Why Hermès Is Growing While LVMH And Gucci Decline

The Birkin bag by Hermès / VÍDEO: How to Authenticate Hermès Birkin Bags (Secret Vintage Collection)

The Birkin bag is a personal accessory of luggage or a tote by Hermès that is handmade in leather and named after actress and singer Jane Birkin. The bag is currently in fashion as a symbol of wealth due to its high price and use by celebrities.

Its prices range from £7,500 to £100,000 (US$11,550 to US$150,000). Costs escalate according to the type of leather and if exotic skins were used. The bags are distributed to Hermès boutiques on unpredictable schedules and in limited quantities, creating artificial scarcity and exclusivity. Small versions (25 cm) may be considered a handbag or purse.

In 1981, Hermès chief executive Jean-Louis Dumas was seated next to Jane Birkin on a flight from Paris to London. She had just placed her straw travelling bag in the overhead compartment for her seat, but the contents fell to the deck, leaving her to scramble to replace them. Birkin explained to Dumas that it had been difficult to find a leather weekend bag she liked.

In 1984, he created a black supple leather bag for her, based on a 1982 design. She used the bag initially, but changed her mind because she was carrying too many things in it: “What’s the use of having a second one?” she said laughingly. “You only need one and that busts your arm; they’re bloody heavy. I’m going to have to have an operation for tendonitis in the shoulder." Nevertheless, since that time, the bag has become a status symbol.

In an August 2015 New York Times article and its accompanying style feature video by Bill Cunningham a moulded rubber bag bearing the same style seemed to have become ubiquitous in Manhattan, along with examples of the authentic ones. A significantly lower cost was reported for the rubber totes, being comparable to typical leather handbags.

Design

Birkin bags are sold in a range of sizes. Each one may be made to order with different customer-chosen hides, colour, and hardware fixtures. There are other individual options, such as diamond-encrusting.

The bag also comes in a variety of hides such as calf leather, lizard, and ostrich. Among the most expensive used to be saltwater crocodile skin and bags with smaller scales cost more than those with larger scales. In 2015, however, Jane Birkin asked Hermès to stop using her name for the crocodile version due to ethical concerns. Each bag is lined with goat-skin, the colour of the interior matching the exterior. Prices for the Birkin bag depend on type of skin, the colour, and hardware fixtures.[8]

Sizes range from 25-, 30-, 35-, to 40-centimeters, with travelling bags of 50- and 55-centimeters. It also comes in a variety of colours such as black, brown, golden tan, navy blue, olive green, orange, pink, powder blue, red, and white.

* The bag has a lock and keys. The keys are enclosed in a leather lanyard known as a clochette, carried by looping it through a handle. The bag is locked by closing the top flaps over buckle loops, wrapping the buckle straps, or closing the lock on the front hardware. Locks and keys are number-coded. Early locks only bore one number on the bottom of the lock. In more recent years, Hermès has added a second number under the Hermes stamp of the lock. The numbers for locks may be the same for hundreds of locks, as they are batch numbers in which the locks were made.

The metallic hardware (the lock, keys, buckle hardware, and base studs) are plated with gold or palladium to prevent tarnishing. Hardware is updated regularly to maintain the quality available in the industry at time of production. The metal lock may be covered with leather as a custom option. Detailing with diamonds is another custom option.

Hermès offers a "spa treatment" – a reconditioning for heavily-used bags.

A "Shooting Star" Birkin has a metallic image resembling a shooting star, stamped adjacent to the "Hermès, Paris Made in France" stamp, that is in gold or silver to match the hardware and embossing. Rarely, the stamp is blind or colourless, if the bag is made of one or two leathers onto which no metallic stamping is used. Sometimes, Birkins or other Hermès bags may be made by independent artisans for "personal use", but only once a year. Every bag bears the stamp of the artisan who made the bag. These identifications vary widely, but are not different for every bag made. Finding stamps of more than one artisan on a bag occurs because the stamp is not a serial reference. Fonts and the order of stamping may vary, depending on the artisans.

The Birkin bag may be distinguished from the similar Hermès Kelly handbag by the number of its handles. The single-handle handbag is the Kelly, but the Birkin has two handles.

The bags are handmade in France by expert artisans. The company's signature saddle stitching, developed in the 1800s, is another distinctive feature.

Each bag is hand-sewn, buffed, painted, and polished, taking several days to finish. An average bag is created in 48 hours. Leathers are obtained from different tanners in France, resulting in varying smells and textures. Because of varying individual skills, other details of the bags may not match with other bags. The company justifies the cost of the Birkin bag, compared to other bags, based on the meticulous craftsmanship and scarcity.

According to a 2014 estimate, Hermès produced 70,000 Birkin bags that year. The bag is highly coveted and, for several years, was reputed to have a waiting list of up to six years. The rarity of these bags are purportedly designed to increase demand by collectors.

As a result of the strong demand, the Birkin bag has a high resale value in many countries, especially in Asia, and to such an extent that the bag is considered by some people as an instrument of investment. One 2016 study found that Birkin bags had average annual returns of 14.2% between 1980 and 2015, significantly beating the S&P 500 Index. In April 2010, Hermès announced that the waiting list would no longer exist, implying that it is potentially available to all.

The Philippine Star reported in March 2013, that a very high-end, 30-cm Shiny Rouge H Porosus Crocodile Birkin with 18K gold fittings and encrusted with diamonds fetched US$203,150 at an auction in Dallas, Texas.

In her memoir, The Primates of Park Avenue, author Wednesday Martin recounts how Birkin bags signal social class status on the Upper East Side.

 

Hermès and Jane Birkin resolve spat over crocodile handbags

Actor withdrew name from product after Peta video showed cruelty at slaughter farm, which French luxury fashion house says was isolated incident

Angelique Chrisafis in Paris

Friday 11 September 2015 18.49 BST

https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2015/sep/11/hermes-jane-birkin-crocodile-handbag-peta-luxury

In the moneyed and cut-throat world of French luxury goods, no brand dares lose a glamorous ambassador in a public spat over a handbag. So it was with relief that the fashion house Hermès announced on Friday it had patched things up with the actor and singer Jane Birkin, following a row over animal rights.

In July, Birkin had demanded Hermès remove her name from its Birkin Croco bag after learning of “cruel practices” used against crocodiles in its production. She had been moved to act after seeing a video released by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, showing how live reptiles were skinned or sawed open on farms that supplied luxury brands.

On Friday, however, the French leather-goods firm said it had identified an “isolated irregularity” in the slaughter process at a crocodile farm in Texas and had warned the farm it would cease any relations should it continue to neglect its recommended procedures.

“Jane Birkin has advised us that she is satisfied by the measures taken by Hermès,” the company added.

Birkin’s public takedown of Hermès over the Birkin Croco – one of the world’s most expensive and sought-after handbags – had been a fashion world embarrassment.

Birkin is still hugely popular in France, where she arrived in the 1960s as a 21-year-old, awkwardly shy, home counties English rose and shot to fame singing the the 1969 heavy-breathing melody Je T’aime Moi Non Plus with her partner, Serge Gainsbourg, France’s biggest rock star, poet and provocateur.

The story of the chance invention of the Hermès Birkin bag had long been one of the cleverest marketing narratives in the luxury goods world, providing a human touch often missing from sleek leather products.

In the 1980s, so the tale goes, Birkin had been upgraded on an Air France flight and was fiddling with the contents that had fallen out of a mundane handbag, two days after her then-husband, Jacques Doillon, had reversed his car over the cherished basket she used to carry as well, “crushing it on purpose”.

When the passenger sat next to her suggested she needed a bag with pockets, she said: “The day Hermès makes one with pockets I will have that.” He turned out to be the Hermès chief executive and they came up with a design together on the back of a sick bag, in exchange for the use of her name.

Hermès prides itself on its reputation. The company is one of the world’s last high-end labels to remain independent, defiantly resisting conglomerates and what it scathingly calls “mass-market techniques”. It is still controlled by various branches of the family descended from the saddlemaker who founded the firm in 1837.

