Abercrombie & Fitch, far from the struggling mall brand it once was, has been on a hot streak over the last year.
On Wednesday, Abercrombie & Fitch Co. reported its fifth consecutive quarter of revenue growth. In addition, announcing $4.23 billion in fiscal 2023 revenue, the company beat its goal of $4.1 billion in annual revenue by 2025 over a year ahead of schedule. Abercrombie & Fitch Co.’s fourth-quarter revenue was nearly $1.5 billion, marking a 21% year-over-year increase.
Glossy has been covering the return of Abercrombie & Fitch since as far back as 2021, when the brand’s mission to shed the problematic, exclusionary reputation of its past first started to pay off. Since then, Abercrombie & Fitch has extended its size ranges, captured a broader audience on TikTok and continued to grow its sales each year.
On the earnings call on Wednesday, group CEO Fran Horowitz said the company’s recent success has given the leadership team confidence that it can both deepen its existing audience and expand geographically and demographically.
“2024 should be a proof point of our ability to balance the pursuit of new growth opportunities, while also maintaining strong financial discipline,” Horowitz said on the call. “We believe we can continue our trajectory into 2024, growing across regions and brands and building to our longer-term ambition of $5 billion in global sales [by 2025]. 2023 has given us confidence that we are on the right path.” Abercrombie & Fitch Co.’s owned brands include Abercrombie & Fitch, Hollister and Gilly Hicks, among others.
The next big category expansion for Abercrombie & Fitch is bridal, a growing industry worth $61 billion globally according to Research and Markets. On Thursday, Abercrombie is launching the online A&F Wedding Shop featuring over 100 pieces including bridal dresses, bridesmaids dresses and apparel geared toward bachelorette parties and trips, including swimwear. Abercrombie already sold some bridal wear, but this will be its first focused hub and it introduces an expanded bridal assortment. The pieces range in price from $29-$200, in keeping with the middle-ground sweet spot Abercrombie has cultivated between ultra-fast fashion and higher-end brands.
The A&F Wedding Shop can be accessed from the main Abercrombie online store, in a separate tab dedicated to bridal products. In recent years, Abercrombie’s core customer has leaned Gen Z, a demo that is soon coming into the marrying age.
The A&F Wedding Shop will put Abercrombie more directly in competition with some of its contemporaries like URBN-owned Anthropologie, which has staked a claim on the bridal category through its newly formed Anthropologie Weddings division.
The lower prices are set to help the brand play into one of the defining bridal trends of the moment: wearing a wider variety of clothes throughout wedding celebrations. Many brides choose to wear different dresses for their ceremony and their reception, while wearing even more outfits throughout these events is catching on.
“Abercrombie’s customers view weddings as multi-faceted experiences, which is why we designed this collection to be the outfitting solution for so many wedding-related occasions,” Corey Robinson, chief product officer at Abercrombie, told Glossy. “The A&F Wedding Shop’s pieces collectively tell the story of the modern wedding experience, from the bridal shower and the bachelorette party to the wedding-day prep, ceremony, reception and brunch, and even the honeymoon. It has it all.”
The collection is primarily being marketed on Abercrombie’s TikTok account, where Abercrombie has over 150,000 followers. Abercrombie plans to increase its investment in marketing this year, especially on TikTok, Horowitz said. Additionally, the company will open more stores and host 60 in-store activations throughout 2024.
