--:-- [Theme music fades out]
--:-- Noel King: Welcome to Today Explained. I'm Noel King.
--:-- Noel King: Summer of 1999. Britney had her first hit. TLC had their million. American Pie was in theaters. Carson Daly was on TRL. And the cool kids wore Abercrombie and Fitch.
--:-- Noel King: Abercrombie didn't invent the American teenager. Hollywood did that. You're tearing me apart! But for a time, it defined what it meant to dress and act like a teenager.
--:-- Noel King: Look at him! It's like Abercrombie's making people now. But then the brand cratered, done in by the cheap shots it took at women, Asians, West Virginia, and male gymnasts, among others, and a CEO who was recently charged with running a sex trafficking ring.
--:-- Noel King: But quietly, Abercrombie has been mounting an incredible comeback. You might even find yourself in one this Black Friday, and you will not be alone. Coming up on Today Explained.
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--:-- Noel King: Yes, hi, I'd like to order a pizza. Oh, hey, can I ask you a question? Is the cute blonde guy delivering tonight? Very Abercrombie and Fitch.
--:-- Noel King: I'm Noelle King with Elizabeth Seagrin. She's a senior staff writer at Fast Company. She writes about the fashion industry.
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: Okay, so I did not grow up in this country because my dad worked for an airline. I spent most of my childhood in Europe and Asia.
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: And so my first experience, even hearing about Abercrombie & Fitch, came in 1999 when I was a junior in high school. It was called Summer Girls by LFO.
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: It was such an iconic song. And the refrain of that song, as many people will remember, is I like girls that wear Abercrombie & Fitch.
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: And so the thing that went off in my little, you know, teenage girl brain was like, what is this brand that makes men swoon when girls just wear it?
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: Right. And then when I watched the music video, you know, almost all of the models in it were were white.
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: So I think I was getting my first taste of Abercrombie and Fitch from that song.
--:-- Noel King: You were indeed. When did you experience Abercrombie in the flesh?
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: So then I came to the U.S. for college, and so I decided to go to a mall and check it out for myself.
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: Welcome to Abercrombie and Fitch. Can we take your order?
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: So this was probably around 2001, 2002. And this was, I think, at the period where Abercrombie was still very powerful in American culture.
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: And so I stepped into this store and let me tell you, the first thing that happened was I was hit in the face with this overwhelming musky cologne.
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: And I was just like, how are they even pumping this stuff out? Like, I didn't know where it was coming from, but everything smelt of this musk.
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: And then the next thing that I noticed was that all over the walls, there was this black and white imagery of these models.
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: And they were, you know, predominantly men. And they were, most of them not wearing shirts, which struck me as odd because this was a clothing store and yet all the models were naked.
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: But I think, you know, the main thing that I experienced when I was in the store was that, you know, all of the staff members there were predominantly white.
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: They were all, you know, very, very beautiful and very physically fit. And they just did not seem very interested in serving customers there.
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: They were sort of like off in the corner. And if you needed any help, you needed to go and like talk to these people who were obviously way cooler than you.
--:-- Noel King: You sought Abercrombie out and that was kind of a weird thing to do, but actually it was not that weird because it was so huge.
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: Yeah. Well, you know, eventually, you know, after that period, I became a fashion journalist.
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: So over the last 10 years, I've done many stories about Abercrombie & Fitch, and I find it a absolutely fascinating company.
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: I don't know whether everybody knows this, but it was originally founded 130 years ago, and it was one of the original American clothing brands.
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: It created mostly outdoor clothing that was sold by catalog. And it has dressed everyone from Amelia Earhart to Teddy Roosevelt, right?
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: And so it's this very old, iconic brand. But over the decades, you know, after it was founded, you know, it ran into hard times.
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: The long traffic lines have created a virtual parking lot here in Bell Harbor. It's not because the exclusive shops here are giving away anything free, just Abercrombie & Fitch going out of business.
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: By the time we enter the current era, it was really struggling financially. So in 1988, the brand was acquired by The Limited, which you might know because it also owns Victoria's Secret and Express.
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: And it was in the late 80s and early 90s that it went through this incredible transformation from this heritage American brand into what we now know as this teen, hyper-sexualized, kind of racist brand.
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: And really the mastermind behind this strategy was this man Michael Jeffries who became the CEO in 1992.
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: And he's the one who transformed the company into this massive hit. CEO Mike Jeffries used sex appeal to win them over.