Its status and traditional production methods – each bag is made by hand in France by one artisan devoted entirely to that piece – have seen it boost sales and weather various financial crises that have shaken other parts of the luxury goods market.

The Birkin Croco – with a starting retail price of more than €20,000 (£14,700) – and its cousin, the Kelly, named after actress Grace Kelly, are among the most sought-after luxury goods in the world.

Birkin bags comes in all types of materials, from leather to ostrich skin, and Hermès produces fewer than there is demand for, creating waiting lists that have seemingly made celebrities from Victoria Beckham to the Kardashians, even keener to acquire their own and be photographed carrying one.

The Hermès ( Grace ) Kelly Bag ...

Jun 12, 2008 in suite 101.com
Gill Hart
Women the world over love the classic lines of a Hermès Kelly bag. Named after Grace Kelly, Princess Grace of Monaco, the Kelly is one of the greatest bags of our time. One of the most sought-after purses of recent decades has to be the Hermès Kelly bag, a timeless handbag design, right up there with it’s sister, the Hermès Birkin. The Kelly bag, however, has enjoyed a longer life than its sibling, when it was thrust into the limelight in 1956.

The origins of the Kelly first appeared, in its original form in the 1930’s but it wasn’t until 1956 that it truly became a star. With its smart tailored-shape it evolved into a ‘50s favorite during the Hollywood glamour years, and has enjoyed an iconic status ever since.

Why the Kelly Bag is So Named
The Kelly bag is so named after the actress Grace Kelly, when in 1956, the then Princess of Monaco used one of her two favorite Hermès bags to shield her pregnant stomach from the prying eyes of the paparazzi. Photographs of her covering her stomach bulge with her hallowed Hermès were splashed all over the world and made it onto the cover of Life magazine!






Hermès fashion house now valued higher than Société Générale
Luxury brand puts France's second biggest bank in the shade as it is valued at €28bn on the Paris stock exchange

Zoe Wood guardian.co.uk, Friday 2 September 2011
The fashion pack has always known a Hermès handbag is a good investment but the clamour to invest in the exclusive French handbag-maker has given it a new wow factor: the super-luxury group is now valued far more highly than France's second biggest bank, Société Générale.

The firm behind the famous Kelly and Birkin bags, which can easily cost more than a car, and the Queen's favourite headscarves is now valued at more than €28bn (£24.5bn) on the Paris stock exchange, while SocGen is worth €18bn. The disparity means the nimble fingers of an Hermès artisan, who spends up to 24 hours painstakingly stitching a bag with one long waxed thread, are valued 30 times higher than the moneymaking brainpower of a SocGen investment banker.

"It is extremely demanding to turn 700-odd bits of leather into a useful bag," says Pierre-Yves Gauthier, head of research at AlphaValue, who says that with a fraction of SocGen's staff and turnover, Hermès's market capitalisation equates to €3.3m per employee.

Luxury goods sales have bounced back from the hiatus caused by financial crisis thanks to the growing ranks of the super-rich in emerging markets such as China who are shopping till they drop at home or abroad. This week Hermès said its sales jumped 22% to €1.3bn in the first six months of the year as consumers in important markets such as the US, which were battered by the recession, rediscovered their taste for the finer things in life.

Indeed such is the demand for the firm's coveted handbags that Patrick Thomas, chief executive, warned of a shortage that would stifle sales in the coming months. "We can only make so many bags," he said, adding that Hermès had hired 400 new staff to raise production of leather goods by nearly 10%.

With 174 years of experience under its buttery leather belt – and still 73% owned by about 60 members of the sprawling founding family – luxury experts put Hermès in a class of its own. Thomas told one interviewer recently: "We try to do poetry and we get excellent economic results." That poetry comes at a price: the Birkin bag, for example, which is named after singer Jane Birkin, starts at £5,400 but can cost as much as £100,000 in exotic skins such as saltwater crocodile.

In the company's main workshop in the Paris suburb of Pantin, time has stood still. There, 340 craftsmen and women spend 18-24 hours handsewing each bag. Only the zipper and inside pocket are finished by machine. Orders can be delayed for several years as the company scours the globe for the right colour of crocodile.

Harrods managing director, Michael Ward, says the waiting list is "the new VIP pass" and after what can be an 18-month wait for a Birkin the store performs an "opening ceremony" when the box arrives: "The last person to touch the bag was the artisan and when [the customer] opens the box she is the next one to touch it."

María Eugenia Girón, a professor at Madrid's IE business school and author of Inside Luxury, says customers will pay for expert craftsmanship that has been passed down through six generations of the business, founded in 1837 by Thierry Hermès, a French harness-maker who supplied the royal houses throughout Europe. "Hermès has the magic combination of tangible and intangible brand values," says Girón. The craft skills make its handbags unique but there is the stardust sprinkled on products such as the Kelly, named after Grace Kelly, which imbues them with the qualities of the princess famed for her style and beauty, she explains.

Girón says Hermès has never made sunglasses because it does not believe it has the rigorous level of manufacturing expertise that would enable it to make "unique, authentic products". You get the picture when you learn that the material for its famous coloured scarves is woven in Lyon from silk raised on its own farm in the mountains of Brazil and the fragrance Un Jardin sur le Toit, launched earlier this year, was concocted by Hermès's own perfumier in Grasse, the world's perfume capital in the south of France.

Pierre Mallevays, a former head of M&A at LVMH, who now runs boutique advisory firm Savigny Partners, says much of Hermès's current success is down to the "brand vision" of Jean-Louis Dumas who took the helm in the late 70s. Dumas relaunched the Kelly in bright colours and introduced the bigger Birkin after a chance meeting with the actress on a Paris-London flight. Birkin told him her Kelly bag was not big enough. "Hermès owns that unique "artisan" space where it can charge a fortune based on the perception that its products are the ultimate degree in craftsmanship and use of the best materials," says Mallevays.

Hermès shares are up 70% this year, closing the week at around €270, turbocharged by the unexpected – and unwanted – arrival of the predatory LVMH luxury group on its shareholder register. The Krug-to-Kenzo group, overseen by Bernard Arnault, France's richest man, has snapped up a 21% stake in Hermès, saying its intentions are friendly.

The Hermès family and Thomas are determined to retain the company's independence with the latter memorably telling a press conference this year that: "If you want to seduce a beautiful woman, you don't start by raping her from behind." Rather more politely, the company has said of LVMH: "[There is] an intruder in the garden but we don't want him in the house."

A merger, Thomas added recently, would "kill" Hermès: "You would keep the brand and keep the name, but Hermès would be dead."

The appeal of Hermès

The past decade has seen a huge rise in the number of women carrying designer handbags, despite their £1,000 price tags. Heavy leather bags with chunky buckles and proper names have become the property of the fashionable masses rather than the preserve of the wealthy. But Hermès bags have managed to retained an air of exclusivity. They cost at least four times as much as the average designer handbag, which makes them unattainable for anyone who is not extremely rich. This has added to their allure, combined with the fact that the brand's most famous style, the Birkin isn't available to buy instantly – instead you have to join a waiting list that can allegedly last years, depending on who you are.

Hermès bags have long had the reputation of being the ultimate "stealth wealth" fashion statement, signalling: "I'm richer and have more influence than you." The label has an equestrian heritage and focuses on the quality of its leather and harness-like fastenings. As a result, the bags are not ostentatious. Nor do they follow trends: many designs remain unchanged for years and they are meant to last a lifetime. This adds an extra dimension to the message: its classic bags also silently say: "My taste is refined and I don't need to show off a label." The Hermès approach has proved so successful that several several other luxury brands, including Céline, have attempted it recently.


The Interesting Hermes Kelly Bag History
By Annieth Wollery

Hermes is a very well known fashion house and brand that is loved by women all over the world. The brand has come up with many unique creations when it comes to handbags, over the years; however, one bag which remains very famous till date is the Hermes Kelly bag which was named after the actress Grace Kelly.

