How Abercrombie went from America’s most hated retailer to a Gen Z favorite

Abercrombie & Fitch Co. has been many things in its 130-year history. An outdoor clothier that dressed Theodore Roosevelt and Ernest Hemingway. A 90s-era mall chain notorious for its homoerotic catalogs. The subject of a lawsuit that went all the way to the Supreme Court for refusing to hire a woman because of her hijab.

Last year, it added a new chapter to its story. It gained 285% on the stock market in 2023, making it the best performing stock on the S&P Index. It even beat out Nvidia, the AI chipmaker that’s been on a tear. It generated $4.03 billion in revenue during the twelve months ending in October 2023, with 10% year-over-year growth.

Abercrombie’s performance took many by surprise. After all, in 2016, the brand was voted America’s most hated retailer. And it was just two years ago that the Netflix documentary White Hot came out, which traced Abercrombie’s decline as its over-sexualized imagery and occasionally racist products fell out of favor with the millennial consumers who had grown up with the brand.

But since 2019, Abercrombie has been undertaking a quiet transformation, reimagining everything from its target customer to its supply chain. And from the brand’s financial results, it appears that the new generation of twentysomethings like what they see in this new iteration of Abercrombie. The brand expects to hit a $5 billion revenue target in the next few years.

Inside The Mind of A 20-Something

The Abercrombie of the 90s and 2000s made low-rise jeans and skin-tight T-shirts pitched at high schoolers. Then, in 2019, the company overhauled its entire product design and marketing, in an effort to distance itself from the series of scandals that had plagued the brand in the previous decade. It was also an effort to boost its revenues and stock price, which had been spiraling downward since the Great Recession.

The new Abercrombie is focused on an older demographic: The twenty-something. “The brand is growing up with its customer,” says Kristen Classi-Zummo, a fashion apparel analyst at the market research firm Circana. “They’re appealing to millennials who last wore the clothes when they were in high school. But now, they’re a decade older. They’re in their post-college years and starting their first jobs.”

Abercrombie has spent the past five years studying the lifestyles and psychologies of today’s twenty-somethings. “They’re starting their life,” says Corey Robinson, who became Abercrombie’s head of merchandizing and design in 2018 after more than a decade at the company, partly to help drive the turnaround. “They’re on their way to successful careers, but they’re not defining success in the same way that older generations did. They live for the long weekend, when they’re planning brunch with friends or going to a friend’s destination wedding.”

Bye Low-Rise Jeans; Hello Blazers

Robinson and his team has created an assortment of outfits designed to fit all these scenarios. They now make blazers and suits for the office, dresses for weddings and other parties, and even a new line of workout gear called Your Personal Best.

The new clothing design is smart, says Classi-Zummo. “It’s not just tailored clothing or activewear,” she says. “It’s the right assortment for a balanced lifestyle. Abercrombie is not trying to be super trendy: It’s offering classic silhouettes in classic colors, and it is really serving them right now.”

Aesthetically, the outfits are sleek and sophisticated, with a classic color palette of white, black, grey, and brown, and plenty of interesting textures, from wool coats to leather pants to boucle jackets. This is a sea change from the previous iteration of Abercrombie, whose style can be described as a sexier version of classic American prep. It was famous for low cut henley shirts and micro mini denim skirts for women; jeans and cargo shorts for men that models wore shirtless.

Shifting to a slightly older customer makes sense because there aren’t many brands targeting twenty-somethings so deliberately. There are many brands that design for working professionals with larger budgets, from Everlane to Banana Republic. And there are more casual and less expensive brands like American Eagle and Brandy Melville that appeal to teens. Abercrombie lands in the middle, with aspirational clothes at an accessible price point. Jeans start at $90, blazers at $120, and coats at $220.

“These are elevated essentials, but you’re not spending too much on them,” says Classi-Zummo. “And at a time when twenty-somethings continue to feel pressure financially, this is just the right price point.”

But if there’s one aspect of the old Abercrombie that the current design team wants to hold on to, it’s jeans, which have been a big-seller for the brand in the past. And being known for well-tailored denim has been a successful strategy for many brands in the past, from Madewell to Gap.

Robinson says the brand has focused heavily in improving the fit and quality of jeans. It has also made a concerted effort to be more inclusive of diverse body types, which is a major change for a brand that was notorious for refusing to make larger sizes in the past. In 2019, Abercrombie launched a new line called Curve Love, which features a lot of stretch and is designed to be flattering across any size.

“Our design designer studied YouTube videos of women trying on jeans and talking about the waist gap,“ he says. “We realized we have a huge opportunity to solve this problem.” The strategy is working: Curve Love jeans now makes up half of all denim sales.

Stumbling Across The New Abercrombie

Carey Krug, head of marketing, who was also brought on in 2018 to help with the rebrand, says that Abercrombie has chosen not to make a big splash about its new direction. Instead, it has led with product while also quietly transforming its brand imagery. Today, the ads feature models of many skin tones and body types. It has moved away from the sexually-charged imagery of the 90s, towards a more refined, understated look.

Instead, Krug wanted consumers to stumble across Abercrombie, and discover for themselves that the brand looks and feels different from their last experience with it. Rather than rolling out ads, the brand partnered with an army of influencers to spread the word on social media. The strategy worked. TikTok began trending with hashtags like #AbercrombieIsBack. “We let the conversation play out online,” says Krug. “People were telling stories about how their product fits and how it makes them look and feel.”

For now, the youngest millennials are rediscovering this heritage brand they remember from their younger days. But Abercrombie is already beginning to appeal to older Gen Zs, who are leaving college or already in the workforce. And many of them are discovering the brand for the first time, without any of its baggage from the past. Krug thinks they’ll like what they see. “Our plan is to go from being the best-kept secret in fashion to their favorite brand,” she says.