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American Apparel Marketing Strategy

In: Business and Management

Submitted By pupettajaystava
Words 2598
Pages 11
PROJECT: AMERICAN APPAREL Marketing Strategy

AMERICAN APPAREL Abstract American Apparel has been experiencing a declining trend since 2008. My aim is to identify the reasons why this has been, and continue, to happen. Even if the world financial crisis had an important role at the end of the day, there surely are other actual and potential threats the company has overlooked: for example, right 2 days before the beginning of the decline the CFO resigned; they didn't properly manage internal control especially regarding the financial closing; they cut the advertising budget during 2009; they have been opening stores without considering cannibalization. While trying to describe the mistakes American Apparel did during the last 6 years, an evaluation of its recovery marketing plan to put the company back on the right track will be made. Company's Strategy American Apparel (from now on APP) is a clothing manufacturing, wholesaling and retailing company headquartered in Los Angeles, founded in 1988 by Dov Charney, who is still its CEO and Chairman of the Board of Directors. During the late 80's and the 90's, when the identity of APP was being modeled, Charney was living his life between Canada, South Carolina and California and that deeply influenced the company: while driven by the initial intention to bring affordable American t-shirt to Montreal people, APP slowly developed interests in fashion to please the young in Los Angeles, yet maintaining its classical and casual evergreen signature that was necessary to thrive in South Carolina.1 The company became soon a must shop for basics fashionable apparel. Following the VALS framework, from a psychographic segmentation point of view APP was, and is still, focusing on the "strivers", and from a demographic one it tries to appeal the millennial GEN Y, positioning itself as a casual

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