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Few retail brands have staged a transformation as striking as Abercrombie & Fitch’s in recent years. Voted America’s most hated retailer in 2016, the 130-year-old company spent the past decade clawing its way back into shoppers’ good graces, reestablishing itself as a revitalized, digitally savvy lifestyle brand. The effort paid off, bringing its shareholders total returns of 54.4 percent over the past five years, far outpacing the 12.4 percent average delivered by peer companies. Behind that performance is a turnaround strategy and cultural evolution steered by a focused management team with support from an inquisitive and engaged board. As an independent director, Nigel Travis played a pivotal role in that process, drawing on decades of experience leading major consumer facing brands through disruption and reinvention.
Selected by his peers as CBM’s Independent Director of the Year, Travis brings a unique blend of operational acumen and governance insight to the boardroom. Best known as the CEO of Dunkin’ Brands from 2009 to 2018, he also grappled with challenges tied to brand relevance, labor dynamics and rapid industry change in leadership roles at Burger King, Papa Johns and Blockbuster. A longtime champion of “positive pushback,” Travis authored a book (The Challenge Culture) on the importance of modeling a culture where difficult questions directed at all levels are welcomed from all quarters. As Abercrombie’s chair, he advocates a boardroom atmosphere of constant learning and open dialogue as cornerstones of effective oversight. CBM recently sat down with Travis to discuss lessons learned from Abercrombie’s remarkable resurgence. Excerpts of that conversation, edited for clarity and length, follow.
Fashion retail is a notoriously difficult market, characterized by fickle customers, slim margins and challenged today by declining mall traffic. How was the learning curve for you coming in from a different sector?
It is very different from the majority of my career, which has been in, let’s call it, fast-food, quick-service restaurants (QSR). I’m used to dealing with franchisees. At the time, Abercrombie was very strongly corporate, and it still is. When you have a lot of corporate stores, it’s a big machine. Today, we have about 780 stores around the world. That took a little bit of getting used to. Also, while the fashion industry moves very quickly, it also has a slowness that I’m not used to. I’m used to promotions being done at a fairly rapid rate, but in the apparel industry, you have a [slower] supply chain that you don’t have in restaurants.
I had to get used to that. I’m also not someone regarded as having the best taste in fashion, according to my wife. So, I had to recognize—and this is important—that I didn’t have the expertise in the product that perhaps other people on the board had or certainly management had. I had to accept that. To be fair, it probably took me a year or so to get used to the industry.
Your book, The Challenge Culture, talks a lot about questioning and challenging. In your role as a board member and as chair working with its CEO, Fran Horowitz, were there any points at which the strategy was questioned or challenged in order to make sure it was the right one?
I’ll answer that in two ways. Fran and I meet every two weeks, and because I have lots of other boards and interests, I challenge her to think differently in certain areas. There are lessons that come from chairing a football club, Tropical Smoothie Cafe and, up until yesterday, Servpro. I’m also the lead director of Jersey Mike’s and the chairman of Fooda. In all these other companies, ideas come out, and I convert those into the Abercrombie world, and I challenge her. So that’s the one-on-one challenge.
Secondly, in between every board meeting, I meet with all board directors and say, “What do you want to talk about at the next board meeting?” So, we have these rapid-fire meetings, 10, 15 minutes, and by now they all know they have to come up with a couple of things. It’s something I started just over two years ago. The net result is that I give the management team a list of items that the board wants to talk about. You could say that’s challenging in its own right, because at a lot of companies, it’s just what management wants to talk about. So, we have that, and then we evolve it given the input of the board.
It also has another benefit, which people sometimes miss. People in management sometimes forget that it’s a long way between one board meeting and the next. Me talking to board members means they have to think about what happened last time, what they’ve seen since and make sure that their points are relevant. So, it’s a great way of keeping the board more up to date than normally happens.
At board meetings, there are usually two executive sessions, one with the CEO in the boardroom and a second without the CEO. I encourage board members to say things with Fran in the room. And that has worked really well. So, we’ve developed a much more open approach with Fran. I think she appreciates it. The board seemed to like it. And it’s actually brought us together extremely well.
Abercrombie’s transformation since you joined the board in 2019 has been striking—with a 27 percent year-over-year revenue increase in 2023 alone. What were the most urgent issues the board needed to address, and how did you and your fellow directors prioritize them?
We had challenges that are well documented, which I don’t really want to go into because there are legal issues with a prior CEO, Michael Jeffries. Fran came in after his tenure, and the turnaround that she’s done has been spectacular. We are a very different company now from, let’s say, 11 years ago. The job she has done in terms of inclusivity, the feeling of belonging, the feeling of making sure everyone is welcome at the stores is in sharp contrast to what I understand was the approach under the prior regime. So, it’s been a cultural shift. Fran is a great communicator.
