The first thing that hit you was the smell.
Even before you made your way to the storefront, the scent of Abercrombie & Fitch’s signature cologne, FIERCE, was already wafting through the mall’s corridors. Mannequins sporting that season’s hottest looks — branded polos, skinny jeans, cargo shorts, babydoll tops — were stationed in the store’s windows.
Shirtless male models stood at the doors, often posing for pictures with smiling teen girls. Inside the dimly lit store, beautiful employees folded clothes and rang up purchases for aspirational customers.
It was the iconic Abercrombie & Fitch of the 1990s and early 2000s. It was sexy, cool and expensive. And it was everything Mercedes Wallace wasn’t.
Wallace grew up in a suburb of Youngstown during the early aughts. Her family relied on welfare and mostly shopped for clothes at second-hand stores. It wasn’t something Wallace said she really noticed until middle school.
“It was one of the first times I realized I was different,” Wallace said, now 30 and living in Old Town East.
Her friends would go to the mall and spend their parents' money at Abercrombie, she said. Wallace would drive with her mom to thrift stores in wealthier suburbs to search the racks for the same denim shorts and mini skirts.
Wallace said Abercrombie kept its chokehold on her circle until college. By then, Abercrombie didn’t just resonate. “It felt elitist and cliche,” she said.
It wasn’t until about five years ago that Wallace gave Abercrombie another shot.
She had just moved to Columbus from Toledo for work and was in need of jeans. As a 5-foot-10-inch-tall woman, Wallace said it's often a task to find long jeans that still fit her waist. A friend offered a suggestion: “I know this is going to sound crazy, but have you tried Abercrombie?”
Wallace hadn’t, but she was desperate. So she drove to Easton and picked out a pair of light-wash jeans with a long inseam. When she got to the dressing room, she was shocked.
“I remember not feeling bad about myself in the jeans,” Wallace said. “That was huge for me.”
It’s a sentiment shared by countless Millennial women. Those customers — many who swore off the brand as scarred teens for not being cool, thin or wealthy enough to wear Abercrombie — now consider it a staple of their wardrobes.
“The brand of yesteryear was a casual jeans and t-shirt company that really catered to a very specific teen consumer,” Abercrombie & Fitch CEO Fran Horowitz told The Dispatch. “We have done 180 degrees from that.”
The jeans were the beginning of Wallace’s renewed love affair with Abercrombie.
“I could give you a TED Talk on my love for Abercrombie,” Wallace quipped.
That renewed interest from Millennials shows in the company’s stock price.
In 2023, Abercrombie rose 285% on the stock market, making it one of Wall Street’s highest performers of the last two years, especially for retailers. The company even outpaced AI chipmaker Nvidia.
Abercrombie earned $1 billion in first-quarter sales this year. It was the best start to a year in company history and put it well on its way to hitting a goal of $5 billion in annual sales.
It’s a success that once-similar retailers like Express and GAP have not realized. And it’s a streak that Horowitz, retailer experts and customers attribute to a successful rebrand that centers the customer first.
Once America's most notorious mall brand, they agree Abercrombie is back and better than before.
‘America’s most-hated retailer’
Abercrombie’s comeback was far from an overnight success.
Retail mogul Les Wexner purchased the brand name in 1988 for $47 million in cash. Abercrombie, originally a sporting goods store for America’s elite, would now cater to teens and young adults.
Wexner hired Mike Jeffries in 1992 to lead the company and be the brand’s architect.
Jeffries’ vision for Abercrombie was the epitome of California cool. All-American quarterback meets beach babe. Preppy popped collars. Pre-ripped jeans. Logos emblazoned on every t-shirt and hoodies.
To Jeffries, cool also meant exclusive.
"In every school there are the cool and popular kids, and there are the not-so-cool kids. Candidly, we go after the cool kids. We go after the attractive, all-American kid with a great attitude and a lot of friends," Jeffries said in a now-infamous 2006 interview with Salon.
"A lot of people don't belong (in Abercrombie clothes) and they can't belong. Are we exclusionary? Absolutely."
In 1998, a decade after Wexner’s purchase, Abercrombie spun off as its own publicly traded company and exploded as one of the largest teen apparel retailers in the country. It launched a children's brand, abercrombie kids, and another teen subsidiary, Hollister Co., within a few years.
Jeffries built Abercrombie in large part through sexualized marketing. Its periodical magalog, A&F Quarterly, featured pages of scantily clothed models with articles about sex and pop culture. Shirtless male models were a brand icon, pictured on its shopping bags, billboards, cologne bottles and working in-person at stores.
During his two decades at the helm, Jeffries led Abercrombie on a meteoric rise. He also oversaw its downfall.
Jeffries abruptly stepped down as CEO in December 2014 amid mass criticism of the company's performance and culture. Abercrombie had 11 straight quarters of negative company comparable-store sales. Former employees protested and sued over allegations of racial discrimination and a toxic workplace culture.
