Business Insider/Jessica Tyler Hollister was dimly lit, and most products still had a Hollister logo on them.
- Abercrombie & Fitch has made some major changes in the past few years while its sister store, Hollister, has performed consistently well.
- In the second quarter, comparable sales were up 2% at Abercrombie's namesake store and 4% at Hollister, according to a company press release. It was the seventh consecutive quarter of growth for the Hollister brand.
- Abercrombie & Fitch CEO Fran Horowitz said in an August earnings call that Hollister has been successful because of its product assortment and marketing strategy.
- We paid a visit to a Hollister store in New York City and saw that it hasn't changed much over the years while its sister brand, Abercrombie, has worked to reinvent itself.
While Abercrombie & Fitch has had to make some major changes to its brand over the past few years, its sister brand Hollister has been doing relatively well.
Hollister is generally priced lower than Abercrombie and tends to support it similarly to how Old Navy supports Gap. It's meant to appeal to a younger crowd of shoppers and has a California-inspired theme. In the second quarter, comparable sales were up 2% at Abercrombie and 4% at Hollister, according to a company press release. It was the seventh consecutive quarter of growth for the Hollister brand.
In its August earnings call, the company discussed plans to open 22 new stores in 2018, 13 of which would be Hollister stores. Last year, it remodeled 35 Hollister stores. But according to Retail Dive, the company as a whole has closed 400 stores since 2010, and it may close as many as 60 this year.
Though Hollister hasn't vowed to make the same drastic changes its sister brand Abercrombie has, it has been quietly working on improving its stores and marketing strategy, Abercrombie & Fitch CEO Fran Horowitz said in the earnings call. Most recently, Hollister launched a campaign featuring Khalid and Noah Cyrus.
On a recent trip to a Hollister store in New York City, we noticed that many products bore a huge logo - a design feature that Abercrombie has been criticized for in the past.
Here's what else we found when we visited Hollister: