By Nathan Sommer
Murphy News Service
Evolving consumer preferences have youth-targeted mainstream clothing retailers such as Abercrombie & Fitch Co, Aeropostale and Hollister Co. facing downturns in sales and plunging stock market prices over the past five years.
Each company has struggled to anticipate and adjust to morphing needs and desires, as young consumers are increasingly turning to simple, more original styles offered by boutiques and rising large, more price-conscious retailers such as Forever 21 and H&M.
Abercrombie & Fitch Co experienced seven straight quarters of declining sales in 2012 and 2013, Bloomberg News reported. The company’s most recent quarterly sales were down 7 percent, 3 percentage points more than the drop originally estimated by Consensus Matrix.
Comparably, Hollister saw its revenue diminish by 10 percent, almost double the anticipated decline Consensus Matrix had projected for the retailer.
“Buyers do not want to consume these mass-produced products in a mass-scale environment anymore,” said Juanjuan Wu, associate professor and director of the University of Minnesota’s retail merchandising program in the College of Design’s Department of Design, Housing and Apparel. She added, “They want something unique that appears to be one-of-a-kind and specially made just for them.”
Wu said trends in mainstream fashion retailing are dictated by cultural norms and guidelines, as consumers constantly seek new products and experiences.
“Buyers want to fit in with their social groups and to be a part of the rest of society,” Wu said, “Within this framework, they also want to be different,” an impulse that had led to the current rise of customizable fashion.
Logo-centric brands such as Hollister and Aeropostale are beginning to adapt to the growing trend, but they have new competition in the form of online sites such as Zazzle, Etsy and Redbubble. Those sites have thrived in a redefined industry that Wu says “allows the individual creativity of consumers to be materialized by giving them the ability to customize their own clothing.”
Where before many consumers turned to larger retailers to determine what was and was not fashionable, the buyers themselves are now taking some of control, which is creating a discrepancy between customer opinion and the clothing mainstream retailers are offering.
Emily Spang, store manager of the Patina boutique’s northeast Minneapolis location, acknowledged the divergence of preferences between companies and their buyers from her time as a former employee of one of the struggling major retailers.
“They seemed to be creating clothing that was brand-focused, fit with the style they wanted their brand to portray rather than what the customer wanted,” Spang said. This created an environment where Spang said the company needed “to force sales through suggestive selling to make sales goals, forcibly moving product instead of creating pieces that met the consumer’s needs.”
Additionally, Wu said she thinks retailers like Abercrombie and Hollister have not done an effective job at continuing to satisfy their core base of the past as they age into their 20s and 30s and generally could do better at appealing to the next generation of buyers.
This disconnect was reaffirmed by University of Minnesota sophomore Tasha Carlson, who, when asked her opinion of Abercrombie’s clothing, said “I used to wear it in middle school but now I would never because they are just T-shirts with a name on it,” adding that the products of these brands made her feel like a “walking billboard.”
Fellow University of Minnesota student Andrew Juneau agreed with Carlson’s sentiment, saying “I don’t like wearing clothing with huge logos because I don’t know enough about those companies to walk around boldly representing them everywhere I go.”
As a college student, Carlson said she and her friends shop at retailers whose clothing is “comfortable but also fashionable in a way that is not dressing down or duplicating the styles of anybody else.” Juneau looks for basic, simple styles from stores such as H&M, with an emphasis on “nothing too flashy or ridiculous.”
In order to overcome growing negative public perception, Wu says brands like Hollister “need to latch on to or capitalize on these new trends, completely shifting their thoughts about what the new generation of consumers really want.” This could include involving more buyer input or a campaign allowing their core base of consumers to help co-design the line.
Spang agreed, saying “putting more thought into their product and re-evaluating who their consumer is are two large areas of improvement that would transform these brands into being more competitive within the marketplace.”
Aeropostale has already began putting this idea into action, recently joining forces with teen-Youtube fashion sensation Bethany Mota, whose videos have surpassed 600 million combined views and are wildly successful with the company’s targeted demographic, to co-design a new collection of clothing.
It is moves such that, Wu said, will help struggling retailers move their brand efficiently into the next era of fashion. “As a brand, if they are continuing to do the old way of thinking, creating the same product and maintaining the old aesthetic, they will inevitably be out and will not maintain a customer following,” Wu said, adding “Bottom line, the most important thing is they need to change.”
Nathan Sommer is studying journalism at the University of Minnesota.