abercrombie fitch

Bryan Thomas for The New York Times “We aren’t in the business of optimizing and maximizing profits,” Mr. Rattray said. “We’re in the business of impact.”

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When Benjamin O’Keefe read the words of Abercrombie Fitch’s chief executive, Mike Jeffries, suggesting that the retailer wanted its clothes worn only by thin, attractive “cool kids,” he wasn’t happy. Mr. O’Keefe, 18, struggled with weight issues in middle and high school and felt compelled to speak out. He created a petition on the Web site Change.org, encouraging Mr. Jeffries to sell clothes to people of all sizes. That was on May 8; the petition has now attracted more than 75,000 signatures.

One of the people who heard about the petition was Greg Karber, a Los Angeles filmmaker. Five days after the petition went up, Mr. Karber posted a video about Mr. Jeffries’ comments on YouTube. On May 15, a vague apology appeared on Abercrombie Fitch’s Facebook page, and a week later, Mr. Jeffries met with Mr. O’Keefe. Afterward, the company issued a statement saying it would continue the dialogue and take “concrete steps” to support anti-bullying, diversity and inclusion.

This is just the kind of thing Ben Rattray says he was hoping for when he started Change.org in 2007. The idea behind it began percolating when he was a senior at Stanford in the late 1990s, studying economics and intent on a career in investment banking. While he was home for winter break, his brother, Nick, who was in high school at the time, told his family and friends he was gay. “Before he came out,” Mr. Rattray said, “Nick saw lots of homophobia and bullying, all these insulting comments made, but his friends didn’t stand up for the L.G.B.T. community, no one spoke out. And it was so painful for him, seeing people he loved not saying anything against all this hate.”

It was a pivotal moment for Ben. That conversation began his transformation, he said, from wanting to be in finance to wanting a career that revolved around social change, “enabling people to speak out for issues they care about.” He thought he would do that by studying public interest law at New York University — and then he saw Facebook. “I saw the potential power of that technology to connect people around issues of common interest,” he said.

Mr. Rattray ditched law school and wrote a 90-page business plan for Change.org and then introduced the site with a college friend, Mark Dimas. They wanted it to provide tools for social organizing and fund-raising and tried a number of approaches, including virtual political action committees, skills-based volunteerism, social fundraising and personal pledges. It turned out the simplest tool, the petition, worked best. “This merging of old-school advocacy with social media made the petition much more effective,” Mr. Rattray said.

Today, the company has 170 employees in 18 countries and is growing faster outside the United States than in it, with two million new international users each month. Last year, revenue was $15 million, which came from sponsored petitions, started and paid for by businesses and organizations. These are usually nonprofit, political and charitable organizations, although the site will accept sponsored petitions from any business or organization.

About a month ago, the site made promoted petitions available to its users worldwide. Promoted petitions allow individuals to pay to get a petition in front of Change.org’s 38 million users. The more a signer pays, the greater the number of users who will see the petition. For example, it costs $10 to promote a petition to 50 users, $100 for 500 users. The average contribution is about $19, and there is a $1,000 cap. Mr. Rattray projects that by year’s end, 10 percent of Change.org’s revenue will come from promoted petitions.

Last month, Change.org also secured a $15 million round of investment led by the philanthropic investment firm Omidyar Network. Mr. Rattray has declined to take traditional venture capital because there are few venture capitalists willing to accept his terms: he says he will never sell the company, go public or cede control. “We aren’t in the business of optimizing and maximizing profits,” he said. “We’re in the business of impact.”

The company has been certified as a B Corporation by the nonprofit B Lab, a certification available to for-profit companies that pass B Lab’s B Impact Assessment, which shows a company meets certain standards of social and environmental performance, accountability and transparency. Mr. Rattray says he would ultimately like to incorporate as a benefit corporation, which is a legal status akin to a C corporation, S corporation or L.L.C. He can’t do so because Change.org is incorporated in Delaware and that state has yet to pass legislation to allow companies to incorporate as benefit corporations. “We operate as if we were incorporated that way anyway,” Mr. Rattray said. “We respect the interests not just of shareholders but of stakeholders too.”

Those stakeholders include people like Mr. O’Keefe, the Abercrombie Fitch petitioner, and Bo Muller-Moore, a folk artist in Montpelier, Vt. Mr. Muller-Moore’s T-shirt company sells custom-designed, hand-printed T-shirts bearing the slogan “Eat More Kale.” In 2011, when Mr. Muller-Moore decided to register the slogan for a federal trademark, the fast food chain Chick-fil-A opposed him, maintaining it was too similar to its “Eat mor chikin” slogan. (Chick-fil-A declined to comment for this post).