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: Hope Abercrombie feels very sexy for a 20-year-old. Mike Jeffries told Salon magazine at one point, In every school, there are cool and popular kids, and then there are the not-so-cool kids.
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: Candidly, we go after the cool kids. Are we exclusionary? Absolutely.
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: So he was going after, you know, physically fit, athletic kids, largely white, and he clothed them in traditional, classic American preppy clothing.
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: And so he was drawing from the catalog of, you know, American aesthetics. So we're talking about, you know, Oxford shirts with popped collars and cotton T-shirts and, you know, denim and khakis.
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: But what he did was he took it to a new level as far as how sexualized these garments were. So everything was extremely tight, very low-fitting, lots of midriff exposure.
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: And there were lots of brands. I mean, over time, there have been lots of brands that are exclusive. That is part of the marketing. It's what gets non-cool people to buy in, that this is what they should be wearing.
--:-- Noel King: What went wrong with Abercrombie? Yeah, I agree. I think the exclusionary point of view is what sells, right? I mean, that's what sells in retail.
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: But I think what went wrong with Abercrombie is that they were just so nakedly in pursuit of this kind of vision of exclusion.
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: For one thing, they were extremely racist. I mean, let's just put it plainly, right? I mean, this was a very racist brand.
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: My, you know, favorite, you know, example of how racist they were was that in 2002, they released this T-shirt that featured two Chinese men on it with very offensively slanted eyes.
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: And it was designed to look like a shirt from like a laundromat. And the slogan on it was, Two Wongs can make it white.
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: I just want to know, like, what was the process of making, like, who was in the room when they made this? Like, did they just did they just think like, oh, OK, this is kind of a funny pun. Like, let's just go with it. Right.
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: Or was there anybody there who was like rolling their eyes? I don't think so.
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: I think that they had hired, you know, a team of executives that didn't have the ability to understand exactly how egregious that was.
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: And, you know, in 2003, the brand faced a class action lawsuit where all of these plaintiffs argued that Abercrombie did not hire black, Asian and Latino people in stores.
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: So I was totally onto that. Hold up, shorties. Each photo costs $10. And the proceeds go to charity. Oh, what charity is that? It's to pay for the $40 million lawsuit against us.
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: Yeah. A bunch of minorities sued Abercrombie because they only hire foxy white guys. Like us.
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: If they were hired, they were forced to work in back rooms where they wouldn't be seen by customers.
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: You know, all the way until 2013, there was a woman who took Abercrombie to court saying that the brand didn't hire her because she wore a hijab.
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: Abercrombie told her they had a, quote, look policy. No headscarves allowed.
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: Her lawyer reading a statement on her behalf. Observance of my faith should not prevent me from getting a job.
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: And that case went all the way to the Supreme Court and Abercrombie lost.
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: Justice Scalia has our opinion this morning in case 1486, EEOC versus Abercrombie and Fish.
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: This is really easy. And so I think the brand was just so overtly, nakedly offensive that the brand slowly offended people into irrelevance.
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: This is, I mean, this is a preppy clothing brand that literally lost a Supreme Court case against it.
--:-- Noel King: How bad, was that the low point? How bad did it get for Abercrombie?
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: Yeah, I mean, I think that was the low point. You know, this coincided with financial problems.
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: So starting in about 2008 during the Great Recession, Abercrombie's revenues began to go into a tailspin.
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: But that was actually true of many retailers at the time. You know, the Great Recession was terrible for fashion brands.
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: But what was different about Abercrombie is that it never bounced back.
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: During that period of the Great Recession, I think consumers realized that this was not a brand that they wanted to come back to.
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: And by 2012, its stock price was like absolutely in the toilet.
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: And, you know, in 2016, it was voted the most hated retailer.
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: Like, I don't think that you can come back from that.
--:-- Noel King: What was going on during this period is that, you know, actually culture was changing.
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: The brand in the 1990s was really playing into this notion that exclusion was a good thing, that, you know, you wanted to be at the top of this social hierarchy.
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: But, you know, over the last couple of decades, you know, culture has changed.
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: American culture has changed for the better, in my opinion.
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: Young people today don't want to live in an exclusionary world. They want to live in a place where everybody's accepted.
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: And this includes people of color, people of different religions, people of all kinds of body types.
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: And this brand was just totally out of sync with the moment that we're in now.
--:-- Noel King: Elizabeth Seagrin, Fast Company, coming up, the Abercrombieback, the Abercrombiecents.
