Fran Horowitz rebuilt Abercrombie & Fitch and drove it to record sales

A decade ago, the American retailer Abercrombie & Fitch was a punchline — dim, cologne-heavy stores, shirtless models at the door, and marketing built on telling most shoppers they weren't cool enough to wear the clothes. The American Customer Satisfaction Index once deemed it America's "most hated" retail brand. Today Gen Z buys it without irony, and the company has just posted the biggest year in its history. The architect of that reversal is Fran Horowitz.

Her method is almost disarmingly simple: listen, then act. Take denim, the example she likes to give — Abercrombie's flagship denim long defaulted to a button fly while customers kept asking for zippers. "It sounds silly, but it was like, 'OK. Let's listen to what they're telling us and put those zippers in,'" she recalled at NRF 2026: Retail's Big Show in January, a day after receiving the National Retail Federation's Visionary award at the NRF Foundation Honors. Denim sales have set records since. But by the middle of 2026 the comeback is no longer the story. Revenue has never been higher; the share price sits at under half its 2024 peak. "What got us here won't get us there," the chief executive officer told the NRF crowd — and the line now reads less like a slogan than a warning to herself.

Good ideas come from anywhere

Horowitz's first job was on a shop floor in Armonk, New York, selling Levi's at a women's specialty store called Country Bumpkins while still in high school. A family friend had gone through a department-store training programme, and the structure of it — rotations through buying and selling, a clear ladder, measurable results — pulled her in. Fashion had always interested her, but it was retail's measurable, fast-moving nature — clear targets, room to climb — that hooked her.

She trained at Bloomingdale's and Saks Fifth Avenue, earning an MBA in night classes at the Gabelli School of Business while in the Saks merchant programme. She spent 13 years at Bloomingdale's, where she grew the contemporary department from roughly 30 million to 100 million dollars and watched its chairman, Michael Gould, run the business by knowing everyone's name. "He was truly an empathetic leader. People first — that's Mike," she told trade publication WWD of the mentor whose style shaped her own. Roles at Express, where she helped take the business public, and as brand president of Ann Taylor Loft followed. Four decades in, she still frames retail as a discipline of curiosity that prizes agility and an openness to change.

The brands that had "the right to live again"

Horowitz joined Abercrombie & Fitch Co. in 2014 as brand president of Hollister, at a low point. Sales were in double-digit decline, stores were closing, and the company was still defined by its previous chief executive, Mike Jeffries, whose hypersexualised marketing and exclusionary image had curdled into liability. Friends asked her why she was walking into it. "Many people said to me, 'What are you doing? Why are you doing this?'" she recalled. "But what my gut told me … was that both Hollister and Abercrombie were incredible, iconic brands that had the right to live again."

She was promoted to president and chief merchandising officer in 2015 and became chief executive officer on February 1, 2017. The inflection came in the fourth quarter of 2019, when the brand began to accelerate and the turnaround started to register. The pandemic, counterintuitively, sped the word of mouth, as shoppers caught on that this was no longer the Abercrombie of old.

Not "cool" — a lifestyle

Horowitz's strategic conviction is that durable brands are not built by chasing trends. "'Cool' is a tough word," she told the Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit in October 2025. "It's not what we're aspiring to be. We're aspiring to be a long-lasting lifestyle brand that someone can wear and enjoy for many, many years." Abercrombie was repointed at millennials and "the long weekend"; Hollister kept its Gen-Z core.

Underneath sits an almost evangelical customer obsession, which she frames as a practised discipline rather than a slogan: her teams turn up at Friday night football games to watch Hollister's teen shoppers and spend long weekends living alongside the Abercrombie customer. She is equally wary of easy answers. "What frustrates me sometimes is when people think there's a silver bullet. There are no silver bullets in this business. This was years and years in the making … it started with us inspecting every single function within this company," she told trade publication WWD.

From cautionary tale to growth engine

The numbers vindicate the patience. Revenue sat at roughly 3.30 billion dollars when Horowitz took over and went flat for years; it then broke out to about 4.28 billion in fiscal 2023, 4.95 billion in fiscal 2024 and a record 5.27 billion dollars for the year ending January 31, 2026 — the first time the company crossed five billion. The first quarter of fiscal 2026 marked the 14th consecutive quarter of sales growth. The stock, worth around 12 dollars when she became chief executive officer, reached an all-time closing high of 192.34 dollars in June 2024. In January 2026 the NRF named her its Visionary, citing a company that has outperformed the broader apparel sector for four straight years; Fortune, which has called it "one of the most sweeping company transformations in modern retail history," placed her on its Most Powerful Women list for a third consecutive year.

The harder second act

Then the other story. The business has never been bigger, but the stock that once soared on the turnaround has come sharply back to earth. After reaching an all-time closing high of 192.34 dollars on June 12, 2024, the shares closed at 90.57 dollars exactly two years later — down more than half from the peak, off about 16% across 2025 and roughly another 28% in the opening months of 2026. The growth premium the market once paid has largely evaporated. And yet, measured from the start of her tenure, the stock is still up around sevenfold from the 12 dollars it fetched in 2017. The turnaround is intact; what the market has repriced is the pace of what comes next.

The first quarter of fiscal 2026, reported on May 27, captured the split. Earnings of 1.47 dollars a share beat the roughly 1.29 dollars analysts expected, though they slipped from 1.59 dollars a year earlier; net sales rose 2% to 1.11 billion dollars and operating margin narrowed to 8%, from 9.3% — still ahead of the company's own outlook. EMEA sales fell 10% as conflict in the Middle East weighed on Hollister, offset by the Americas up 3% and APAC up 24%. Abercrombie & Fitch Co. held its full-year guidance, and investors, far from punishing the print, sent the shares up almost 9% on the day. The question is no longer survival. It is whether the playbook that fixed a broken brand can keep a healthy one growing as tariffs bite and the easy gains thin out.

The reluctant honoree

For all the hardware, Horowitz is not a spotlight-seeker; colleagues describe her, approvingly, as "so normal." She still walks to the campus café in New Albany, Ohio, every day. Coverage of her has lately split in two — half celebrating the transformation, half asking whether the growth can last. Having rebuilt Abercrombie, Fortune noted, she now "faces the harder task of sustaining it." The Jeffries era surfaces only as the legacy she dismantled. That scandal belongs, pointedly, to a different Abercrombie from the one Horowitz runs today.

The six pack

Outside work, Horowitz calls her family of six — herself, her husband, two grown children and their partners — "the six pack." They are sports fans — she roots for the New York Giants — Aruba regulars and skiers who decamp to Deer Valley; on her own she defaults to yoga, walking and swimming to decompress. She has also served on outside boards, including the sock-and-giving company Bombas and the executive coalition Chief Executives for Corporate Purpose.

Horowitz has done the rare thing in retail: turned a punchline back into a brand. The question that defines her second act is whether she can do the harder thing and out-grow her own success. She has already named the stakes. "What got us here," she told the room in January, "won't get us there."

This article was written with the assistance of AI.