I make no excuses for the fact I love Abercrombie and Fitch and more recently, Hollister. For those of you who are not familiar with either store, they are essentially the same company just selling slightly different style clothes, Hollister claims to be “laid back Californian style”. Whilst walking around my local Hollister store, and having had the experience of Abercrombie and Fitch on 5th Avenue NY last year and London recently, I thought it was interesting to look at their branding and the user experience of their stores. Abercrombie sell their clothes for an average of 1/3 more than Hollister and as I started to dig deeper into the brand I started to find noticeable differences to how the quality of Abercrombie next to Hollister would be perceived regardless of the fact there doesn’t seem to be any difference in the quality of their clothes. Abercrombie opts for a neat Serif font with secondary fonts in Sans Serif, Hollister opts for the complete reverse. Serif fonts always seem to me to carry a certain quality of a brand, used properly of course.

San-Serif are normally seen in brands we deem more fun or personable, such as “eBay” to use just one example. Hollister opts for simple brown paper bags and corrugated cardboard style tags whereas Abercrombie goes for bags with fabric handles and raised ribbed grey paper on boxes and clothes tags. The colours used in both brands are always limited, as with any good brand. Abercrombie opts for dark greys, crisp whites and a contrasting red, while Hollister sticks to it’s more earthy look of brown, dark red and a pale powder blue. Looking at the two comparatively I’m sure many of you would instantly be able to guess which had the higher price tag purely down to what you are seeing with the branding. The user experience of actually going into one of these stores is terrible but somehow a pleasure all at the same time. If you are not lured by the smell of the store in the first place, you would be hard pressed to actually find one if you didn’t know it was there, you will rarely see a big shop front emblazoned with their logo, for either store.

Instead both opt for subtle small signage that could easily be missed by passing traffic. Once you are actually in, good luck in trying to find what you’re looking for. There is no order to anything except jeans, male clothes are mixed with female clothes, it’s almost completely dark bar a few dimmers on the edges of the shelves (don’t touch them, they hurt) , you’ll be dodging beautiful people dancing to blaring music and generally feel completely lost. hi vis hoodie ebayYou turn a corner to enter another unorganised section only to be met by a plant and an armchair blocking your way, it’s like being in a maze, a dark maze with beautiful smelling clothes all around you. hoodie buddie discount couponYou see mannequins dressed amazingly and shout to an assistant if they have “ONE OF THESE IN A SMALL” with accompanying British ‘shouting sign language’, inevitably the answer always comes back “No we don’t have those now, they were last season” to cue more frustration of trying to find something similar amongst the piles of clothes that you can’t see properly. bape hoodie for sale authentic

I actually got a sweater to the checkout last weekend convinced it was blue only to find it was brown. The clothes are sized in American aside from a few items which are thankfully XS, S, M, L but generally you’ll also be battling with converting 1,3,5,7,9 to your standard UK size.hoodie wedgie The whole user experience is generally quite frustrating and you can see everyone around you thinking the same thing, yet we all walk around picking up clothes and spending money (lots of it at that) amongst this terrible customer interface, why? rorschach hoodieMaybe you feel like you’ve invested lots of effort and time into finding something and you’d get lost trying to put it back anyway so you might as well buy it? shake junt hoodie for saleI have no idea, everything about these two physical stores shouldn’t work but yet they do.hoodie mufc

The online stores, by comparison, are neatly laid out, the UI is kind of intuitive bar the english/american translation of clothes making you pause to think for a bit, one of the worse thing they are guilty of is using a lot of inline frames for content which makes using it on an iPhone a no go. This might seem like a bit of an odd post for me, and in a way, it probably is – but I thought the comparison in the branding, the price difference and the world of contrast to their online stores was worth exploring. Can you think of any other brands that go against everything we know and yet somehow work?I’ve been clothes shopping a few times this year, and each time I go, I get another reminder of how 32×34 must mean something else in Indonesia or the planning rooms at Abercrombie and/or Hollister Co. While the pant-sizing issue is a bummer in and of itself, the real pisser of late has been the “case of the shrinking shirt sizes.” On top of that, the ineptitude and utter detachment that the employees of these places display kind of drives me nuts, although it’s hard to blame them sometimes when you consider the retail environment.

