Abercrombie & Fitch Loses Its Cool
The retailer stubbornly clings to luxury while everyone else cuts prices. By Caitlin McDevitt of The Big Money To the dismay of the Abercrombie & Fitch empire, teenagers whose parents have cut back on their allowances may be coming to…
The retailer stubbornly clings to luxury while everyone else cuts prices.
By Caitlin McDevitt of The Big Money
To the dismay of the Abercrombie & Fitch empire, teenagers whose parents have cut back on their allowances may be coming to a recessionary revelation: Paying $90 for torn jeans isn’t that cool anymore.
While other retailers are responding to the downturn with red-lined price tags and tempting promotions, upscale Abercrombie & Fitch (ANF) isn’t budging on its price points. This scarf, for example, will still cost you $58. The company is fiercely protecting its image as a “premium” brand, and, as a result, it’s getting snubbed big time by its once cultlike, ever-loyal fan base. Abercrombie & Fitch just posted a 34 percent drop in same-store sales from last year—the worst among retailers in March.
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Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.
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A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.
TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.
McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.