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: Do you have one? That's so good.
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: Maybe if they had used that, it would have come back faster.
--:-- Noel King: Thank you
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--:-- Noel King: That's A-T-T-I-O dot com slash todayexplained.
--:-- Noel King: What do you think the vibe of the new Abercrombie is? Who are they trying to talk to? What is the sort of thing they're trying to put across?
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: They're still targeting young generation, but not as good as they did before.
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: They're not smelling as good as they used to.
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: The shoppers were attractive, to be very honest. I used to collect them as a teenager, but they're just basic now, so I feel that.
--:-- Noel King: You're the only person that I've talked to who misses the smell of Abercrombie.
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: Yeah, definitely. It was so much better. It was a different vibe. It was a different experience.
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: I wanted to be in store for longer because it smelled good, but it's just basic now.
--:-- Noel King: It's Today Explained back with Elizabeth Seagrin, senior writer at Fast Company.
--:-- Noel King: All right. So, Elizabeth, you have been a fashion writer for a long time.
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: When did you start to suspect that Abercrombie & Fitch was trying to turn things around?
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: So it was a very distinct moment in 2019, which is five years ago now.
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: And, you know, I'm a fashion writer. You know, I've been a fashion writer for a long time.
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: And so I, you know, I'm in touch with lots of different brands because I need to do stories about them.
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: And I had not heard from Abercrombie for the previous, like, five to ten years.
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: But in 2019, I started getting emails from them about changes that were happening at the company.
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: And indeed, they had brought on an entirely new executive team with a new CEO and a new CMO and a new design team.
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: We did it. You know, no one thought, particularly with Abercrombie brand, that it was possible.
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: And our favorite thing to say right now is we're back.
--:-- Noel King: So my interest was piqued and I wanted to know whether it was really possible for this brand to bounce back after it had just tanked.
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: The first thing I noticed was that the brand was very different aesthetically.
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: For one thing, everybody was dressed in the ads, which, you know, was a big change for them.
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: And, you know, and there was also this cast of, you know, diverse models.
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: I mean, it kind of reminded me of ads from the United Colors of Benetton.
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: Be right. Be wrong. Be anything. Be yourself. Be in love. Be humble. Be brave. Be happy.
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: But I think another very clear move that they were making is that rather than targeting teenagers, which had been their strategy for the previous two decades, they were very focused on targeting people in their early 20s.
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: And I think this was a really clever strategy.
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: I mean, for one thing, there are actually not that many brands that are targeting this particular demographic.
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: There are still teen brands out there, and there are lots of brands that are targeting, you know, people with a little bit more money, you know, in their late 20s, early 30s.
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: But this was, you know, sort of an untapped part of the market.
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: But it was also smart in the sense that these were millennials still, right? People in their early 20s.
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: And they had vague memories of what this brand was a long time ago.
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: But they hadn't followed it very closely.
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: So it's a brand name that still carried some cachet.
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: But, you know, it was an entirely new generation that could explore this brand for the very first time.
--:-- Noel King: That's so interesting. I think since I was a kid, I've always known Abercrombie.
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: Yeah. Well, it changed a lot over the years.
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: The preppy stuff that I remember was very cute for high school, but I don't know that I would want to wear like that tennis pleat skirt into my first job.
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: What does it look like now?
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: Well, that skirt would have been way too short and inappropriate for the workplace.
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: You're absolutely right.
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: But that's the other really fascinating thing. They totally revamped the design of the products.
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: We like to say at Abercrombie, today it's about belonging. In the past, it was about fitting in.
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: And there's a very big difference to those two things.
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: So we have really been able to make a very inclusive and diverse associate-based, consumer-based, product-based.
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: We've extended our size. It's much less fashion-focused and also a lot less preppy.
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: And it's mostly about sleek, minimalist pieces, kind of like essentials that you would use day in and day out.
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: And they're very thoughtful about the use cases for these people who are just starting their lives.
--:-- Noel King: That's so interesting. They're really trying to make it more inclusive.
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: Yeah. So there are pieces in their collections now that are great for your first job.
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: Like so there's even, you know, suits and things like that.
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: But there are lots of pieces for things like going to weddings because people might be starting to get married.
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: The consumer told us, you know what, weddings are no longer a day. They're two, three, four-day weekends.
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: We need lots of things to wear throughout all of those different occasions.
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: And lots of things that are just like sort of casual for every day.