In September, a friend of Mr. Muller-Moore’s started a petition against Chick-fil-A on Change.org. Today the petition has 41,000 signatures and has garnered press attention and support from Vermont’s governor, Peter Shumlin. Although Chick-fil-A has not stopped its efforts to block Mr. Muller-Moore’s trademark, the petition has been a boon for his business — after an Associated Press article appeared about the petition and was picked up by Yahoo, the Eat More Kale site went from 350 visitors a day to 27,500 visitors and stayed that way for three weeks.

Mr. Rattray says he wants to enable Change.org’s users to develop ongoing campaigns that have the power to shift public policy and corporate behavior over time. “The question is: How do we turn these remarkable, momentary victories into longer-term social movements?” he said. “We are focused on building tools to enable that.”

You can follow Eilene Zimmerman on Twitter.

Article source: http://boss.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/04/change-org-merges-old-school-advocacy-with-social-media/?partner=rss&emc=rss

No successor has been named yet.

Mr. Robinson, who joined retail chain in 2007, was a hire that fashion insiders loved. He had designed for Paco Rabanne, Perry Ellis, Giorgio Armani and Anne Klein before going to Gap, and had been nominated for a Council of Fashion Designers of America award, the industry’s equivalent of an Oscar. (And his wife, Virginia Smith, is a Vogue editor.) Soon after joining the Gap, he was dispensing styling advice on the pages of Glamour and Teen Vogue, and was covered like a celebrity by fashion blogs.

Beyond the buzz, Mr. Robinson had a difficult job: trying to figure out what Gap should be selling. After pretty much defining American basics in the ’80s and ’90s , the chain had floundered. Competitors like Abercrombie Fitch and J. Crew, along with fast-fashion brands like HM and Zara, were offering sharper takes on trends.

Introducing one of his first Gap collections, Mr. Robinson said he wanted to “take the classic, iconic heritage of the company and make it relevant.” His Gap designs produced some popular items, like fitted cargo pants, reinvented jeans and military-inspired clothing, but sales did not take off.

Starting in 2005, and continuing through Mr. Robinson’s tenure, Gap’s North America stores have had annual decreases in sales at stores open at least a year, a crucial measure of retail health. In 2010, though Gap Inc.’s other units, including Banana Republic and Old Navy’s North American stores, posted positive same-store sales, the Gap unit saw a 1 percent decline.

The trend continued in January, February and March of this year, when Gap North America’s same-store sales were flat, down 1 percent and then down 9 percent, as same-store sales for retailers tracked by Thomson Reuters were up a few points in each month.

Mr. Robinson’s departure comes as Gap is overhauling its Gap North America division. About three months ago, the company dismissed the top business-side executive overseeing the Gap brand in the United States, and named a new global chief marketing officer for the Gap brand.

While media releases announcing executive changes tend to dance around a dismissal — they usually say that an executive chose to leave, often to spend more time with his family — the Gap release that hit the wires on Thursday was fairly direct.

“I’ve made the decision to make a change within our Gap Adult design team,” Pam Wallack, chief of the Gap Global Creative Center in New York,’ said in the statement. While Gap looks for a successor, the head of children’s design will oversee adult clothing.

“Our leaders of the new Gap Global Creative Center are taking the necessary steps to compete and win around the world,” Glenn Murphy, the chairman and chief executive of Gap Inc., said in the statement.

Analysts said the problem on the design side seems to be twofold.

The colors that Mr. Robinson seems to prefer are muted — Gap’s stores now, for instance, are filled with peaches and grays, while competitors are going for saturated jewel tones.

“They were very, very neutral throughout 2010” in terms of colors, Adrienne Tennant, a retail analyst at Janney Capital Markets, said in an interview earlier this year.

“The Gap division, particularly at holiday, really resonates when there’s color and pop and vibrancy. Part of what Gap had done well is use bright colors to connect with customers’ emotions, particularly around the holiday season, and we didn’t see as much of that” recently, Ms. Tennant said.

Also, the timing of when it brings clothing has been an issue. While Gap has had moderate success with items like its 1969 jeans, other styles hit at the wrong time.

Gap introduced skinny-leg cargo pants, for instance, in early 2010. “But they were early on the trend, early in the year, and when the trend peaked they weren’t there as much,” Ms. Tennant said.

In an interview in March, Seth Farbman, the new global chief marketing officer of the Gap, acknowledged some of the problems.

“To rely on hit product after hit product is unreal,” he said.

“It’s hard to be in the middle, so we have our work cut out for us — to design what a middle brand really means,” he said. “This is not a five-year turnaround strategy; this is a right-now.”

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=5ecb2f58aaf3ae87689e69edccef6f50

You’re the Boss Blog: Change.org Merges Old-School Advocacy With Social Media

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