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Abercrombie Fitch
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Abercrombie & Fitch is a specialty
retailer encompassing four brands: Abercrombie & Fitch, abercrombie
Kids, Hollister Co., and Ruehl 925. The merchandise is sold in the
brands' retail stores, catalogs, and online. As of 2006, the company
operated 350 Abercrombie & Fitch stores in all U.S. states except
New Mexico and Wyoming, and five stores in Canada (two A&F in
Toronto and one in Edmonton and two Hollisters in Toronto).
Founded in 1892, the company was for many decades
mainly an elite sporting goods retailer. After many years of success,
the company struggled economically from the late 1960s until it was
purchased by The Limited in 1988 and revamped as a lifestyle brand.
History
During the beginning of the 20th century, Abercrombie & Fitch Co. was
one of the most popular retail stores for America's sporting elite. The
East Coast company's clientele consisted of mainly big-game hunters,
fishermen, and outdoorsmen. Abercrombie & Fitch not only outfitted
wealthy people, it also outfitted some of America's most influential
leaders and celebrities on their excursions. Every president from
Theodore Roosevelt to Gerald Ford is said to have been outfitted by the
company in some capacity (Teddy Roosevelt was an especially enthusiastic
outdoorsman and Abercrombie & Fitch customer, and he frequently visited
the store in preparation for his famous African safaris). Other famous
people to pass through Abercrombie & Fitch's doors include Charles
Lindbergh, Amelia Earhart, Greta Garbo, Katharine Hepburn, Clark Gable,
and author Ernest Hemingway purchased at an Abercrombie & Fitch store.
Abercrombie & Fitch began as a small waterfront shop
and factory in lower Manhattan on June 4, 1892. David Abercrombie, born
and raised in Baltimore, Maryland, was a former trapper, prospector,
topographer and railroad surveyor. He was also an inventor, an ingenious
designer of tents, rucksacks and other camping equipment. It was his
love of the great outdoors that inspired him to begin Abercrombie & Co.,
a shop dedicated to selling only the highest quality camping, fishing
and hunting gear. His clientele consisted mostly of professional
hunters, explorers and trappers. In 1900, Ezra Fitch, a wealthy New York
lawyer and loyal customer, expressed a desire to buy into the growing
company. Abercrombie accepted his offer, and Fitch joined as a partner.
Soon thereafter, the shop moved to a larger location at 314 Broadway. In
1904, the store became incorporated and the official name of the company
was changed to Abercrombie & Fitch Co.
The partnership, however, was ill-fated. David
Abercrombie and Ezra Fitch were stubborn, hot-tempered men, and both had
vastly differing opinions on how best to run the establishment.
Abercrombie was more conservative, content to continue the store as it
was, selling professional gear to professional outdoorsmen. Fitch, on
the other hand, was more of a visionary. He was positive that the future
of the business lay in expansion, selling the outdoors and its delights
to more of the general public. The two quarrelled frequently, often
violently, even as the company grew increasingly successful. In 1907,
Abercrombie sold his share in the company to Fitch and returned to
manufacturing outdoor goods. Fitch continued the business with other
partners and was, for the first time, able to direct the company in a
manner to his pleasing.
Fitch determined that the store ought to have an
outdoor feeling. Stock was not hidden behind glass cabinets. Instead, it
was displayed as if in use. He set up a tent and equipped it as if it
were out in the middle of the wilds of the Adirondacks. A campfire
blazed in one corner, where an experienced guide was always in
attendance, imparting valuable information to interested customers. Part
of Fitch's strategy to expand the company was the creation of a
mail-order catalog. In 1909, Abercrombie & Fitch mailed out over 50,000
copies of its 456 page catalog, which included outdoor clothing, camping
gear, articles, and advice columns. The cost of the catalog nearly
bankrupted the company, but it proved to be a profitable marketing
device. By 1913, the store moved to a more fashionable and easily
accessible midtown address just off Fifth Avenue, expanding its
inventory to include sport clothing. A&F became the first store in New
York to supply such clothing to women as well as men. In 1917,
Abercrombie & Fitch Co. moved yet again to a twelve-story building on
Madison Avenue. The store occupied the entire available space, making it
the world's largest sporting goods store. Outside, a sign proclaimed,
"Where the Blazed Trail Crosses the Boulevard."
