Istoria Brandului Abercrombie and Fitch

Walk into any high school or college classroom in your area, and chances are you will see many of the students wearing some item of clothing from Abercrombie & Fitch, be it a pair of jeans, a t-shirt with an off-the-wall slogan, or a baseball cap with a perfectly bent bill. The A&F logo is seemingly everywhere these days and is one of the hottest clothing brands among teenagers and twenty-somethings in America. In fact, Abercrombie & Fitch Co. expects to generate more than $2.5 billion in sales this year at its more than 356 stores across the country.

That’s not bad for a company that started out as a sporting goods store in New York over 100 years ago. According to several websites, company founder David Abercrombie opened his first store in New York City in 1892. Current Abercrombie and Fitch patrons might recognize this date, as it is featured prominently on many Abercrombie t-shirt designs. That, however, is probably the only thing today’s customers would recognize from the first store. The sign over the door read “Abercrombie & Co.” and the merchandise inside consisted not of trendy casual wear, but of hunting, camping, and fishing equipment. Instead of middle- and upper-class suburban kids, Abercrombie’s first customers consisted of rugged outdoorsmen and professional trappers. In 1900, Abercrombie entered into a partnership with a man named Ezra Fitch, who was one of the store’s regular customers, and four years later Abercrombie and Fitch was officially born. Fitch quickly established himself as a forward-thinking futurist and idea man, while the more conventional Abercrombie tried to go about business as usual. Their vastly different management philosophies and visions about the direction of the store soon caused an irreparable strain in their relationship. This ultimately resulted in Abercrombie’s resignation from the company in 1907.

Ezra Fitch was now free to implement his business plans at will. He hired a sales staff made up of people with extensive knowledge of the great outdoors in order to cater to the store’s biggest customer base. He used innovative in-store display techniques to attract new customers. He printed a thick catalog and sent it out to both existing and potential customers, which was a very expensive undertaking at the time. And, in 1913, Abercrombie & Fitch began selling men’s and women’s sportswear and outdoors-related clothing. Over the next several years, Abercrombie & Fitch became the outdoor outfitter of choice among some of America’s most elite individuals, from presidents to movie stars. When Admiral Robert E. Peary made his historic expedition to the North Pole, it was with A&F equipment. It is even purported that Ernest Hemingway bought his shotguns from Abercrombie & Fitch. Subsequent decades brought about many changes for the company, including financial troubles that eventually led to bankruptcy in 1977. Ownership of Abercrombie & Fitch changed hands a couple of times before A&F finally became a public corporation in 1998. The Abercrombie and Fitch style that we associate with the name today is the result of about 113 years of history!