The beautiful actress Grace Kelly also happened to be the Princess of Monaco, and upon her pregnancy after her marriage, she was not very comfortable showing her bulging belly to the media. As a result of that, on her public appearances, she was found to be hiding her pregnancy with her Hermes bag. When more and more people got to know about this little secret, pictures of the actress hiding her pregnancy with her handbag were spread all over the world. The bag then became so famous that it started to be known as the "Kelly Bag".

Even though Hermes has a "Birkin Bag", named after the actress Jane Birkin, the Kelly Bag seems to have surpassed that in terms of hype and popularity. It takes around two alligators' skin to make one Kelly Bag, and the hardware and the design is so classic and beautiful, that the bag is indeed a masterpiece. On more research about the handbag, it was found out that it takes around 18 hours to produce just one such bag.

The Hermes Kelly Bag history story remains interesting and captivating till date, and the designs of the bags from Hermes, Paris, happen to be an inspiration for many new and upcoming fashion designers, and also for those working specifically in the handbag industry.

The Hermes bags can be easily found at any of the official Hermes outlets or with authorised dealers of Hermes bags. There are also many dealers of Hermes bags who have websites of their own, and sell these bags online with great offers of free shipping across the world, and some great discounts too.

There are many different colour options available, and over the years, the kind of materials chosen to design the Kelly bag have also changed, giving the classic design many new versions. You can find out about all these bags at the Hermes website, or at any of their outlets. So if you too are fascinated with the story and history behind the making of the Kelly Bag, then go and get yourself one of these bags today!

Annieth Wollery, Entrepreneur: Full time online marketer/consultant and is the CEO of http://www.vintagedesignerhandbagsonline.com

Inside the Delirious Rise of ‘Superfake’ Handbags

 

Inside the Delirious Rise of ‘Superfake’ Handbags

 

Can you tell the difference between a $10,000 Chanel bag and a $200 knockoff? Almost nobody can, and it’s turning luxury fashion upside down.

 

Credit...Grant Cornett for The New York Times. Set designer: JoJo Li.

 

By Amy X. WangPhotographs by Grant Cornett

Published May 4, 2023

Updated May 5, 2023

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/04/magazine/celine-chanel-gucci-superfake-handbags.html?action=click&module=card&pageType=theWeekenderLink

 

Once upon a time, the legend goes, Theseus slew the Minotaur and sailed triumphantly home to Athens on a wooden ship. The vessel was preserved by Athenian citizens, who continually replaced its rotting planks with strong, fresh timber so a pilgrimage to Delos could be made each year in their hero’s name. Fascinated by this mythical tale, the philosopher Plutarch found it to embody a “logical question of things that grow”: After Theseus’s ship had been stripped of all its original material, could it still be considered the same ship? His question has caromed through centuries of Western thought. What if, Thomas Hobbes wondered, someone rustled up a second boat out of the discarded planks; would you now have two original vessels? And what about our own era of machine-made duplication — does replication strip away the soul of creation?

 

Not long ago, I found myself wandering through Paris with a fake Celine handbag slung over my shoulder. In France, a country that prides itself on originating so much of the world’s fashion, punishments for counterfeiting are severe, to the point that I technically risked three years in prison just by carrying my little knockoff around. But the bag’s fraudulence was undetectable to human eyes. I was toting around a delicious, maddening secret: Like a ship remade with identical wood, the bag on my arm had been built on the same plan, with seemingly the same gleaming materials, as the “original.” Yet it was considered inauthentic, a trick, a cheat.

 

My plunge into the world of fantastically realistic counterfeit purses — known as “superfakes” to vexed fashion houses and I.P. lawyers, or “unclockable reps” to their enthusiastic buyers — began a couple of years earlier, in what I might characterize as a spontaneous fit of lunacy. It was early 2021 when, thrown into sensory overload by grisly pandemic headlines, I found my gaze drifting guiltily to an advertisement in the right margin of a news site, where the model Kaia Gerber arched her arms lovingly around a Celine Triomphe — a plain, itty-bitty rectangular prism that in no universe could possibly be worth, as further research informed me, $2,200.

 

I shut the tab, horrified. Having grown up a first-generation immigrant whose family’s idea of splurging was a monthly dinner at Pizza Hut, I refused to be the type of person who lusted over luxury handbags. I had always understood that these artifacts were not for me, in the way debutante balls or chartered Gulfstreams were not for me. But, days later and still mired in the quicksand of quarantine, I found myself cracking my laptop and Googling “buy Celine Triomphe cheap.” This led me to a Reddit community of replica enthusiasts, who traded details about “trusted sellers” capable of delivering a Chanel 2.55 or Loewe Puzzle or Hermès Birkin that promised to be indistinguishable from the original, and priced at a mere 5 percent or so of the M.S.R.P.

 

Where did these sensational counterfeits come from? Fake goods, as anyone who has ever strolled past the plasticky buffets on the Las Vegas Strip or Manhattan’s Canal Street can tell you, are nothing new or rare. But in the past decade or so, a new breed of knockoff purses has come onto the scene from China — boasting shockingly good quality and slipping through customs gates like sand through a sieve. And, as many an angry resale buyer can attest, they’re able to fool even the most well-trained eye. “It’s a pervasive, tremendous problem,” Bob Barchiesi, president of the International Anti-Counterfeiting Coalition, told me. Hunter Thompson, who oversees the authentication process at the luxury consignment site the RealReal, elaborated: “It’s gotten to the point that you can see something in season replicated within that season.”

 

What was once a sly novelty has bloomed into a gigantic market. In 2016, a Virginia woman was sentenced for buying $400,000 worth of designer purses from department stores, returning high-quality knockoffs and reselling the real bags for profit; the stores went years without catching on. Before the “Real Housewives” star Jen Shah pleaded guilty to telemarketing fraud last year, police raided her house and found shelves and shelves of fake Louis Vuittons mingled with authentic ones. In the pandemic, superfakes went supernova: A killer combo of quarantine malaise, frenzied stimulus-check hobby spending and the rise of sales via social-media sites like Instagram has propelled consumers’ awareness of — and fervor for — these hyperrealistic copycats to new heights. Now especially, in the face of rampant inflation, consumers coveting a $10,000 handbag who are advertised a $100 copycat hardly need an extra push.

 

I WeChatted a seller calling herself Linda — a name that, amid others like Aadi, Aooko, Mr. Bao and Zippy, made her seem the least likely to scam me and/or get me placed on a C.I.A. watch list — and instantly she sent me photos of a dozen possible Triomphes. The seller reassured me that I’d have the chance to “QC” (quality-check) the “PSPs” (pre-shipment photos). A “high tier” version of the bag would come out to about 915 yuan, or $132. Which color would I like?

 

I hesitated for a few days, then texted her: Cream, please. It was the middle of the night in China, but Linda wrote me back within seconds: Done. It would be at my doorstep in about three weeks.

 

Untangling the problem of duplication in the fashion industry is like trying to rewrap skeins of yarn. Designer houses spend billions fighting dupes, but even real Prada Cleos and Dior Book Totes are made with machines and templates — raising the question of what, exactly, is unique to an authentic bag. Is it simply a question of who gets to pocket the money? (Hermès recently mounted, and won, a trademark war against “MetaBirkin” NFTs.)

 

Besides, replication is already threaded through the whole history of clothing. Before industrialization, and well before handbags were popularized as accessories, mimicry was essential to dressmaking: Rich women would observe in-vogue silhouettes, then direct their own seamstresses to duplicate the cuts, waistlines or sleeves. It wasn’t until the mass-production inventions of the 19th century that designers became paranoid about the riffraff’s being able to ape their status symbols. In 1951, the American writer Sally Iselin reported for The Atlantic on the pointedly snobbish shopping culture in Paris. But, she observed, while copyiste was a dirty word in France’s haute-couture circles, skilled tailors in Rome were more than happy to fit her with cheaper twins of the same ball gowns.

 

In Iselin’s time, such boutiques were a guilty marvel; nowadays, shoppers don’t bat an eye at the idea of snapping up a Balenciaga silhouette from Zara, Shein or AliExpress. Even the superrich crave a good deal, as a Manhattan woman with a treasure trove of superfake Birkins confessed to The Cut last year. On the other side of the world in China — a country that is known for its fake-making and that had no compunctions about building a replica of the Gardens of Versailles — there are, by some estimates, as many as several million people who make a living delivering these good deals.

