Oct 28th, 2016, 07:14 PM

Brand Damage: Abercrombie & Fitch

By Leila Tidjani
Image credit: Abercrombie & Fitch
The ups and downs of Abercrombie & Fitch offer hard lessons on how a powerful brand can crash and burn.

Long before the brand became known for hard-bodied hunks with ripped abs on its advertising posters, Abercombie & Fitch was selling products with much less sex appeal: hunting and fishing equipment. 

David Abercrombie, who founded the company in 1892 as an upscale sporting goods store in Manhattan, was a conservative business owner who wanted the retailer to stick to its product line of shotguns, fishing rods, tents and other outdoors products. When he partnered with lawyer Ezra Fitch, the company expanded rapidly by moving into apparel and Fitch eventually took sole control. By the 1940s, Abercrombie & Fitch was one of the most successful American retail stores for sportswear attire.

By the 1970s, however, the brand was suffering due to poor management and sales — and filed for bankruptcy. In the 1980s, Limited Brand bought the company for $47 million and appointed Michael Jeffries as CEO. Jeffries, famous for his outside-of-the-box marketing approach, was famous for his magic touch. He transformed Abercrombie & Finch into a teen apparel brand for "cool kids".

His strategy was based on the concept: discriminate against ugliness. A&F's sexy advertising campaigns featuring male models with ripped abs made clear who the brand was targeting. Abercrombie & Fitch was putting youth at the heart of its brand vision. 


Image credit: Abercrombie & Fitch.

The strategy worked. With a strong retail presence in the U.S. and more than a thousand outlets worldwide,  Jeffries boosted sales of the brand so much that, by the end of the 1990s, A&F was a publicly traded company and one of the most recognizable brands in the world. The pop/rap band LFO had a hit with their song “Summer Girls”, which included the line, “I like girls who wear Abercrombie & Fitch, I’d take her if I had one wish.”


Image credit: Abercrombie & Fitch

But the glory years for the brand would not last. The branding genius of Michael Jeffries turned out to be controversial. The brand's negative attitude towards "fat and ugly" — manifested in its refusal to carry XL and XXL sizes in stores — attracted widespread criticism, especially on social media. The company was also accused of racism for hiring only white male sales staff.  Others complained of sexism and a toxic environment in Abercrombie & Fitch stores. A Muslim woman sued the company for refusing to hire her because she wore a head scarf. The company argued that its employees were required to have a look described as "classic East Coast collegiate style". 

Facing a barrage of criticism, Abercrombie & Fitch was unapologetic about its policies, practices and discriminatory corporate culture, but eventually the backlash from mainstream and social media was too intense. In December 2014, Mike Jeffries suddenly resigned after two decades running the company. 

Abercrombie & Fitch Apologizes After Plus-Size Firestorm

 

FOUR STAGES OF BRAND DAMAGE

So what went wrong? How did such a successful brand blow it?

Abercrombie & Fitch learned the hard way that its unapologetic branding strategy, which worked in the 1990s before the social media explosion, no longer worked in a world of viral web backlashes that quickly go global. The days when retailers practised questionable staff and customer policies were over. Consumers now had a voice. And on social media, word-of-mouth can be powerful enough to destroy a brand. That is almost what happened to A&F.

Below are the four factors that, over the decade from 2006 to 2016, led to Abercrombie & Fitch's brand crisis. 

1. The CEO Factor: Michael Jeffries


CEO Mike Jeffries. Image credit: Geoworld Magazine

CEO Michael Jeffries cultivated mystery. He was rarely photographed and never talked to journalists — until January 2006. The only interview he gave was to the Salon. It was probably the biggest mistake of his career at A&F. In the interview, Jeffries was honest. That was the problem.

As Salon noted: "He admitted things out loud that some youth-focused retailers wouldn’t (which may be why he panicked and pulled his cooperation from this story two days after I left A&F headquarters, offering no explanation).

For example, when I ask him how important sex and sexual attraction are in what he calls the 'emotional experience' he creates for his customers, he says, 'It’s almost everything. That’s why we hire good-looking people in our stores. Because good-looking people attract other good-looking people, and we want to market to cool, good-looking people. We don’t market to anyone other than that.' As far as Jeffries was concerned, America’s unattractive, overweight or otherwise undesirable teens can shop elsewhere. 'In every school there are the cool and popular kids, and then there are the not-so-cool kids,' he says. 'Candidly, we go after the cool kids. We go after the attractive all-American kid with a great attitude and a lot of friends. A lot of people don’t belong [in our clothes], and they can’t belong. Are we exclusionary? Absolutely. Those companies that are in trouble are trying to target everybody: young, old, fat, skinny.'"

The Salon article, which went viral, marked the beginning of the company's brand crisis. 

2. The Feminist Factor

A&F had its own sizing guide. At a time when the fashion industry was in trouble for promoting anorexic models, and nutritionists were concerned about teenager' diet issues, Abercrombie & Fitch came up with the XXXS size — basically, a triple zero. When hit with controversy, the company tried to blunt the criticism by acknowledging that they had not been producing those sizes for years, and would not restock after selling what was left in stores. But the Internet blowback was already on fire.

Not only was Abercrombie & Fitch creating "triple zero" small sizes, they also had decided to stop producing what they called ‘plus-size clothes’. Anything above a 10 size (in the U.S.) was removed from the racks and disappeared from the stores. Online petitions pressured the company to apologize. The apology came, but it was already too late. A plus-size American fashion blogger, Jes Baker, created an counter-campaign against the A&F policy, calling it “Attractive & Fat”.

"The only thing you've done through your comments is reinforce the unoriginal concept that fat women are social failures, valueless, and undesirable," wrote Baker. "Your apology doesn't change this."


Image credit: The Militant Baker

 3. The Charity Factor

A&F had long associated its brand with charity. But another scandal hit. It turned out that A&F was not giving away clothing to charity, not even its faulty clothes. The unspoken policy of the brand was to never give to charity organization because they did not want people to see their brands on homeless people or people who were not included in their intolerant target market. They would rather throw away or burn their faulty clothing than give them to charity. 

4. The Staffing Factor

A&F had long associated its brand A&F was accused of having a blond, athletic and white hiring policy. That was not entirely true; they did hire blacks, Asian and Latinos — for backend store work. In 2004, A&F lost a class-action lawsuit in the U.S. filed against them for their discriminatory hiring practices, and had to was required to pay $40 million to applicants and fix its hiring practices. In France, they are currently under investigation for still applying their discriminatory hiring policy.

 


Image credit: Abercrombie & Fitch

Facing all these crises, A&F lost its appeal and was boycotted both online and offline. Since Mike Jeffries' departure, the rebranding has been a challenge. In order to stop their dramatic decline in sales, they have decided to change their target market, change their in-store policy, revamp their image. In short, a brand facelift.

Earlier this year, A&F was undergoing an emergency rebranding to switch gears. As Business Insider noted: "Amid declining sales, the teen brand has slowly but surely chipping away at its raunchy reputation to become palatable to the modern consumer." The sexed-up posters of cool kids are gone. The new Abercrombie man is now more hipster, embodied by Alex Libby; and the new Abercrombie woman is now more classic and conservative. The brand has eschewed sexy for nice. 


A&F's new hipster look, embodied by Alex Libby. Image credit: Abercrombie & Fitch

 

So far, A&F has managed to stop the decline in sales, but still has a long way to go before regaining their market shares — and, most importantly, winning back respect.

This is Abercrombie & Fitch