.
But in Britain, it has been popular for years. At the suburban London high school that Ms. Meynell attended, the cool kids wore Jack Wills hoodies, crews and chinos. "If you didn't have Jack, you were no one," she said.
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A photo posted by Ella Crockett (@ellacrockett) on Jul 14, 2016 at 8:52am PDT
Ms. Crockett, who also grew up in suburban London and has modeled for Jack Wills, nodded in agreement, saying: "At my school, you put your lunch in a blue-and-pink Jack Wills bag. You wanted the bedding. You wanted the knickers. You were obsessed."
Both remembered fawning over the brand's catalogs, which, similar to those of Abercrombie & Fitch, feature attractive young men and women cavorting at sporting events or falling into bed in their underwear, post-pillow fight. (The sexualized imagery in the spring 2016 catalog — and its winking promotional copy about "midnight mischief" — led it to be banned by the Advertising Standards Authority, a British media watchdog.)
On the ferry ride, both women wore the brand they have been relentlessly promoting. Ms. Meynell had on the red Bagley shorts and a white Eccleston T-shirt, while Ms. Crockett was dressed in black Fernham high-waisted jeans and the Hoyle tank. Her overnight things were stuffed into an on-brand blue-and-pink duffel bag.
They were returning after a night in Chatham, a town on Cape Cod that also has a Jack Wills store.
Three weeks into their branded summer, the women were still adjusting to New England, which neither had ever visited before, and to their out-every-night social schedule, in keeping with the corporate hashtag mantra to #livelifelouder.
" Mealtime is not a thing when you're a Seasonnaire," Ms. Meynell said. "I eat at 2 a.m. when I get home."
And the partying and brand promotion doesn't end at the bar. "We have so much alcohol in the house," Ms. Crockett said.
College Life Forever
When Ms. Meynell and Ms. Crockett were selected for the Seasonnaire program, they were sent for training at Jack Wills's London headquarters, where they met with the co-founder and chief executive, Pete Williams.
Now 42, Mr. Williams, who is British, started the brand at 24, an age when he had already realized, he said, that his best years were behind him. Jack Wills was about capturing (or recapturing) the rush of college and post-college youth.
"You have all the amazing independence of being an adult, but haven't lost the naïveté," Mr. Williams said from Britain by phone. "You don't have a boss, a wife or husband, kids or a mortgage and the responsibilities that grind us all down. That spirit is intoxicating, and you don't realize it until later."
Founded in 1999, the brand's visual and spiritual DNA comes from Salcombe, a preppy nautical resort town in southwest England similar to Nantucket that Mr. Williams once visited with a college girlfriend. As for the term Seasonnaire, it's based on a tradition in Europe in which students would take a gap year between high school and college and go work at, say, a ski resort in the French Alps.
"It w as an amazing time in your life, lots of fun working and partying," Mr. Williams said.
The job of a Jack Wills Seasonnaire, as Ms. Crockett and Ms. Meynell learned, involves going out to bars, beaches and restaurants, meeting lots of people and spreading the word about Jack in the friendliest, most organic way possible. So far, in an expansion push into America begun in 2010, the brand has opened stores in wealthy enclaves and university towns on the East Coast like Westport, Conn., and Boston. Seasonnaires also work in the stores and organize promotional parties like the Croquet and Cocktails event that was held at the Chatham Bars Inn.
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