 

I spoke with Kelly, one such person, seeking to peek under the hood of the shadowy business. (“Kelly” is not her real name; I’m referring to her here by the English moniker that she uses on WhatsApp. I contacted more than 30 different superfake-bag-sellers before one agreed to an interview.) Five years ago, Kelly worked in real estate in Shanghai, but she got fed up with trekking to an office every day. Now she works from home in Guangzhou, often hammering out a deal for a Gucci Dionysus or Fendi Baguette on her phone with one hand, wrangling lunch for her 8-year-old daughter with the other. Kelly finds the whole business of luxury bags — the sumptuous leather, razor-straight heat stamps, hand stitches, precocious metal mazes of prancing sangles and clochettes and boucles and fermoirs — “way too fussy,” she tells me in Chinese. But the work-life balance is great. As a sales rep for replicas, Kelly makes up to 30,000 yuan, or about $4,300, a month, though she has heard of A-listers who net up to 200,000 yuan a month — which would work out to roughly $350,000 a year.

 

On a good day, Kelly can sell more than 30 gleaming Chloés and Yves Saint Laurents, to a client base of mostly American women. “If a bag can be recognized as fake,” she told me, “it’s not a worthwhile purchase for the customer, so I only sell bags that are high-quality but also enticingly affordable — $200 or $300 is the sweet spot.” Kelly keeps about 45 percent of each sale, out of which she pays for shipping, losses and other costs. The rest is wired to a network of manufacturers who divvy up proceeds to pay for overhead, materials and salaries. When a client agrees to order a bag from Kelly, she contacts a manufacturer, which arranges for a Birkin bag to roll out of the warehouse into an unmarked shipping box in a week or so.

 

In Guangzhou, where a vast majority of the world’s superfakes are thought to originate, experts have identified two main reasons behind the illicit goods’ lightning-fast new speeds: sophistication in bag-making technology and in the bag-makers themselves.

 

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One such innovation in the latter is a disjointed, flat-string, hard-to-track supply chain. When the intellectual-property lawyer Harley Lewin was the subject of a New Yorker profile in 2007, he could often be found busting through hidden cellars on raids around the world. But increasingly, Lewin told me, “I’m sort of the guy in the spy novel who’s called ‘Control’ and sits in a room,” trying to sniff out “the bad guys” from screenshots of texts and D.M.s. Counterfeiting operations are no longer pyramid-shaped hierarchies with ever-higher bosses to roll: “Nowadays it’s a series of blocks, the financier and the designers and the manufacturers, and none of the blocks relate to each other,” Lewin explains. “So if you bust one block, odds are they can replace it in 10 minutes. The person you bust has very little information about who organizes what and where it goes.” Indeed, Kelly, even though she has sold every color variation of Louis Vuitton Neverfull under the sun, only handles bags in person on rare occasions to inspect quality. Sellers don’t stock inventory. They function as the consumer-facing marketing block, holding scant knowledge of how other blocks operate. Kelly just gets daily texts from a liaison at each outlet, letting her know of their output: “The factories won’t even tell us where they are.”

 

As for how the superfakes are achieving their unprecedented verisimilitude, Lewin, who has observed their factories from the inside, says it’s simply a combination of skillful artisanship and high-quality raw materials. Some superfake manufacturers travel to Italy to source from the same leather markets that the brands do; others buy the real bags to examine every stitch. Chinese authorities have little to no incentive to shut down these operations, given their contributions to local economies, the potential embarrassment to local ministers and the steady fraying of China’s political ties with the Western nations where savvy online buyers clamor for the goods. “They avoid taxes,” Lewin says. “The working conditions are terrible. But all of that goes to turning out a very high-quality fake at very low cost.”

 

For replica enthusiasts on Reddit, “187 Factory” is legendary for its top-notch Chanel bags. It commands a premium of $600 for a caviar-leather quilted double-flap — pricier than a midtier $200 rep, but still far from the bag’s asking price at a Chanel boutique ($10,200) or on resale sites ($5,660 for one in “very good” condition on Fashionphile, $3,600 for one with “heavy scratches” and “noticeable balding” on the RealReal). But as Kelly describes it, “187 Factory” sounds like a branding ploy for what’s really just a well-organized chain of blocks, functionally indistinguishable from other miniature companies making premium knockoffs out of the same buckles and patterns. Kelly always lets clients know that she can get them equal-quality bags for less than what the 187 people charge. Still, many buyers insist they must have a “bag from 187.” Some have told Kelly that they’ve saved paychecks for months just to buy a 187 Chanel — in a curious echo of the fervent consumers doing the same for the authentic bags.

 

Those whose business it is to verify luxury bags insist, at least publicly, that there’s always a “tell” to a superfake. At the RealReal, where designer handbags go through rounds of scrutiny, including X-rays and measuring fonts down to the millimeter, Thompson told me that “sometimes, an item can be too perfect, too exacting, so you’ll look at it and know something is up.” And, he added, touch and smell can be giveaways. Rachel Vaisman, the company’s vice president of merchandising operations, said the company will contact law-enforcement officials if it suspects a consignor is sending in items with the intent to defraud.

 

But one authenticator I spoke with confesses that it’s not always so clear-cut. The fakes “are getting so good, to the point that it comes down to inside etchings, or nine stitches instead of eight,” he told me. “Sometimes you really have no idea, and it becomes a time-consuming egg hunt, comparing photos on other websites and saying, ‘Does this hardware look like this one?’” (He asked to remain anonymous because he is not permitted to speak on behalf of his company.) He and his colleagues have their theories as to how the superfakes that come across their desks are so jaw-droppingly good: “We suspect it’s someone who maybe works at Chanel or Hermès who takes home real leathers. I think the really, really good ones have to be from people who work for the companies.” And every time a brand switches up its designs, as today’s fast-paced luxury houses are wont to do, authenticators find themselves in the dark again.

 

Though U.S. officials try valiantly to sniff out impostor goods, too, seizing more than 300,000 fake bags and wallets in fiscal year 2022, the sheer volume of counterfeit imports — fakes in general are estimated to be a bustling, multibillion-dollar industry — means that authorities are able to inspect, on some estimates, as little as 5 percent of what comes in. For superfake sellers and buyers, those are great odds.

 

After weeks, and hundreds of anxious Control-Rs on the DHL tracking page, and a daily pondering about what my mother might say when she encountered my mug shot on the evening news, my Celine Triomphe finally materialized — anticlimactically, in a manner much like anything else I’d ever ordered online. The box was lightly battered from having traveled through Abu Dhabi and, funnily enough, a network of shipping hubs across France and Italy before it landed in my lap in New York. I ripped open the tissue paper to extract the Triomphe, that glorious vessel, my purse of Theseus. By sight, nothing was detectable. I faithfully counted the stitches, measured dimensions. Underneath my hand, the leather did feel a bit stiff, rather less plush than the version I’d fondled for an unnecessary amount of time at Celine’s Soho boutique beforehand. But this giveaway, this “tell,” would graze against my shoulder and no one else’s.

 

A strange, complicated cloud of emotions engulfed me wherever I carried the bag. I contacted more sellers and bought more replicas, hoping to shake it loose. I toted a (rather fetching) $100 Gucci 1955 Horsebit rep through a vacation across Europe; I’ve worn the Triomphe to celebrity-flooded parties in Manhattan, finding myself preening under the approving, welcome-into-our-fold smiles of wealthy strangers. There is a smug superiority that comes with luxury bags — that’s sort of the point — but to my surprise, I found that this was even more the case with superfakes. Paradoxically, while there’s nothing more quotidian than a fake bag that comes out of a makeshift factory of nameless laborers studying how to replicate someone else’s idea, in another sense, there’s nothing more original.

