Abercrombie & Fitch has come a really long way. Despite the #MeToo scandals and the death of the mall, CEO Fran Horowitz has managed to turn things around in a big way. The company reported earnings Wednesday that beat Wall Street expectations for both earnings and revenue, delivering $233 million in profit on $1.5 billion in sales. The latter was 20% higher than the same time the year before.
The stock was nevertheless down about 3% about in Wednesday morning trading, but still just shy of a record high.
“Following several years of transformation across our brands, people and operating model, fiscal 2023 was a defining year for our company,” Horowitz said in a statement.
Horowitz spoke last year about how excited she has been to guide the company back uphill since working her way to the top post after a brand presidency at the Hollister subsidiary.
“I joined the company in 2014 and it was a really tough time for both brands,” she said at a November conference put on by the fashion industry publication WWD. “The brand health was declining tremendously. The business was double-digit down. It was going to be a true opportunity to brand build and bring it back. I just felt they were two iconic brands that deserved to live again.”
Abercrombie & Fitch has done a lot to change its ways from being a too-cool-for-school brand that shunned people who didn’t fit into its thin, preppy image, as highlighted in the documentary White Hot: The Rise & Fall of Abercrombie & Fitch.
Now it’s considerably friendlier.
In 2022, Abercrombie & Fitch introduced its “Always Forward” plan, which called for the company to be making $4.3 billion in annual revenue by 2025. Thanks to its strong fourth quarter, the company hit that number two years early in 2023. Since that day in 2022, the stock is up 600%. Last year, it even outperformed Wall Street favorite’s favorite AI chipmaker Nvidia.
The only thing that may be holding Abercrombie back from actually hitting a record share price, MarketWatch suggests, is that it beat sales expectations by the smallest margin in six quarters.