Troubled fashion retailer Abercrombie & Fitch has cut down on its trademark half-naked male models strolling outside their stores. Good thing, too. If they were still around, they’d need to be holding styrofoam coffee cups asking passers-by for change.
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The Albany-based retailer, once renowned for selling sexy tight shirts to teens, reported sales of $685.5 million for the quarter, down from $709.4 million compared with a year ago and $20 million below Wall Street analysts’ predictions.
I went shopping at Abercrombie and Fitch yesterday and their ads had been multiculteralized. I was disgusted!
— Tila Tequila (@AngelTilaLove) May 25, 2016
Abercrombie & Fitch claims on its Twitter handle to stand for the “next generation of effortless All-American style.” But the brand, which re-invented itself in the 1990s from a staid sporting goods store into a hot preppy emporium fashion magnet — using models including Taylor Swift and Jennifer Lawrence in the process — has gone from hardbodies to hard times.
Hundreds of stores have closed and their sales are in free fall. As Nikki Baird pointed out on Forbes, millennials are abandoning brands like Abercrombie & Fitch for H&M and Forever 21.
How is the company addressing the consistent fall in retail traffic? It’s not too clear from Abercrombie Chairman Arthur Martinez’s desperate pronouncements.
He told Business Insider: “This is a journey. There won’t be an ‘a-ha’ moment where we pull the covers off something and say, ‘Here’s the silver bullet answer.'”
Martinez, 76, says the brand has to appeal to an older crowd: “I’d really like the world to stop referring to Abercrombie as a teen brand.” No more thongs for preteen girls printed with “Wink Wink,” in other words.
It’s all a far cry from a decade ago when Abercrombie & Fitch’s then-CEO Mike Jeffries told Salon: “We go after the cool kids…a lot of people don’t belong [in our clothes], and they can’t belong. Are we exclusionary? Absolutely.”
Extinction, rather than exclusion, is increasingly more now on Abercrombie & Fitch’s radar.
Abercrombie’s sales slip as fewer shoppers visit its stores https://t.co/TWeB7ZQ20T
— Wall Street Journal (@WSJ) May 26, 2016