 

While a wardrobe might reveal something of the wearer’s personality and emotion, a luxury handbag is a hollow basin, expressing nothing individualistic at all. Instead, a handbag communicates certain ineffable ideas: money, status, the ability to move around in the world. And so, if you believe that fashion is inherently all about artifice — consider wink-wink items like Maison Margiela’s Replica sneaker, or the mind-​boggling profits of LVMH’s mass-produced luxury items — then there is an argument to be made that the superfake handbag, blunt and upfront to the buyer about its trickery, is the most honest, unvarnished item of all.

 

I asked the writer Judith Thurman, whose sartorial insights I’ve always admired, about the name-brand handbag’s decades-long hold on women. Why do we yearn for very expensive sacks in the first place? Why do some buyers submit to thousand-dollar price hikes and risk bankruptcy for them? “It’s a kind of inclusive exclusiveness,” Thurman told me. “A handbag is a little treat, and it’s the only fashion item that is not sacrificial.” Clothes, with their unforgiving size tags and rigid shapes, can instill a cruel horror or disappointment in their wearers. Bags, meanwhile, dangle no shame, only delight. “There is an intangible sense when you are wearing something precious that makes you feel more precious yourself,” she theorizes. “And we all need — in this unbelievable age of cosmic insecurity — a little boost you can stick over your shoulder that makes you feel a bit more special than if you were wearing something that cost $24.99. It’s mass delusion, but the fashion business is about mass delusion. At what point does a mass delusion become a reality?”

 

Thurman’s first designer-bag splurge was an Issey Miyake Bao Bao she bought for the full retail price of about $900. (“In buying that bag, I became an insane person.”) After it fell apart from wear, she couldn’t justify the price of another — and Issey Miyake had also stopped making her preferred model. So she went on Alibaba and bought two cheap replicas. “It was very strange,” Thurman says. “There was an aura to the real thing that the fake didn’t have. And if you ask me what does that mean, I really almost can’t say. Part of it was the spirit of going to the shop and paying more money than I could afford.”

 

Volkan Yilmaz goes by Tanner Leatherstein on TikTok, where some 800,000 followers watch him slash and tear popular silhouettes from Chanel or Louis Vuitton apart at the seams to assess whether the quality of any given handbag is “worth it” from a quality and craftsmanship perspective. (Spoiler: Very rarely so. With the exception of Bottega Veneta or Hermès.) “A luxury bag’s cost is never about its material,” Yilmaz told me.

 

That the profits of one idea’s relentless duplications funnel only into one (fat, corporate) pocket is precisely why many younger consumers see fake bags as better than the real thing. To them, counterfeit luxury — in a world already awash in lower-priced “dupes” of every kind, from eye shadows to electronics — is not an unethical scandal but a big, joyful open secret. Replica communities laugh at big luxury firms, taking on a subversive, stick-it-to-the-man attitude. A handbag “is a mass-produced item — it’s not a piece hanging in a museum,” Kirstin Chen, who was inspired to write her novel “Counterfeit” by the Virginia woman who scammed department stores, said to me. Jordan T. Alexander, a 29-year-old TikTok creator who has made videos about replica bags, told me she sometimes thinks of them as “the democratization of fashion.” Trina, a woman who sells imported replicas to customers in Las Vegas and requested to be identified only by her first name, sees the most passion for fakes among middle-class women of color who seem emboldened to find themselves with access to a different world: “A bag gives a woman a more classy demeanor. The woman who is walking out of Target, getting in their vehicle or whatever, feeling good? That’s what it’s all about.”

 

In the face of widening wealth disparity around the globe, it’s no longer fashionable anyway to gate-keep expensive things. The actress Jane Birkin, who lent her name to Hermès’s crown jewel, shrugs at fake Birkins: “It’s very nice that everyone’s got one or wants one,” she told Vogue in 2011. “If people want to go for the real thing, fine. If they go for copies, that’s fine, too. I really don’t think it matters.” The first recorded instance of the English word “snob” dates back to 18th-century cobblers, and was soon used in reference to any person of low rank. (One rumor, though unsubstantiated, pins the etymology to the Latin phrase sine nobilitate, or “without nobility.”) According to the Oxford Dictionary of Word Origins, university students snickered at the lowly “snobs” outside their gates, and the word eventually came to describe people who tried to mimic their more well-to-do neighbors — early templates of today’s schemers, scammers, wannabes — only for the word to come to define this elite group’s own high-class arrogance.

 

Was I a snob in the original sense or the contemporary one? I’d been drawn to multithousand-dollar designer bags because they felt so elusive and unavailable, but now that they, via superfakes, had become available to me, I no longer really wanted them; the pursuit of them had started to feel, I realized at some point, marvelously worthless.

 

I asked Kelly what she thought about her clients and their obsessive yearning for these brilliant, mundane, often aesthetically unimaginative tiny objects. I yearned for her to unfurl my unease, to rip open the secret seams and expose something profound.

 

“You know, there’s an old saying in Chinese,” Kelly told me.

 

I thought she was about to recite a fragment of an ancient poem, or to synthesize the joy and genius of superfakes into some wonderful proverb that could reconcile our collective love of duplicity with our human insistence on realism. But Kelly, practical, business-minded and raised on a different side of the world, didn’t find my loose-ended Western anxieties all that interesting. Or maybe she had misunderstood what I was asking. Kelly went on: “The saying is, ‘You always get what you pay for.’”

 

Grant Cornett is an artist who resides in the Catskill Mountains. His work focuses on objects and their relation to light and time in natural settings and more composed commercial projects.

 

Amy X. Wang is the assistant managing editor of The New York Times Magazine. @amyxwang

IVY ...IVY ...IVY

 

Abercrombie, Pushing a New Image, Confronts Accusations Against Ex-C.E.O.

 

Abercrombie, Pushing a New Image, Confronts Accusations Against Ex-C.E.O.

 

Recent sex trafficking charges against Michael Jeffries could entangle the retailer, too, as it tries to close a tumultuous chapter in its history.

 

On Tuesday, federal prosecutors charged Michael Jeffries, center, the former longtime chief executive of Abercrombie, with running a sex trafficking scheme from at least 2008 to 2015, while he was at the helm of the company.

 

Danielle Kaye

By Danielle Kaye

Oct. 25, 2024

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/25/business/abercrombie-mike-jeffries-sex-trafficking-charges.html

 

Fran Horowitz, the chief executive of Abercrombie & Fitch, said it plainly: “We are no longer the company that we used to be.”

 

That was in 2017, and Ms. Horowitz was referring to a series of crises that had tainted the clothing retailer during the tenure of her predecessor, Michael S. Jeffries, who had led the company from 1992 to 2014. There were lawsuits accusing Abercrombie of discriminating against Black, Latino and Asian employees; blowback for selling sexualized clothing to children; and accusations that its marketing to “the attractive all-American kid” excluded potential customers based on weight.

 

Under Mr. Jeffries, Abercrombie’s stores emulated nightclubs, with dimmed lighting and images of half-naked young models lining the walls.

 

Ms. Horowitz took the helm in 2017 and revamped the brand’s image. Its stores are brighter, its models are fully clothed and its stock has soared, bolstered by customers’ embrace of the expanded product offerings.

 

For a time, Mr. Jeffries’s legacy seemed to be a dark period that would stay in the past. But new accusations against him, more serious this time around, have come to light. They have threatened Abercrombie’s revamp of its image and could put the company at financial risk.

 

On Tuesday, federal prosecutors charged Mr. Jeffries, 80, with running a sex trafficking scheme from at least 2008 to 2015, while he was at the helm of the company, coercing young men to attend events around the world where he and his romantic partner sexually exploited them. The indictment echoed allegations that were first unearthed last year by a BBC investigation and a lawsuit accusing Mr. Jeffries of using the prospect of modeling jobs at Abercrombie to abuse dozens of men.

 

He was arrested this week in Florida and pleaded not guilty to all the charges on Friday, during his arraignment at a federal courthouse on Long Island. He was released on a $10 million bond with home confinement.

 

The company has denied any involvement in or knowledge of Mr. Jeffries’s activities.

 

“Abercrombie & Fitch Company’s current executive leadership team and board of directors were not aware of the allegations of sexual misconduct by Mr. Jeffries,” said Kate Wagner, a spokeswoman for the company.

