Abercrombie's Misfire

After more than eight decades of catering to princes and Presidents as well as just run-of-the-millionaire sportsmen, New York-based Abercrombie & Fitch now finds itself looking, figuratively, at the business end of one of those $6,000 custom-made rifles it has become famous for. Losses for the nine-store chain have widened steadily over the past six years, and lately they have grown as big as all outdoors--from $540,000 on sales of $25.4 million last year to a thumping $1.7 million in the first three quarters of 1976. Last week, amid talk that the chain was for sale, lawyers for proud old A. & F. trooped sadly into that legal haven of so many lesser merchants, a federal bankruptcy court.

The lawyers' aim was to hold off A. & F.'s creditors and keep the doors open in hopes that the firm could reorganize before the traditionally busy Christmas shopping season. Weary of unpaid bills, many of A. & F.'s suppliers had already begun demanding payment in cash for goods shipped to the firm. To reassure its nervous bankers, Abercrombie's unpaid chairman, Harry G. Haskell Jr., a wealthy sportsman himself (yachting, hunting) and former mayor of Wilmington, Del., who is also A. & F.'s largest stockholder, brought in a corporate surgeon. He is Geoffrey Swaebe, 65, a British-born retailing executive who made his reputation running Los Angeles' May Co., a part of the big St. Louis-based department store chain, in the 1960s and early 1970s. Swaebe quit as May's president four years ago to freelance his skills among ailing companies.

Swaebe, who is being paid $1,000 a day (plus expenses), has agreed to run Abercrombie for three months; after that, says he, "they'll have to give me an assessment of the time they'll need." Swaebe's forte is what he calls a "restructuring of management personnel," meaning firings, shufflings and replacements. But a new cast of characters may not be enough for ailing Abercrombie. The store has had three chief executives since 1970, each of whom tried to extend A. & F.'s appeal beyond the well-heeled sportsman. They succeeded mainly in driving up costs and deepening A. & F.'s debt. In 1975 the store paid out more than $1 million in interest on loans.

The question of whom it should sell to played an important part in Abercrombie's genesis. David T. Abercrombie made camping goods in a small factory in Lower Manhattan and was content to sell to trappers, railroad surveyors, prospectors and others who worked out of doors. Then, in 1892, he met Ezra Fitch, a successful but bored lawyer. They became partners and built a store on Broadway where Fitch set out to sell Abercrombie's goods to the public in general and fat-cat sportsmen in particular. After many disagreements over just whom the store should be catering to--Abercrombie's trappers or Fitch's moneyed swells--the two hot-tempered entrepreneurs parted, with Abercrombie quitting the business in 1907.

Fitch retired in 1928, but A. & F.'s fame as a purveyor of sporting goods to the rich and famous had become widespread. The store outfitted Theodore Roosevelt for safaris, Admiral Richard E. Byrd for his expedition to Antarctica. Fisherman Herbert Hoover, Golfers Woodrow Wilson and Dwight Eisenhower and all-round author-out-doorsman Ernest Hemingway also shopped there. Its stock of firearms and tackle equipment was among the world's largest and finest, and its aloof sales staff was made up of technical experts in A. & F.'s wares. A. & F.'s Manhattan store on Madison Avenue was a showcase of such exotic items as $300 miniature antique cannons, $1,188 Yukon dog sleds, and portable stone furnaces for heating cabins on yachts. It even sold lightweight chain-mail suits to protect explorers against arrows from Indian bows in South America.

Midwestern Physicians. As participant sports became more and more popular in the U.S. in the 1950s and 1960s, Abercrombie opened branches in San Francisco, Troy, Mich., and Colorado Springs, and it began dealing more in fashion. Other high-priced stores--notably Tiffany--successfully made the difficult transition to a broader market by combining friendliness with lower-priced items, but A. & F. did not move far or fast enough. As recently as the mid-1960s, complains a New York advertising man, A. & F. was run "like a stuffy club"--still catering to wealthy Midwestern physicians who take four weeks off to shoot game in Wyoming. Young, affluent skiers, backpackers and tennis players came into A. & F. to admire its tony, well-stocked departments, but they bought their gear at cheaper places, such as Korvette's, Two Guys Stores and other discount operations catering to the outdoors set. None of those were around, of course, when T.R. went on safari.

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