Ick. A profile of the rather creepy 61-year-old CEO of Abercrombie & Fitch.
His biggest obsession, though, is realizing his singular vision of idealized all-American youth. He wants desperately to look like his target customer (the casually flawless college kid), and in that pursuit he has aggressively transformed himself from a classically handsome man into a cartoonish physical specimen: dyed hair, perfectly white teeth, golden tan, bulging biceps, wrinkle-free face, and big, Angelina Jolie lips.
And:
As far as Jeffries is concerned, America’s unattractive, overweight or otherwise undesirable teens can shop elsewhere. “In every school there are the cool and popular kids, and then there are the not-so-cool kids,” he says. “Candidly, we go after the cool kids. We go after the attractive all-American kid with a great attitude and a lot of friends. A lot of people don’t belong [in our clothes], and they can’t belong. Are we exclusionary? Absolutely. Those companies that are in trouble are trying to target everybody: young, old, fat, skinny. But then you become totally vanilla. You don’t alienate anybody, but you don’t excite anybody, either.”
The article is written by Benoit Denizet-Lewis, who wrote a much-commmented-upon article about frat-boy culture for the New York Times Magazine last year.
Many of the comments in response are entertaining, too.
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But .. apart from everything else that is wrong with Jeffries’ statement, it does not make good business sense!!
One may not like what Jeffries says or how he acts, but unfortunately, he’s one of the greatest CEOs in the last 50 years of any company. After AF spun off from The Limited, Jeffries completely transformed the company and has guided it to sustained growth on excellent fundamentals over the last 15 years.
It’s easy to pick on AF because Jeffries actually says what’s on his mind. What consumer business _doesn’t_ exclude, to some extent, to define a target market? (Should the NYT change its TV ads to dilute its message to the intellectual/in-the-know elite?) I am not in favor of everything AF does to go about this; I am just saying that Jeffries simply articulates the same discussions going on at every consumer product company in America.