 

She said that the company was “appalled and disgusted” by the allegations, and that Abercrombie had “successfully transformed our brands and culture into the values-driven organization we are today.”

 

The federal charges against Mr. Jeffries and two others — Matthew Smith, 61, his romantic partner, and James Jacobson, 71, whom prosecutors accused of acting as a recruiter in the sex trafficking scheme and who also pleaded not guilty — do not explicitly implicate the company. Prosecutors do not have evidence that the alleged crimes happened on company grounds, Breon S. Peace, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York, said at a news conference on Tuesday while announcing the indictment. And prosecutors have not said company resources were involved.

 

But the lawsuit filed in October 2023, on behalf of dozens of men who said they were victims of Mr. Jeffries’s sexual exploitation, named Abercrombie as a defendant. According to the complaint, the company not only knew about Mr. Jeffries’s alleged sex trafficking scheme, but also financed events where the alleged sex abuse took place. The defendants in the case moved this month to dismiss it.

 

“The thing that you’re going to be looking for is knowledge,” said Kenya Davis, a partner at Boies Schiller Flexner and former federal prosecutor. “It will really rise and fall on how much the company knew, and how much the company let this guy do whatever he wanted to do.”

 

The suit makes alarming claims: A video depicting Mr. Jeffries sniffing what appeared to be cocaine off a man’s private body part circulated within the Abercrombie office, but the company did not take action; for several years, Mr. Jeffries was permitted to pay hush money to victims using Abercrombie funds; and in 2010, one model who had been recruited to meet with Mr. Jeffries was given company gift cards to buy Abercrombie clothes.

 

“Without Abercrombie’s knowing participation, the sex trafficking scheme could not have existed and flourished,” the suit said.

 

Ms. Wagner, Abercrombie’s spokeswoman, declined to comment on the allegations in the suit because it was pending litigation. Last year, the company hired a law firm to investigate the accusations against Mr. Jeffries, though the company has not updated the status of that investigation.

 

Elizabeth Fegan, a partner at FeganScott who has represented sexual abuse survivors in high-profile cases including trials against Harvey Weinstein, said there was “fairly abundant” evidence that the company and its former board of directors had abdicated their responsibility to the victims. The board very likely knew, or should have known, about the nefarious activity, she said, adding that juries were more willing, in the post-“Me Too” era, to impose punitive damages on those who enabled or protected perpetrators.

 

But finding corporate liability for Mr. Jeffries’s alleged sex trafficking scheme could be a challenge, lawyers said. Typically, it is not enough to prove that a business has heard rumors about or may have been aware of bad conduct, said Amanda Kramer, a partner at Covington and former federal prosecutor. Liability often comes down to the amount and nature of the knowledge, she said.

 

“There has to be an involvement, and a knowing financial benefit,” Ms. Kramer said. “The way courts seem to be going is requiring more than just passive awareness and general business dealing with a person.”

 

The fact that some of the claims have been made by people who were not working for Abercrombie could be an additional challenge for plaintiffs aiming to hold the company to account, Ms. Kramer said. The standard for corporate liability is “quite different” for conduct perpetrated against an employee or in the workplace, she added.

 

Abercrombie’s strongest defense against liability would be to argue that Mr. Jeffries was acting outside his role at the company, said Heather Cucolo, a professor at New York Law School. But that could be a hurdle for Abercrombie, she said, because the civil suit seemed to indicate a significant connection between the alleged acts and Mr. Jeffries’s position as chief executive.

 

Ms. Cucolo pointed to a decision this year by a judge in Delaware ordering Abercrombie to pay for Mr. Jeffries’s legal fees in the lawsuit, on the basis that the allegations in the case were tied to his role at the company.

 

The heightened attention to Mr. Jeffries’s conduct comes as Abercrombie has continued to overhaul its public image — largely successfully — to lure back customers wary of buying clothes from a brand tainted by scandals. When Mr. Jeffries resigned from Abercrombie in 2014, he left the company with sluggish sales amid discrimination lawsuits and public backlash to its hypersexualized branding. Abercrombie’s sales and stock price were dropping sharply at the time.

 

But in the last fiscal year, the retailer brought in more than $4 billion in revenue, a level not reached in more than a decade.

 

Investors have liked the turnaround: Abercrombie’s share price rose 285 percent last year.

 

It remains to be seen if the new charges against Mr. Jeffries will hurt the retailer in the same way. Both the federal indictment and the civil suit could drag on for months, if not years, adding to public scrutiny of the company.

 

But many customers have become desensitized to allegations of sexual misconduct against people in power, said Shawn Grain Carter, a professor of fashion business management at the Fashion Institute of Technology. Even if they find the allegations reprehensible, they’re likely to keep shopping at Abercrombie, especially as Ms. Horowitz has pushed the retailer to expand its offerings and focus on inclusivity, a sharp departure from Mr. Jeffries’s exclusionary rhetoric, she said.

 

The accusations and charges against Mr. Jeffries are “not going to affect this brand at all,” Ms. Carter added, saying that “the customer is going to continue to support the brand because they’ll say, ‘This guy has been out of there for 10 years.’”

 

Abercrombie’s stock has fallen more than 11 percent since Mr. Jeffries’s arrest.

 

The company will have to do everything it can to distance itself from its former chief executive, stressing to the public that much of the leadership at the company — including the entire board of directors — has changed since Mr. Jeffries’s tenure, said Erik Gordon, a professor at the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan. Two current senior executives, the chief financial officer and the head of human resources, worked at Abercrombie during Mr. Jeffries’s tenure, though both were in lower-level roles.

 

But beyond potential legal liability, there could be a bumpy road ahead for Abercrombie’s business, Mr. Gordon said, given the severity of the allegations against its former longtime leader. The public scrutiny could set the company back in its push to rebrand and “calls the brand’s identity into question,” he said.

 

Sean Piccoli contributed reporting.

 

Danielle Kaye is a business reporter and a 2024 David Carr Fellow, a program for journalists early in their careers. More about Danielle Kaye

REMEMBERING: The Fall of Abercrombie And Fitch / Can Abercrombie And Fitch Make A Comeback? / History of Abercrombie & Fitch

History of Abercrombie & Fitch

The Founders of Abercrombie & Fitch

 

David T. Abercrombie

 

Ezra Fitch

The history of Abercrombie & Fitch began in the nineteenth century and extends into the twenty-first century. Key figures who changed and influenced the course of Abercrombie & Fitch's history include co-founders David T. Abercrombie and Ezra Fitch, Limited Brands and Michael Jeffries, the former Chairman and CEO.

 

David Abercrombie founded A&F in 1892 as an upscale sporting goods store. Forming a partnership with Ezra Fitch, the company continued to expand in the new 20th century. After Abercrombie left the company, Fitch became sole owner and ushered in the "Fitch Years" of continued success. Shortly after his retirement, the company continued to develop under a succession of other leaders until its financial fall and closing in 1977. Limited Brands purchased the ailing brand in 1988 and brought in Mike Jeffries, who revolutionized the image of Abercrombie & Fitch to become an upscale youthful fashion retailer.

 

The company was originally established as Abercrombie Co. by David Abercrombie on June 4, 1892, in a small waterfront shop at 36 South Street in downtown Manhattan, New York. Wealthy New York businessman Ezra Fitch became one of the store's regular customers. In 1900, Fitch bought a major share in the growing Abercrombie Company and thus joined as co-founder. Aberr 2010}}

 

The partnership between Abercrombie and Fitch did not end happily. The two men, with different visions for the future of A&F, quarreled frequently, although the company continued to prosper. Fitch wished to expand the company's appeal to the general public, while Abercrombie wanted to continue selling professional gear to professional outdoorsmen. As a result of the disagreement, Abercrombie sold his share in the company to Fitch in 1907 and returned to manufacturing outdoor goods. Fitch continued the business with other partners and directed the company as he pleased.