Anyhoo, so a couple of weeks ago, I went into Abercrombie with Courtney just to look around. We immediately saw a gray and white striped polo that I knew I would inevitably end up with, but I couldn’t find my size (large) anywhere on the floor. I badgered an employee about it, and a few minutes later, she emerged from the clusterf$*% that is the stock room with said gray polo in large. Now, just to bring you up to speed here, sizing in the late 90s wasn’t really a ridiculous crapshoot. Men’s clothes ran big at the time (because I guess that was the style), so you pretty much knew what you were getting. In 2002, Abercrombie introduced the “Muscle” cut on their shirts, which I think just meant that they were going to make their clothes smaller. Being the attention-seeking man slut that I am, however, I enjoyed this switch because it meant that I wouldn’t have to resort to steroids in order to fill out the sleeves of your everyday shirt. When they first came out with the “Muscle” cuts, a medium was just about right, and a large was just a bit too, well, large.

Over the last year or so, though, I’ve had to start getting larges because the mediums began to look downright ridiculous – like trying to slip a condom over a basketball. Now we go back to our story, only this time you know precisely why I needed a large, and you have this wonderful mental image to boot! I know, I know – I’m feeling generous today. So the girl came back from the stock room with my new shirt, and I bought it and headed on home. The next day, I went to put it on, and lo and behold – there’s a gaping hole where that damn sensor used to be. First question that comes to my mind is this: “How in the hell does the ‘Crombie Zombie’ who removed the sensor not see a hole 3/4″ in diameter?” You know what I think? I think she saw it. I think she just didn’t care. I think she probably thought that the hole wasn’t like directly over my nipple or anything, so why should I care, right? Well, when I’m walking through my house not paying a lick of attention and brush across a door jamb, I’ll probably care a lot when I rip off half my shirt because the hole caught on the lock deal as I passed at 20 mph.

Dismayed over the stupid hole, I had to take the uber cool gray and white stripe polo (in large) back to Abercrombie and exchange it for one that wasn’t ventilated so well. Of course, Murphy’s Law dictates that they would no longer have the gray polo in large, so I had to opt for another polo that I wasn’t quite as crazy about but liked nonetheless. I snatched up a large, made the exchange, and bolted out of there without really even thinking about it. The next morning, I went to put on the new polo. I first noticed a problem when trying to slide my arms through the armholes — umm, I kind of got hung up at the elbows. After much struggling, I managed to pull on the new large polo, and once that bad boy was on, I felt like my arms were going to pop. The shirt was so freaking tight on my “guns” that the skin was actually wrinkling up underneath the cuffed part of the sleeve. It looked completely ridiculous. I have at least ten Abercrombie polos in my wardrobe, and I can say without hesitation that none of them have sleeves that small.

Some are pretty tight on me, but nothing compares to the “large” that would fit the torso of a rhino but the arms of a monkey. Seriously, what is the agenda here? I think there should be at least some reward for being muscular as far as men’s clothes go. I don’t think your everyday chump should be able to fill out the sleeves of a large shirt. Proportionately, it’s got to look kinda weird, I would think. It damn sure looked weird on me! So anyway, I still have the “large” polo, and I guess I’m going to take it back to the store and try to exchange it for something that really does fit. Only this next time, I think I’ll actually try the shirt on in the store, because it’s clear at this point that the size on the label means next to nothing. The alternative, of course, is simply to get my money back and go spend it somewhere else (or not at all, but that’s not gonna get me a shirt anytime soon). Maybe I’ll go to Hollister Co., although I don’t like their polos quite as much.