Abercrombie & Fitch

a brand in crisis

Abercrombie & Fitch needed to be brought into the 21st Century. Mired in the past and beset with negative opinion, they needed a way to reach out to the youth of today in an authentic and non-patronizing way.

To start, we located a truth about the brand: over their 125 year history, they had always been, for better or for worse, fearless as fuck.

During the late 1800s, they outfitted the brave explorers who risked life and limb to do what was previously thought impossible. In the 20s, their clothes were worn by the most iconic and heralded American authors who brought literature to new heights. In the 60s, the youth who flipped the bird to societal and sexual norms flocked to them for clothes they could truly make their own and in the 90s, they cultivated a daring and risky hyper-sexualized brand image that was found distasteful by pearl-clutching parents but appealed to their college aged kids.

But then, they stopped innovating and stagnated, keeping the same brand identity while their competitors reinvented themselves. So to succeed and make Abercrombie relevant again, we needed to define what fearless as fuck looks like today.

It’s not macho, it’s not loud and it’s not showy.

It’s being truthful to yourself, vulnerable, open, honest and real.

So we located people we believed embodied this modern definition of fearlessness, each in their own unique way.