 

The Fitch years

In 1909, Abercrombie & Fitch Co. mailed over 50,000 copies of its 456-page catalog worldwide (a staggering and costly amount of publication at that time, since each cost a dollar to produce).[4] The catalog featured outdoor clothing, camping gear, articles, and advice columns. The cost of the catalog nearly bankrupted the company, but the catalog proved to be a profitable marketing device. Within the store, the catalog was available to customers for free. By 1910, the company began selling women's clothing, and became the first store in New York to supply clothing to women as well as men.[citation needed] In 1913, after moving into Reade Street, which was not a convenient shopping location for women, the store relocated to a more fashionable and easily accessible midtown address near Fifth Avenue at 55/57 West 36th Street, expanding its inventory to include sportswear. In 1917, the store moved again into a twelve-story building at the corner of Madison Avenue and East 45th Street. The store occupied the entire available space (12 stories).

 

The Madison Avenue store included many different amenities. The basement housed a shooting range while on the mezzanine (main floor) paraphernalia for skiing, archery, free diving, and lawn games were sold. The second through fifth floors were reserved for clothing that was suitable for different climate or terrains. On the sixth floor were a picture gallery, a bookstore (focused on sporting themes), a watch repair facility and a golf school (fully equipped with a resident professional). The seventh floor included a gun room with hundreds of shotguns and rifles, decorated with stuffed game heads, as well as a kennel for dogs and cats .[5] The eighth floor contained fishing, camping, and boating equipment and included a desk for a fly- and bait-casting instructor who gave lessons at the pool, which was located on the roof. The fishing section alone was stocked with over 48,000 flies and over 18,000 fishing lures.

 

Abercrombie & Fitch Co. became the first American store to import Mahjong.[6] Ezra Fitch imported the game after a female customer looked for the game that she had played in China. He went to China for the game and translated the instructions into English. Mahjong became a fast selling product, and Abercrombie & Fitch became the epicenter of the Mahjong craze.[4] The company sent emissaries to Chinese villages to buy as many Mahjong sets as possible and eventually sold over 12,000 sets.

 

In 1927, Abercrombie & Fitch outfitted Charles Lindbergh for his historic flight across the Atlantic Ocean. It also attracted the business of other prominent figures.

 

Post-Fitch era

In 1928, Fitch retired from the company and sold to his brother-in-law, James S. Cobb. Under Cobb, A&F acquired Von Lengerke & Detmold, a well-respected New York dealer of fine European-made sporting guns and fishing tackle, as well as that company's Chicago branch, Von Lengerke & Antoine. Cobb also acquired Griffin & Howe, another gunsmith company. Merchandise from both Von Lengerke & Detmold and Griffin & Howe was carried at A&F's Madison Avenue store.[4] By this time, A&F was also selling equipment for polo, golf, and tennis. By 1929, sales of US $6.3 million were reported with net profits of US $548,000.

 

During the Great Depression, the company's revenue decreased and it stopped paying dividends. Sales plunged to $2,598,925 in 1933. A&F recovered in the following years and resumed paying dividends in 1938. During that year, guns accounted for 40% of sales at the Madison Avenue store.[4] Clothing, shoes, and furnishings accounted for 45%, while inventory was valued at about 40% of annual sales (reflecting A&F's readiness to meet customer demands).[4] Ten percent of the business was attributed to mail orders from the catalog.[4] Abercrombie & Fitch Co. continued to expand. As early as 1913, A&F had adopted the slogan, "The Greatest Sporting Goods Store in the World".

 

A&F's record net profit was $682,894 in 1947. The company opened a large branch in San Francisco in 1958. It soon added small winter-only shops open from November through May each season in Palm Beach and Sarasota, Florida, and summer-only shops in Bay Head, New Jersey, and Southampton, New York. to complement a shop in Hyannis, Massachusetts, it had operated since the end of World War II. Guernsey succeeded Cobb as president.[4] He remarked, "The Abercrombie & Fitch type does not care about the cost; he wants the finest quality."With so many locations now under the control of Abercrombie & Fitch, the Madison Avenue store remained the flagship store.[4] In the 1950s, the main floor of the flagship was remodeled to include heads of buffalo, caribou, moose, elk, and other big game, stuffed fish of spectacular size, and elephant's-foot wastebaskets.

 

In 1960, net sales rose to $16.5 million, but net profit fell for the fourth straight year to $185,649.[4] By 1961, net sales dropped to $15.5 million, and net profit to $124,097. Guernsey's successor as president, John H. Ewing, paid little attention to the decline in sales.[4] In 1961, he told an interviewer of Business Week that Abercrombie & Fitch enjoyed a special niche "by sticking to our knitting; by not trying to be all things to all people." A&F would open a year-round resort shop at The Broadmoor resort in Colorado Springs (1962) and its first suburban store at the Mall in Short Hills, New Jersey (1963). Under the leadership of Earle K. Angstadt, Jr., Abercrombie's continued to expand in upscale locations such as the Bal Harbour Shops near Miami Beach, Florida (1966), the Somerset Mall in Troy, Michigan, outside Detroit (1969) and in boutique-style shops in other department stores.

 

In 1964, Abercrombie and Fitch achieved a notable early example of the "brand integration" form of product placement by providing the venue for part of the Rock Hudson / Paula Prentiss romantic comedy film Man's Favorite Sport?.

 

Abercrombie and Fitch held a warehouse sale in 1968 and early 1970 and presented offbeat newspaper advertisements that reflected a measure of desperation. The company's revenue continued decline, with a loss of about $500,000 in its previous fiscal year. Noticing the effect that the ads and sale-days had upon the Abercrombie & Fitch customer base, the next president William Humphreys, a former Lord & Taylor executive, halted the measures. He focused on improving A&F's inventory control and credit practices and cutting the company's expenses.; changed the store design to present a different image, focused on expansion into the suburbs in 1972 with a location in Oak Brook, Illinois, 1972 in hopes of recapturing customers who no longer patronized its store in downtown Chicago's Loop. Noticing that the offbeat advertisements were bringing in customers that management considered "not of classic Abercrombie & Fitch material," A&F ceased its mis-directing ads and sale-days in October 1970.[4] Presentation within the flagship changed as well to provide a newer look. Expensive sailboats were moved from the main floor to an upper floor, a discount clothing section was introduced on the tenth floor, sportswear lines were expanded, and new buyers for woman's apparel were hired. However, the changes did not improve sales and the company continued to decline financially under Humphreys and his successor Hal Haskell, who was a major stockholder of the company. After losing $1 million in 1975, Abercrombie & Fitch Co. filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy in August 1976 and finally closed its doors in November 1977.

 

Oshman's, a sporting goods retailer, acquired Abercrombie & Fitch Co. in 1978 for $1.5 million ($5.2 million in 2013 dollars). It opened an Abercrombie & Fitch store in 1979 in Beverly Hills, California, and another in Dallas, Texas, which was bigger and sported $40,000 USD elephant guns and an "Abercrombie Runabout sports convertible" worth $20,775 USD.Stores continued to open in South Street Seaport and Trump Tower and catered towards contemporary interests of golf, exercise, and tennis. Clothing collections for men and women carried business and casual dress, and sportswear. Forbes described the merchandise as "a hodgepodge of unrelated items" and that "sometimes it is better to bury the dead than to try reviving them." Abercrombie & Fitch continued to struggle as Oshman's struggled itself to develop a strong identity for the company.

 

Modern image

1988 through 1999: rebranding into fashion retail

In 1988, Limited Brands acquired the ailing company for $47 million after having success in popularizing Express and Victoria's Secret. Headquarters was moved to Columbus, Ohio, and all inventory was cleared out.[4] The new president of Abercrombie & Fitch, Sally Frame-Kasaks, placed a strong emphasis on apparel. Michael S. Jeffries, a clothing executive, took over as president in 1992. He popularized the brand to a teen apparel merchandiser from an ailing sports brand. He believed that focusing the A&F brand towards the American teen market would be financially beneficial as that sector of retail economy was said to be growing at a record rate at the time.