The flagship store included many different amenities.
In the basement there was a shooting range, on the mezzanine there was
paraphernalia for skiing, archery, skin-diving, and lawn games. The
second through the fifth floors were reserved for clothing that was
suitable for any climate or terrain. On the sixth floor, there was a
picture gallery and a bookstore that focused on sporting themes, a watch
repair facility and a golf school, fully equipped with a resident
professional. The seventh floor included a gun room, stuffed game heads,
and about seven hundred shot guns and rifles. The eighth floor was
dedicated solely to fishing, camping, and boating. It also included a
desk that belonged to a fly- and bait-casting instructor who gave
lessons at the pool, which was located on the roof. The fishing section
of the store alone was stocked with over 48,000 flies and over 18,000
fishing lures. The clerks hired at Abercrombie & Fitch were not
professional salesmen, but rugged outdoorsmen. Talking was their
pleasure and selling was performed only at the customers' insistence.
In 1928, Ezra Fitch retired from the company. Despite
the change in ownership, Abercrombie & Fitch continued to expand. In
1939, it adopted the slogan, "The Greatest Sporting Goods Store in the
World." By 1962, the company operated stores in Chicago(Von Lengerke &
Antoine, an affiliated sporting goods retailer since 1928), and San
Francisco, wintertime-only stores in Palm Beach and Sarasota, Florida;
and summertime-only stores in Bayhead, New Jersey; and Southampton,
[[New York)], and Hyannis, Massachusetts. The expansion continued
through the early 1970's, when the company opened new stores in Colorado
Springs, Colorado(the Broadmoor Hotel); Short Hills, New Jersey; Bal
Harbour, Florida;[Troy], Michiganand its final expansion in Oakbrook,
Illinois. Despite the chain's apparent success, the company began to
falter financially in the late 1960s and went bankrupt in 1977. Oshman's,
a sporting goods retailer, acquired Abercrombie soon thereafter, but the
company continued to struggle.
During 1988, The Limited Inc. (now called Limited
Brands) acquired Abercrombie & Fitch, determined to reinvigorate the
ailing brand. The Limited had been successful in rolling out new concept
stores, such as Express, which sold women's clothing, and Victoria's
Secret, which sold lingerie and beauty products. Over the next decade,
Abercrombie & Fitch was carefully rebuilt as a teen apparel
merchandiser. The company began opening stores in upscale malls across
America in the early 1990s, targeting teenagers and college students
aged 18-24 from higher-income families.
Abercrombie & Fitch is a self-proclaimed "casual
luxury" retailer. Much like Ralph Lauren (whose style is frequently
evoked in Abercrombie & Fitch’s apparel), the clothing is fairly
predictable: woven shirts, denim, miniskirts, cargo shorts, wool
sweaters, polo shirts, and t-shirts can be found in most collections.
Labels on clothing reinforce the company’s image as a casual luxury
merchandiser and emphasize the quality and durability of the product.
The clothing produced in the 1990s was fairly consistent with the
brand's preppy image and tended to be less trend-driven than today's
offerings, which bear significantly less resemblance to traditional
Northeastern prep school apparel. The store quickly became successful,
and by the mid-1990s, there were dozens of Abercrombie & Fitch stores in
the United States. Careful marketing made the brand synonymous with
wealth and status among young patrons. In 1996, The Limited took
Abercrombie & Fitch public on the New York Stock Exchange and gradually
phased out its ownership of the company.
