Abercrombie & Fitch CEO Reveals the Simple Secret of Her Successful Turnaround

Abercrombie & Fitch is making a comeback from an image crisis and prolonged sales slump under CEO Fran Horowitz. The secret formula is listening to customers. Employees at the retailer regularly accompany shoppers to football games, drinks and even weekend trips to cities like Nashville in order to gather firsthand data on what their clientele is interested in. “We talk a lot in this industry about being close to the customer, but you really have to do it. My team does it better than most,” Horowitz said while speaking at NRF 2026: Retail’s Big Show today (Jan. 12) in New York.

Horowitz joined Abercrombie & Fitch in 2014 as president of the Hollister brand and has served as CEO for nine years. Her tenure has been defined by a sharp reversal of fortune for the once-dominant mall brand, whose sales plunged in the 2010s after years of popularity built around heavy logos and shirtless male models.

Under her leadership, however, Abercrombie & Fitch’s stock has soared by 333 percent in the past five years. That momentum continues to grow. The company’s most recent earnings report marked three consecutive years of quarterly sales growth, with revenue for the August-October period rising by 7 percent year-over-year to $1.3 billion.

One of Horowitz’s first major moves was to clearly differentiate Abercrombie & Fitch from its subsidiary, Hollister. The CEO believed the two brands had blurred into one. “They really had become kind of one, just in two different stores with different price points and different labels,” said Horowitz.

To distinguish the two brands, Horowitz repositioned Hollister squarely toward teenagers while aging up Abercrombie & Fitch to focus on Millennials. The pivot helped the company’s employees better understand and, therefore, target the consumers of each brand. “It was honestly a 180-degree turn,” said the CEO.

Serving customers doesn’t mean telling them what they want, but listening closely to what they say. Often, she noted, the solutions are straightforward. She pointed to the company’s decision to add zippers to its jeans, which had once been dominated by button-flies, after repeated customer feedback. Since the change, the brand has seen “record sales” in denim, according to the CEO.

There’s no clear endpoint to Horowitz’s turnaround. Looking ahead, she plans to adopt A.I.-powered productivity tools and further expand Abercrombie & Fitch’s global business. International markets currently account for about 20 percent of the business, a figure the company aims to grow by investing further in London and Shanghai.

“What I love the most about this industry is that it just continues to evolve and evolve over time,” said Horowitz. “Retail is a journey—there is no finish line.”