The negativity culminated in 2016, when Abercrombie was named “America’s most-hated retailer.”
It wasn’t just Abercrombie’s management that made the brand passé. Style and culture had changed, said Lee Peterson, executive vice president of thought leadership at Dublin consulting firm WD Partners and former L Brands executive.
People didn’t want to wear clothes with brand names. Customers wanted to see inside the stores. Its customers grew up.
“It made them interesting to begin with but then became inaccessible,” Peterson said.
Back to basics
Horowitz joined Abercrombie in October 2014 as president of Hollister, three months before Jeffries resigned.
“The brands were in a very, very tough place. The brand health was quite negative and declining rapidly,” Horowitz said.
Abercrombie’s sales and reputation were spiraling, Horowitz said. But she had spent her career building brands. “There could be no better and more exciting journey," she said, than joining the team.
Among the first things to change were personnel policies. Abercrombie announced in early 2015 that it would stop hiring sales staff based on physical appearance and relax its “look policy” for employees.
Sales staff would no longer be called “models” but rather “brand representatives.” And the company ended its use of sexualized marketing.
“By the end of July, there will no longer be sexualized marketing used in marketing materials, including in-store photos, gift cards and shopping bags,” Abercrombie said in a news release.
Next, executives took a close look at the product.
Horowitz said the quality of the clothes had gone downhill. Abercrombie started moving away from clothes branded with logos and invested in higher-quality fabrics. It began to offer a broader range of sizes.
One big project of the rebranding was introducing its Curve Love denim line in 2019. Horowitz said associates on her team were hearing from women who hated shopping for and wearing jeans because of the waist gap. This was an opportunity to solve a problem.
Curve Love denim is stretchier, offers a few extra inches in the butt and thighs, and comes in larger sizes. The strategy worked: Half of Abercrombie’s denim sales are Curve Love jeans.
Suzanne Cotton, chair of fashion design and professor at the Columbus College of Art and Design, said investing in denim was a good move.
“Hearing that a pair of jeans fits you like a glove, you’ll set aside your negative feelings to go find those jeans,” Cotton said.
“Fran was smart enough to see that things were bad,” she added. “Brand names and the little moose were out.”
Peterson agreed.
“They went back to basics and figured out what the customer wants,” he said.
'Now they’re making clothes for us'
Abercrombie also considered who its customers really were. Hollister was marketed toward teens, Horowitz said, so who should Abercrombie’s customer be?
Horowitz said the brand would focus on a slightly older demographic: Millennials.
Specifically, the young millennial, though Horowitz says the brand can easily clothe anyone from their late 20s through their 40s. This Millennial customer is a group that lives for the weekend, specifically what Horowitz calls the “96-hour long weekend.”
From staycations and road trips to bachelorette parties and weddings, Horowitz said Abercrombie has an outfit for every social event in their lives.
“The ability to clothe them for each and every one of those occasions throughout that long weekend has really helped us define all of these additional categories that we now sell and have become actually known and famous for, like our dresses,” Horowitz said.
Abercrombie’s dresses are what brought Lucy Freccia back to the brand.
Freccia, 32, of Clintonville, said she had complicated feelings toward Abercrombie growing up in Bexley.
“On the surface, I couldn’t believe all these people were wearing the same thing,” Freccia said. “Just beneath the surface, I thought maybe I should have at least one Abercrombie shirt. I coveted the coolness, or at least the belonging.”
Freccia moved away for college and didn’t think much about Abercrombie again until last summer when she was waitressing at Speck in downtown Columbus. She kept seeing women walk into the restaurant wearing sundresses in the same blue-and-white floral print. Eventually, she asked someone where the dress was from. It was from Abercrombie.
Freccia was skeptical, but she went to Easton to see for herself. There, she found that floral dress she loved. It was in her size. It was on sale. And it fit like a glove. So she bought it for her upcoming birthday party.
“I left the store feeling like I healed my inner child,” Freccia said.
Freccia isn’t totally smitten with Abercrombie. She hasn’t loved everything she’s tried at the store and believes the company has more work to do expanding its sizing. But Freccia said she’s pleased with the rebrand.
“Now, they’re making clothes for us,” she said.
Horowitz said the biggest piece of Abercrombie’s turnaround success is staying close to its customers.
Instead of using shirtless models, Abercrombie relies more on influencers and word of mouth to sell its product. Associates frequently solicit ideas from customers for what Abercrombie should introduce next. It’s what inspired the company’s fitness line, Your Personal Best, in 2022 and its wedding collection earlier this year.
It’s that open communication with customers — and the willingness to adapt and grow — that makes Horowitz excited for Abercrombie’s future.
“We're excited about what we're seeing,” Horowitz said. “They're going to tell us, the consumer is going to tell us, what is next.”
shendrix@dispatch.com
@sheridan120
This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: Abercrombie & Fitch sales resurgence buoyed by young Millennial women
