- Abercrombie & Fitch was based as a retailer for outside gear within the late 1800s.
- It turned massively fashionable with 2000s teenagers till altering tastes and controversy led to a decline.
- The retailer has just lately discovered a brand new cohort of followers: Gen Z consumers.
If you happen to had been a teen within the 2000s, chances are high you both shopped at Abercrombie & Fitch — or felt too excluded to set foot within the retailer.
The 130-year-old retailer could have gotten its begin catering to fishing and looking fanatics, however by the late Nineteen Nineties, the model bore little resemblance to its outdoorsy origins. Its dimly lit, closely scented shops — recognized primarily for his or her shirtless male fashions and slender vary of sizes — offered a model of cool that appeared off-limits to anybody who wasn’t skinny, white, and well-off.
Whereas Abercrombie could as soon as have been the epitome of a sure type of cool, the model fell on onerous occasions within the 2010s resulting from a mixture of altering public sentiment and quite a few controversies and lawsuits, together with one which went all the best way to the Supreme Court docket.
In recent times, the model has seen a resurgence in reputation because of a brand new, extra inclusive picture: it revamped its shops, expanded its measurement vary, and made its pricing extra approachable.
And these modifications are paying off: In Could, Abercrombie & Fitch reported the most effective first-quarter leads to its historical past, sending its shares 24% larger instantly afterward.
Here is how Abercrombie & Fitch rose to fame, virtually misplaced all of it, then mounted a comeback.