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: And there's also been a big focus on denim, which is also another very clever strategy because jeans have been the mainstay for many successful brands, including Madewell and Gap in its heyday.
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: And so they've been very focused on creating very well-fitting jeans.
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: You guys, if you are a curvier girl like me and you have a hard time finding jeans, I just made the discovery of the century.
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: And actually there a lot of discussion online about actually like these jeans fit really really well
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: This is not sponsored also I just have such a hard time finding pants that fit me that when I put these on I almost started crying because it like this never happens.
--:-- Noel King: That's so great to hear.
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: And importantly, the sizes now go up to size 32, which in the previous iteration of Abercrombie, they only went up to size 10, which actually is just like mind blowing when you think about the American population, like how few people could actually fit into those clothes.
--:-- Noel King: That's so interesting.
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: So now it's much more size inclusive.
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: And, you know, from my discussions with their design team, there is a lot of focus on the quality of the materials.
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: They're using a lot of higher end materials like wool and cotton and cashmere.
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: And there's also been a lot of focus on fit.
--:-- Noel King: That's so great to hear.
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: And this is all really important because this is all happening in the context of fast fashion.
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: And the fast fashion world is, you know, is famously about making clothes as cheap as possible and making them so trendy that you can throw them out after a few wears.
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: This is very distinctly going against all of that.
--:-- Noel King: I only recently started seeing stories about Abercrombie being back.
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: I I didn't see like a big relaunch. It's not coming up in, you know, my ads on Hulu.
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: How did they get the word out?
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: This was also extremely interesting to me because they clearly had invested a lot of money in this turnaround, but they chose not to come out big.
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: Instead, what they did was they worked with a lot of influencers on social media.
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: I am an Abercrombie girly. The absolute chokehold that Abercrombie trousers have on me is ridiculous.
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: I'm just going to say, I don't care what anybody says. Abercrombie is elite when it comes to fall fashion.
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: And they started launching stores on shopping streets that had a different look.
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: And they were very quiet about this relaunch.
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: And they were just really hoping that it would spread by word of mouth.
--:-- Noel King: Coming back quietly was a really good strategy because it meant that people weren't thinking that critically about this brand.
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: You know, they were just kind of stumbling into it when they saw, you know, an influencer wear a really nice outfit or stepping into the store and then kind of discovering for themselves what this brand was in this moment.
--:-- Noel King: How well is it working?
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: It is working remarkably well.
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: I mean, this has been like one of the most interesting success stories in retail.
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: So, you know, listen to this. Last year, it was the best performing stock on the S&P index.
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: It beat out NVIDIA.
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: And so it gained 285%.
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: So that's number one, like, pretty remarkable.
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: It generated $4 billion in revenue in the previous financial year with a 10% year-over-year growth.
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: So it's doing gangbusters, right?
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: And, you know, when I spoke to them, they said that they're really, you know, trying to hit that $5 billion revenue target.
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: And so they're totally on track to doing that.
--:-- Noel King: It is remarkable, and it makes me wonder whether there is a takeaway here for other brands that might be struggling.
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: I think this is a really encouraging story for all of the heritage large retailers that dot the American retail landscape.
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: You know, it's been a hard couple of years for a lot of different retail brands, especially, you know, when direct-to-consumer brands like Everlane and Reformation have popped up, you know, and they've had to compete with these new brands.
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: So big brands like J.Crew and Gap have had a difficult time.
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: But I think the Abercrombie story shows us that if a brand has this long history and a place in American retail history, it can come back.
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: But you have to be really smart about it.
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: And you have to be focused, I think, on separating yourself from other brands on the market, just like Abercrombie has by targeting this early 20s audience.
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: But also really focus on quality, because I think consumers, they're very perceptive and they want good quality product.
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: And I think Abercrombie did both of these things.
--:-- Noel King: As a teenager, you heard a line in a song that was compelling enough to make you go in to a store when you hit the U.S.
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: And then you grew up and you became a fashion writer.
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: Do you owe it all to Abercrombie and Fitch or perhaps, perhaps to LFO?
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: Oh, my gosh. I have to rethink my whole life now.
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: I need to talk about this with my therapist, to be honest, to work through all of what this means for me.
--:-- Noel King: What is LFO'd?
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: I'm Noelle King.
--:-- Elizabeth Seagrin: It's Today Explained.
--:-- Noel King: Support for this show comes from Macy's.
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