Good morning! Emma here. At the Most Powerful Women Summit in October, I interviewed Abercrombie & Fitch Co. CEO Fran Horowitz about how she recaptured millennial love for the previously-troubled retailer, taking it from cautionary tale to success. My colleague Phil Wahba, Fortune reporter and retail expert, just sat down with Horowitz for more on the latest from Abercrombie. More from Phil below, ahead of Abercrombie & Fitch’s earnings Tuesday:
Corporate turnarounds in retail can often yield good results initially as a CEO grabs low-hanging fruit like closing weak stores or hiring new design teams. But they also tend to fizzle unless the CEO does the deep, years-long work to set up the company for long-term success.
That’s exactly how Abercrombie & Fitch Co under CEO Fran Horowitz is still reporting industry-leading sales growth years into her tenure. When I profiled her in Fortune in 2022, I explored the changes she made to turn around a company seeing precipitous sales declines as shoppers left in droves.
She dropped her predecessor’s autocratic command-and-control way of managing the company in favor of letting the rank and file have more input. She raised the quality of the clothing, reduced the stylistic overlap between the namesake brand and Hollister which had become almost indistinguishable, and, crucially, decided to eschew chasing trends. As she told Emma at the MPW Summit, she never wanted A&F Co. to be “cool.”
