Abercrombie & Fitch and Hollister feel the squeeze as teens go cold

Irish teens and college students’ love affair with major US clothing brands, Hollister and Abercrombie & Fitch cooled a little last year as sales dropped by more than €2.5m.

New accounts filed by A&F Hollister Ireland Ltd show that pre-tax profits fell 19% from €702,839 to €569,272.

Revenues declined 15% from €16.54m to €14.02m in the year to the end of last January.

The drop in sales last year halted the huge growth the US clothing brands have had here in recent years at the firm’s Hollister brand store at the Dundrum Town Centre and the Abercrombie & Fitch store at Dublin’s College Green.

A frenzy greeted the opening of Ireland’s first Hollister store in Dundrum in July 2011 and this was followed by similar scenes of long queues of teenagers at the opening of the first Abercrombie & Fitch store on College Green in November 2012.

Teens started queuing for the opening of the Hollister store at 1.15am on July 15 2011, while the first teenagers arrived at 6.30am for the November 2012 opening of the Abercrombie & Fitch store.

The drop in sales for the firm here was part of a global slump in sales for the brands where sales last year declined from $4.1bn to $3.74bn.

In response to the downturn in sales at the firm’s two Irish stores, numbers employed last year declined by more than 120 going from 455 to 325, with the firm’s part-time workers absorbing most of the losses, reducing from 427 to 302.

As a result, staff costs last year reduced from €3m to €2.1m.