 

The new Abercrombie & Fitch reopened shortly afterwards with a preppy outdoors theme reminiscent of the company's original roots. Jeffries desired to have Bruce Weber, known for his sexual beefcake photography, as the photographer for the brand, but could not do so until the company gained financial success. The apparel consisted of woven shirts, denim, miniskirts, cargo shorts, wool sweaters, polo shirts, and t-shirts. Its prices were unprecedentedly high in the teen apparel industry. Sales rose $85 million in 1992, $111 million in 1993, and to $165 million in 1994. 49 stores were opened by 1994, and a 102 store count was aimed by the end of 1995.In 1994, new records for merchandise margin rate and profitability were established by Abercrombie & Fitch for its parent, The Limited.[16] To maintain popularity and to keep up with teen trends, Jeffries hired executives to keep up on popular teenage clothing, music, and entertainment.

 

By the mid-1990s, there were dozens of Abercrombie & Fitch stores in the United States.[17] On September 26, 1996, The Limited, Inc. took Abercrombie & Fitch public on the New York Stock Exchange with the ticker symbol "ANF" and with the per share offering as $16.[18] In late 1990s, the company began to opt building stores only averaging between 8,000 and 20,000 square feet (700 to 2,000 m²) in high-volume retail centers around the country. It also launched the canoe store prototype of white facade and interior gray walls to accommodate the growth of its brand.

 

In 1997, Abercrombie & Fitch launched A&F Quarterly. The publication included photography, interviews and articles about sex, pop culture, and other teen interests.[16] In 1998, the company introduced its first subsidiary, abercrombie. The concept was designed as the Abercrombie & Fitch for a younger clientele between the ages on 7-14. In 1999 began a 3-year-long class action lawsuit in which Abercrombie & Fitch was one of several American retailers involved for its sweatshops in Saipan. Revenue recorded for Abercrombie & Fitch at the end of fiscal 1998 was at $805.2 million USD. By 1998, Abercrombie & Fitch became an independent company, and Mike Jeffries assumed the position of Chairman and Chief Executive Officer. As the brand regained its prominence, industry analysts began to speculate how long Abercrombie and Fitch would be able to retain its popularity.

 

Analysts predicted that A&F would fall from popularity, but sales continued escalating after a provocative Christmas 1999 in which the A&F Quarterly issue of the season featured sexually explicit content that drew angry complaints. In 1999, the A&F also launched "A&F TV", which featured young people engaged in sports and leisure activities. A&F TV was originally developed to run on cable television and on monitors in Abercrombie & Fitch stores. It was soon removed. Revenue for fiscal 1999 was at Increase $1.030 billion USD.

 

The overall approach of Abercrombie & Fitch, by the end of the decade, to its customers seemed to please male shoppers more than females, who shopped more frequently at competitor shops.[16] Throughout the 1990s, Abercrombie & Fitch Co. enjoyed sales of over Increase$400/ft2 (Increase$4300/m2). By December 1999, Abercrombie & Fitch operated a total of 212 stores nationwide.

 

From 2000 on

Entering into the 21st century, Abercrombie & Fitch was rated as the sixth most popular brand before Nintendo and Levi's by teenagers. The company introduced its third brand, Hollister Co., in July 2000. The third concept was based on Southern California surf lifestyle, and was targeted towards high school students. After Hollister lowered the revenue of Abercrombie & Fitch, the company launched the Ezra Fitch collection, and began producing A&F clothing with higher grade materials, increasing the prices. In 2001, the company moved into a new 300-acre (1.2 km2) home office in New Albany, Ohio. Headquarters were further expanded by 2003.[22] Also in 2003, the company released its last issue of A&F Quarterly after amounting complaints.

 

 The trademark slogan, Casual Luxury.

After successfully launching Hollister, the company introduced its fourth brand RUEHL No.925 for older consumers, 22 through 35, on September 24, 2004. Revenue continued to escalate as sales are reported at $2.021 billion for 2004. In November 2005, the company opened doors to its first ever flagship store (located in Fifth Avenue). By this time, the company begins to uplift its image to near-luxury status after introducing the trademark Casual Luxury for promotion. Revenue reported for 2005 was $2.021 billion.

 

Abercrombie & Fitch began its Canadian expansion in January 2006 when the company opened two A&F stores and three Hollister Co. stores in Toronto and Edmonton. By fall 2006, a third Canadian Abercrombie & Fitch store opened in the Toronto Eaton Centre. Also in the year, the brand opened a west coast flagship in The Grove. Revenue reported for 2006 is $3.318 billion, an increase of over $1.297 billion from 2005.

 

Beginning 2007, the canoe stores were revamped with dark louvers (see right image). On 22 March 2007, Abercrombie & Fitch opened its first European flagship in London at 7 Burlington Gardens in Savile Row.[citation needed] The store generated a volume of $280,000 (around £140,000 GBP) in its first 6 hours of operation. The flagship remains one of the most profitable A&F locations. Revenue reached record heights in 2007 with an overall sales of $3.749 billion.

 

On 21 January 2008, Abercrombie & Fitch introduced its fifth concept, the intimate apparel brand Gilly Hicks. Inspired by "Down Under", it is officially labeled as the "Cheeky cousin of Abercrombie & Fitch." In April 2008, A&F relaunched A&F Quarterly for release in the UK flagship On August 31, 2008, the "bright and insightful" company director Allan A. Tuttle died. By December 22, corporate announced that it had produced a new employment agreement with Mike Jeffries set to expire in 2014. For the first time in its recent history, A&F suffered a financial decrease to $3.540 billion revenue for fiscal 2008. The blame was to the current economic recession, and also to the fact that the company refused to lower price points and offer sales citing brand image-protection that doing so would "cheapen" its near-luxury image.

As the late-2000s recession continued, A&F noticeably suffered financially for its refusal to lower prices or offer discounts. Early in January 2009, the company reported its worst drop in sales and shares. By the end of the month, 50 employees lost their jobs and many positions were still unoccupied. 170 more employees were dismissed in May. A&F announced on 17 June 2009 the closure of its ailing Ruehl No.925 brand by January 2010. By October, A&F launched its official Facebook page. Despite financial downturns, A&F opened its second European location, a flagship store, in Milan on October 29. On its official Facebook page, A&F called it the biggest consumer reception for a flagship opening in A&F history: "like nothing the world has seen before". On December 15, another flagship store opened in Tokyo, Japan. Marking the first ever A&F location in Asia, the opening became the biggest retail event in history, was noted as a "spectacle of consumerism" by the Japanese, and made around JP¥50 million (US$550,000) that day alone.

 

In January 2010, A&F launched its A&F Cares feature highlighting its philanthropic efforts. Keeping to its commitment, the company shut down ruehl.com on January 22, and closed doors to all final Ruehl stores by the end of the month. Analysts began noting encouraging signs of financial progress, in March, for the company, citing A&F's successful international expansion and better inventory management. Also around that time, a historical fishing line dryer, made by A&F in the early 1900s, was sold to an A&F model for $590 USD.[44][45] As a marketing move, A&F announced the relaunch of the A&F Quarterly on 17 July 2010 as a part of its "Screen Test" Back-to-School marketing campaign designed to attract more consumer attention and sales.[46] In August, CEO Mike Jeffries announced that Abercrombie & Fitch would close roughly 60 stores in 2010. Later that month, CFO Jonathan Ramsden said another 50 stores could close in 2011. Profits began to pick up by September 2010 to larger than predicted results (attributed to the result of the major "Screen Test" campaign and numerous sales held throughout the season). By October, the company was stated as being well ahead its competitors (a first since the economic turndown).[49] The brand opened a flagship in Copenhagen and Fukuoka in November 2010, and another one in Paris by May 2011.

 

On February 15, 2012, A&F announced plans to close 180 more underperforming U.S. stores by 2015 while continuing to expand in Europe and Asia.

 

In 2013, the company's trendy, upscale image took a hit when comments made by Jeffries in 2006 that disparaged customers with body types that do not resemble Abercrombie & Fitch models resurfaced. The resulting backlash launched a viral internet campaign called "Fitch the Homeless", which aimed to subvert and mock the company's carefully manicured image of "exclusionary" style by distributing used Abercrombie & Fitch clothes to homeless and needy persons.