The original store concept (referred to as the "chain
store" concept) hearkened back to the outdoorsy image of company's early
years. The store resembled a hunting lodge, with plaid carpeting, dark
wood fixtures, and antler chandeliers. However, the company introduced a
new store concept (referred to as the "canoe store" concept) in the late
1990s to accommodate its rapid growth. The first canoe store opened in
June 1996 in Chesterfield Mall (Store #0634) in Chesterfield (St.
Louis), MO. This original canoe store, however, does not have a white
wooden front like most of today's A&F stores, but rather a tan stucco
front with navy awnings. A moose head is mounted above the cashwrap and
a canoe is mounted in the main room of each canoe store. Unlike the
chain store, which typically has a wider storefront and two entrances,
the canoe store has one main entrance and is walled off into at least
five rooms. The company is in the process of converting all of its chain
store concepts into canoe stores.
Abercrombie & Fitch has complete control over the
design and production of its merchandise, stores, and marketing. Because
it spends little on external advertising, the company depends upon the
store experience to help define the brand. The company strictly
regulates the store environment in an effort to provide a consistent,
pleasureful experience for customers in a manner that can be replicated
in each store. Factors such as visual presentation, music, and fragrance
are not left to chance. The company also specifies in painstaking detail
how lighting, layout, visual displays, marketing, and fixtures are to be
placed and used in every store. Each store is spritzed hourly with men’s
cologne in order to ensure a pleasant sensory experience. Every store
plays the same pre-produced music segment for a period of four to five
weeks and has instructions on how loud the music is to be played at
certain times of the day or week. Abercrombie & Fitch has become
notorious for loud, pulsing dance music, often eliciting complaints from
mall operators and tenants for disrupting other customers and stores.
Merchandising is managed in a similar fashion. Every week, each store is
sent a booklet—often over 100 pages long—detailing the exact
specifications for placing merchandise on the sale floor. Older
merchandise is shuffled around to provide a different presentation for
frequent customers each time they enter the store, while new items are
generally placed out in the front rooms for display. Apparel is laid out
so that customers can feel the fabrics, contributing to the sensory
experience offered in-store.
The company manages merchandising, distribution, and sales by assigning
each store a tier level (1, 2, 3, 4, or 5) and a volume level (A, B, C,
D, E, or F). Tier level determines what selection of the current
clothing line is sent to a store. Tier 1 stores receive all of the
current items in all styles and colors, for example, while lower tier
stores are sent less merchandise in a smaller range of sizes and colors.
A store's tier level is independent of its volume, since allocation is
often dependent on available area of selling space. Some small stores
are relatively high volume, but lack the floor space needed to support
the entire line. A store can have different tier designations for its
men's and women's sides. (Women's retail normally outperforms men's by a
ratio of about 2:1, though in certain markets the difference is greater
or less.) The company designates Volume A stores, usually in major
cities and tourist destinations, as "elite" or "super-elite." There are
three super elite (AA) stores (Ala Moana in Honolulu, Aventura in Miami,
and South Street Seaport in New York City) and less than thirty elite
(A) stores in the chain.
The company has opted to build only large stores, averaging 8,000 to
20,000 square feet (700 to 2,000 m²) in high-volume retail centers
around the country. Throughout the 1990s, Abercrombie & Fitch enjoyed
sales of over $400/ft² ($4300/m²) —high by retail standards—but that
number has dropped significantly in recent years. As of 2003, sales were
$345/ft² ($3700/m²). The rapid expansion of the chain from 1999-2003, in
addition to the introduction of the company’s more moderately priced
concept Hollister Co., arguably contributed to a decrease in same-store
sales (an important measure of retail performance) across the chain
during that time period.
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Abercrombie Fitch
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Abercrombie & Fitch GM leaves company
bizjournals.com via Yahoo! Finance - Oct 17 9:07 AM The general manager of Abercrombie & Fitch Co.'s flagship apparel chain has left the company.
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Last Update: 2006-10-18 07:59:17 |
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