How a massive rebrand & better UX saved Abercrombie & Fitch
When I was a little kid, I remember my first experiences with brand recognition being for companies like Coca-Cola. I could recall their logo and signature script lettering easily and could identify a Coke can from a mile away. It was the only soda brand we had in my house growing up, and I could probably draw the can design from memory by the time I was 6.
It wasn’t until I was older and studied design more seriously that I started to get a bigger picture of what branding really entails. It encapsulates a lifestyle, a feeling, and makes you want to be a part of it by buying a certain product. Coca-Cola is great, but I wouldn’t say I feel a pull toward it for anything other than its taste.
What made me understand a brand’s power and depth was a store that made me feel either supremely cool or completely lame. It was a company that set the trends and helped cement middle-school reputations. It was the place that essentially sold sex (and migraine-inducing perfume) to kids under 18 years old through the use of their highly-sexualized and explicit advertisements.
Yes, I’m referring to the preppy Mecca itself: Abercrombie & Fitch. Back in A&F’s original glory days in the early aughts, the store was known for its shirtless models, super hot employees, and poorly-lit/migraine-inducing perfumed stores. It was where the hot, popular, skinny, and rich people shopped. It made you want to look like the people who worked there and made you want to be like the people who wore the clothes.
I am now 28 years old and I still vividly remember the whole experience of shopping at an Abercrombie store. I felt genuinely intimidated just walking in, which I think was intentional. The whole experience of shopping here was so perfectly curated and created a lifestyle/mood/attitude surrounding the store. For better or for worse, this was some of the strongest brand creation I’ve ever experienced.
Luckily for us, nothing gold can stay. While A&F was regarded as the place to shop through junior high and high school, people soon tired of the store and its demeaning hiring policies, hyper-sexualized teenagers, and not-so-subtle body shaming. You could barely see the products in the dimly-lit shop, couldn’t hear your friend over the pounding music, and smelled like that cologne for weeks after stepping in the store. Their whole branding, UX, and marketing that worked so well was quickly becoming very tired, and sales reflected this change.
Thank god. Because as I noticed this past week, Abercrombie was forced to make some major changes, both in their physical storefront and online presence, mainly thanks to their new(ish) CEO Fran Horowitz, who says the aim was to become “a much more inclusive company…closer to the customer…responding to the customer wants and not what we want them to want”.
A&F has gone through a major rebranding since 2017. Gone are the days of half-naked young men standing outside the store. No more borderline explicit advertisements. And there is actually enough light to allow customers to move around the store comfortably. The brand aimed to recreate itself as warm, inviting, and inclusive, and clearly, its physical changes have succeeded.
But what of inclusivity? A major issue taken with Abercrombie is how uninclusive it was and how that was almost the point. It wasn’t meant to be a brand for everyone — it was meant for the hot, popular, and skinny. And based on its lack of inclusion of POC, it was also meant for white people.
By taking a look through Abercrombie’s redesigned website, I not only notice improvements in the overall UI (strong branding, pleasant imagery, clean typography), but I also see how intense the rebranding and user experience changes have been. The UX is now in line with their changes in physical stores — clean, bright, inviting, inclusive. There are images of plus-sized models displayed front and center, expanded size ranges, POC models, and unretouched images. A&F made huge alterations to their UX and brand to no longer feel like the unapproachable popular kid. Now, Abercrombie and Fitch has risen up again, and they are making trendy, comfortable clothing for every body, even this size 12, 28-year-old woman. Old Abercrombie is rolling in its well-deserved grave).
