The Abercrombie & Fitch case: an example of successful repositioning

I was twelve when, on the streets of Boston, I first came across Abercrombie & Fitch.

At the time the brand was not yet well known in Italy, but above all nobody knew what brand positioning meant or what a Brand Strategy was, so its formula struck me. The long queues, the scent in the air, the dim lighting in every room. It was a new way – for me at least – of approaching a purchase: of experiencing shopping.

When you walked in, you felt cool. More fashionable, more attractive. Just by walking in.

It would not be long before the brand landed in Italy too, and within a short time Abercrombie & Fitch became (here as everywhere else) an icon of teenage fashion in the mid-2000s.

And then, just as it had arrived, the brand disappeared. It became irrelevant.

Or at least, for a while it did. And that is only natural: when a strong brand loses ground, for whatever reason, the market keeps its memory. Often to the point of preventing it from becoming something different, so firmly does the image of what it was remain fixed in consumers’ minds.

The same happened to Abercrombie & Fitch.

Between the late Nineties and the early Noughties it had built a world impossible to confuse with that of any competitor. Those dark stores I mentioned, loud music, the Fierce fragrance in the air: and of course the models at the entrance, the sensual photographs, the athletic bodies and an extreme idea of who was allowed to aspire to it.

For years, as we know, this formula worked. But the audience soon grew up, the culture changed (above all with Body positive) and what had made Abercrombie desirable began to look increasingly tied to an era.

In fiscal year 2014 the group recorded around $3.74 billion in sales. The following year they had fallen to around $3.52 billion. The Form 10-K filed with the SEC paints an unforgiving picture: a phase in which the brand was losing momentum and the company was busy rethinking its stores, its assortment and its relationship with the public.

Ten years later, however, the picture is completely different.

Abercrombie & Fitch Co. closed fiscal year 2024 with around $4.95 billion in revenue and $741 million in operating income, both records for the group. The Abercrombie brand alone had exceeded $2.5 billion in sales.

How did it happen? In between lies one of the most interesting repositioning cases of recent years.
Let’s explore it together.

Abercrombie had become too easy to remember

Effective positioning builds strong associations in the minds of the audience. That strength becomes delicate when the associations belong to a market that is drifting away.

Abercrombie had achieved an almost extreme precision. For many consumers the name was synonymous with a stage of life: adolescence, college, American malls, tight polo shirts, sweatshirts with enormous logos. Around that imagery the brand had built a deliberately selective sense of belonging.

The problem began to emerge when that imagery started to lose cultural relevance.

As early as 2015 the company changed the in-store experience. Fewer shirtless models, more light and accessibility (CNN Money).

Those changes signalled a far broader shift. Abercrombie had to choose afresh who it wanted to be relevant to.

The most important decision: choosing a new customer

Fran Horowitz became CEO of Abercrombie & Fitch Co. in 2017. The company itself identifies that year as the start of a new phase of growth and greater clarity across the group’s brands.

One of the most interesting decisions concerned the separation of territories. Hollister keeps a privileged relationship with the younger audience, while Abercrombie progressively shifts its centre of gravity towards young adults and Millennials. The group’s official timeline helps trace this evolution over time.

The boy who bought Abercrombie in 2005 may now be thirty-five or forty. He goes to weddings, works in an office, travels, and looks for trousers that fit well, clothes for specific occasions and pieces that slot easily into his everyday life.

So the company began to build the brand around that life.

In 2022 Horowitz explained that one of the key steps in the work had been to define more clearly the purpose and competitive positioning of each brand. Forbes devoted an in-depth piece to the brand’s reinvention.

This is probably the most useful part of the case for anyone leading a company. Repositioning makes sense when the business knows which market it wants to earn back.

The product made the new positioning credible

Changing a campaign takes a few weeks. Changing what a company sells requires far deeper decisions.

This is where Abercrombie focused most of its work. The range gradually took in larger sizes, different fits, more versatile pieces and categories tied to the adult lives of its new audience.

In 2019 came Curve Love, a denim line cut with more room through the hips and thighs to address one of the problems customers reported most often: the gap between fit at the waist and at the hips. In the years that followed, the fit was extended to numerous categories and became one of the recognisable features of the offer.

The company then developed assortments dedicated to work, activewear and social occasions. The Wedding Shop brought Abercrombie into weddings, fittings, trips and ceremonies: occasions far removed from the image of the early-2000s teen retailer. In 2024 Forbes reconstructed the logic of the turnaround and the expansion into new use occasions.

This is where the case becomes interesting from a positioning perspective. The new perception of the brand was fuelled by new reasons to buy it.

The store, too, had to tell the story of a different Abercrombie

For those who, like me, remember the Abercrombie stores of the 2000s, walking into the shop was part of the product. Darkness, music, fragrance, imagery and staff created a recognisable environment before you even looked at the clothes.

When the customer changes, that experience must also be reassessed.

The company gradually opened up its spaces, increased the lighting and developed smaller, more functional formats, while reducing the number of large stores and strengthening digital. The retail transformation is one of the steps reconstructed in the Forbes case study.

The change in the store shows clearly how far a repositioning runs through the entire company. Product, range, retail, service, communication and distribution must progressively lead towards the same perception.

Then came TikTok

There is also a part of the revival that Abercrombie could hardly have planned in full. The new product met a new system for distributing reputation.

TikTok and Instagram filled feeds with hauls, jeans try-ons, sizing tips and videos of customers rediscovering a brand they had stopped considering years earlier. The surprise was already part of the content: Abercrombie had changed.

The Wall Street Journal covered the turnaround by putting at its centre the attention paid to adult women, to the real occasions in their lives and to the company’s ability to listen to feedback from social media. The Wall Street Journal’s in-depth piece.

The campaigns followed the same direction. With “Denim Your Way”, for example, Abercrombie showcased its customers and community and presented a far broader denim offer than in the past. The company’s press release on the campaign.

Virality accelerated a transformation that the product had already made credible.

The numbers show how much the company has changed

In fiscal year 2023 sales of the Abercrombie brand stood at around $2.20 billion. In 2024 they reached around $2.56 billion, while the group as a whole recorded $4.95 billion in revenue and the highest operating income in its history. The figures are reported in the company’s filings.

Abercrombie & Fitch Co. itself places in 2019 the moment the brand was rethought for the “modern customer”. The corporate timeline shows how that journey was built over several years.

The repositioning brought Abercrombie back to a scale that seemed hard to imagine only a few years earlier. The most useful data point, for anyone studying the case, is the time it took to get there: the shift in perception followed the shift in product and experience, consolidating as the audience found new reasons to come back.

What the Abercrombie case teaches anyone who has to reposition a company

In short, the world changed and Abercrombie chose to change in response.

Its long, slow repositioning therefore has a great deal to teach: three main lessons emerge from this case.

The first concerns when to start. Abercrombie already had awareness. Millions of people knew exactly what it stood for. That very clarity made the distance plain between how the brand was remembered and the market the company wanted to win.

A CEO should therefore watch closely for the moment when established perception stops supporting the company’s strategy. It can happen when the business wants to move upmarket, when its core customer is ageing, when it enters new markets, when the product has changed faster than its reputation, or when the advantage that built its success belongs to a different competitive phase.

The second lesson concerns depth. Abercrombie worked on the customer, the product, sizing, stores, distribution and communication. Brand strategy exists to give a common direction to decisions that are then taken in different parts of the organisation.

Finally, there is the hardest question: how much of the past to carry forward. Abercrombie held an enormous store of memory, awareness and recognisability. It kept the name Abercrombie & Fitch, retained Fierce, its American heritage and part of the aspiration attached to the brand. Meanwhile, it rewrote the meaning attributed to that name.

This is where repositioning becomes a decision for the top.

A company must understand which part of its history continues to create value and which is starting to decide the future in its place.

Abercrombie took years to find that answer. The results explain why it was worth looking for.