RETAILING: Abercrombie's Misfire

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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.