by Matthew Christopher

Created on: March 06, 2008   Last Updated: March 11, 2008

Abercrombie & Fitch is best known for their near-pornographic catalogs and overpriced mall stores. Less known is that the store killed the great writer and raging alcoholic, Ernest Hemingway.

Ok, so they didn't really kill Ernest Hemingway. Ernest Hemingway killed Ernest Hemingway. But he allegedly bought the gun he shot himself with at Abercrombie & Fitch, which was then a high-end sporting equipment store. In truth, the copious amounts of liquor he drank, his bi-polar disorder, and his father's suicide probably played a much larger role than Abercrombie; however, I still loathe the place.

This was all before the chain was bought out by Limited and redesigned to get teenie-boppers to blow their parents' money on "casual luxury" clothes in their quest to join the elite social ranks of high schools and junior highs across America.

Abercrombie & Fitch originated when a wealthy lawyer (Fitch) joined forces with a sports store owner in Manhattan (Abercrombie). Unable to agree on how to run the business, eventually, Mr. Fitch bought out Mr. Abercrombie and experimented with different ways to expand. He became an early leader in branding, which has become a vital marketing strategy today. Part of the genius of the company was that they relabeled most of their products with their own name. This early innovation accounts for a great deal of the stores' success even today.

This strategy also means that the very last word read by Mr. Hemingway may very well have been "Fitch."

Though successful at expanding, the store had ups and downs financially. In the late 1980s it ended up in the hands of Limited - the same corporation that owns Victoria's Secret. It was at this point that the store began shifting to focus on older teens and marketing with sex - a practice that they were not at all coy about.

Their catalog in 1997 was officially labeled as containing sexually explicit content for the first time; a feat yet to be matched by their lingerie-selling sister-store, Victoria's Secret.

Now the company's stores reside almost entirely in malls. Due to the success of marketing sex to teens - a gloriously simple and efficient strategy - the stores have spin offs, such as Hollister. Long gone are the high-end, professional sports enthusiasts originally catered to by Mr. Abercrombie.

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