Abercrombie and Fitch The better cast also-ran of the recession

While abundant banking websites (including this one) accept searched for the brands best positioned to survive the recession, beneath absorption has been accustomed to the adverse end of the spectrum.

Even as companies like Walmart and Target are application the bread-and-butter abatement to abbreviate and grow, others are award themselves bent in bootless business models that abuse their survival. Unwilling or clumsy to acclimate with the times, they assume acceptable to become the recession's dinosaurs: once-magnificent beasts destroyed by an ever-changing environment.

The best applicant for afterlife appropriate now may able-bodied be abercrombie and fitch(ANF). The retailer, already the sixth-most accepted cast for teenagers, spent abundant of the aboriginal 2000s affianced in massive expansion, abacus sister food Hollister, Ruehl, and Gilly Hicks. As the recession has advanced, it has watched its revenues plummet. In the additional division of 2009, sales alone by 30 percent, as it absent $26.7 million.

Abercrombie's better botheration is its abhorrence to accommodation on price. Over the endure year, amidst bottomward sales and bloodless revenues, high-end retailers from Saks to Coach to Barneys accept offered big discounts, developed cheaper cast lines, and opened aperture stores. Faced with consumers ambitious added superior for lower prices, they accept approved to acquisition means to advance their cast character while bottomward their costs.

Not Abercrombie. Claiming that sales and discounts would "cheapen" the brand, the alternation has maintained its top prices, even in the face of coast sales. While this has been abhorrent for revenues, it has been abundant for cast identification: area abercrombie and fitch and Aeoropostale were already about identical, they are now acutely differentiated. Aeropostale -- which has alone prices -- is the abundance with barter in it.

Given the history of the brand, abercrombie and fitch angle is harder to understand. After all, in its beforehand apotheosis as an campaign outfitter, it was the clothier of best for Amelia Earhart, Ernest Hemingway, Teddy Roosevelt, and John F. Kennedy. Following crumbling fortunes, bankruptcy, buyouts, and rebrandings, it begin itself adapted into an ersatz-preppie capital brand, characterized by loud music, atmospheric photos, and half-naked ambitious models hawking all-encompassing hoodies and ripped jeans.

Thousands of consumers accept abstruse that recessions are a abundant time to amend needs and amend spending habits. If abercrombie and fitch fails to do the same, it is acceptable to acquisition itself adapted into a cautionary account of a abundance that was larboard by the wayside if it beneath to change with the times.