NRF 2026 Rewind: Abercrombie’s CEO Shares Leadership Lessons
In a session at the NRF Big Show, Abercrombie & Fitch Co.’s CEO Fran Horowitz shared five leadership lessons she’s learned over her retail career — a career that’s included stops at Saks, Bloomingdale’s, Ann Taylor Loft, Express, and lately turning around Abercrombie and Hollister.
The five tips include:
- Be Approachable: Horowitz said that during her 13 years as a Bloomingdale’s buyer she had “some incredible mentors there who really helped you understand that at whatever level that you’re at: be approachable. Make sure that you get to know your associates at every level. Make sure you understand that good ideas come from anywhere and everywhere.” On Abercrombie’s Ohio campus, she walks to the café every day to see the team, “making sure they know they can come up to me. And you learn a lot. They don’t realize sometimes that they’re sharing things with you that perhaps they didn’t need to share with you.”
- Listen To The Consumer: Horowitz has continued to learn the importance of staying close and listening to your customer, noting that her team regularly devotes time to talk to millennials and teens. At Abercrombie, the former executive team had long ignored customer requests to stock jeans with zippers, but the eventual move energized its denim business. She said, “One of the biggest transitions I had to make was helping the team understand that you can’t tell the customer what you want, but they actually have to tell you what they want.”
- Give Associates Autonomy: When she took over as Abercrombie’s CEO in 2017, she conducted a listening tour that showed her associates didn’t have significant accountability — and even less autonomy to make changes. Providing autonomy was key to better segmenting the Abercrombie brand around millennials and Hollister towards teens. Horowitz said, “A huge, huge part of our success is really them understanding the customer. They knew them in their hearts. They had that foundation, but they just didn’t have the opportunity to express it.”
- Humility: Horowitz noted that many times, she’s heard colleagues refer to her as “normal” and recognized that it’s because she’s earned a reputation as a good listener. She said, “I think they appreciate you listening, whether it’s to a personal story, whether it’s to something happening in their life and remembering that it happened and saying something to them about it, checking in… I know that they’re the simplest little things, but they really are incredibly meaningful. And it gets people to really follow you because they know that you sincerely care about them. You’re not doing it just because you’re supposed to.”
- Move Forward: Horowitz signs off all her e-mails to her team with the phrase, “Moving Forward,” representing a call to move on from any mistakes that happen in a risk-taking environment but also to be open to evolve in the face of constant change. She said, “My message to them is to say, ‘Tomorrow is the next day.’ Let’s just keep going. Learn some lessons. You can certainly hindsight them, but always forward, and let’s just keep moving ahead.’”