I understand the prior approach was very top-down. Everyone was told what to do. Every store had, like, a playlist. She’s given more autonomy to people and, at the same time, been very supportive, but also made people very accountable. Sometimes people talk about culture and think it’s a soft approach. It isn’t, as long as you hold people accountable.
What was the board’s role during that time in supporting and/or challenging Fran in those changes?
Before I got there, the board was a bit top-down, but that evolved. There was a strong effort from 2017 through 2020 of strengthening the board and bringing people like myself in. I was a recipient of that trend. We brought in stronger people who challenged… one person in management said that until we all turned up, no one ever challenged anything. We have a very strong challenge approach. It’s something that’s encouraged. It’s something that we do all the time—and that’s made us a much better company.
Can you give me an example of something the board challenged?
We spent a lot of time talking about people and talent and succession. That’s been a very strong process that has been put in place. We also challenged the strategy, how fast we’re growing internationally, how quickly we’re going into new channels like wholesale and franchising, which is moving at a speed that probably wouldn’t have happened several years ago. That came from challenges from the board. Our approach on marketing has been heavily challenged at times. Boards have to balance between getting too much into the weeds but challenging from a more macro, more strategic point of view. And I think we’ve done it.
As a former CEO, do you have any approaches that help with that balancing act of counseling but not overstepping?
It’s a very interesting question. Most of my other boards are private equity, so you’re dealing with management much more regularly and probably get into a bit more detail. But at Abercrombie, one of the processes we have is doing annual reviews with directors. With directors who tend to get too much in the weeds, we talk to them, we counsel them. This year, everyone had a lot of feedback. And if someone needed that little bit of extra feedback, I kind of reinforced it.
I’m not sure every board does that. A lot of boards take the easy way out. They don’t do formal board reviews. They perhaps have someone come in for half an hour and say, “This is what we heard. This is what we see. Everything is good. On you go.” We take it down the levels and talk about the performance of every director. It’s important to do that because board directors cost the company a relatively large amount of money. We think it’s a necessary part of board improvement and everyone, including me, can improve.
Some boards do reviews internally, some externally. What does your process look like—and how did the review help?
We try to change the approach regularly because mixing it up sometimes helps, tackles it from a different angle. This year, we used a search firm that interviewed all the directors and all senior management, then got a picture for each director of how the board worked and how individuals contributed. Then they gave feedback on the whole board process and also on the individuals. And if need be, as chair, I came in and added to it.
In the past, some people got too much into the weeds, some people didn’t read all the materials as well as we’d like, some people had issues with calendar management. Those were the kinds of things that you sometimes pick up on.
Earlier, you mentioned franchises at Abercrombie. Did your background play into that becoming an area of growth?
Yeah. Franchises in this business take a lot longer than in quick-service restaurants because the supply chain is much more complicated. So, we’ve got a strategy for opening several countries, but it’s taken a long time. I don’t say that critically, I’m saying it because we’re trying to do the job properly. As a whole approach of making the company less reliant on owned and operated stores and able to distribute around the world, we’ve also taken on some wholesaling, we’ve had some third parties take on some products. The net result of that won’t appear for a few years, but we will end up a much better-balanced company.
It’s an element of asset-light, if you like, which is the area that I’m more familiar with, but that wasn’t all driven by me. That was a discussion that took place at our annual strategic review. I say “annual,” but it’s actually updated regularly. We try and make sure that if people think the strategy needs a little bit of tweaking, we talk about it at that time. We don’t wait until next May’s strategy session.
It’s a regular item on your board agenda?
There are two things besides all the financials and all the results that we do regularly: talent and succession. Too many boards deviate away from talking about that. We talk about people at just about every meeting.
And we talk about strategy. We still have the big strategy day in May, but these days, the world changes so quickly. I’ve always loved saying, today is the slowest day you will see. And I believe that. Companies have to be very agile and respond to changing situations around the world, not just in America. Unlike some of our competitors, we are a truly international company with a presence in Asia Pacific, including China, and in Europe. Everywhere changes all the time.
What decisions around talent is the board discussing? How far down on the levels do you go?
We tend to talk about the leadership team and the people who will replace them. We try not to go down too far. But one thing that’s worked really well is that twice a year we meet the next two levels of management for dinner in the middle of a board meeting. It’s a good way of putting a face to a name. That was set up before my time, but it works extremely well.
What practices have you introduced as chair that you feel have been effective?
I brought in talking about talent at every meeting. I introduced those meeting updates with board directors and changed the executive session approach. I tried to make sure everyone reads the materials so we can focus on a good discussion, not just going through the deck. Going back to getting into the weeds, fashion is an interesting field, probably even more so than QSR, because people can get into the style of pants, dresses or whatever. I’m not sure that’s a board’s role. So I’ve tried to elevate everyone.
One interesting thing that I wouldn’t say I introduced but that has actually become more pronounced is that the board will go to Columbus and go back to the same hotel and have a drink together. That social time is actually helpful because what people forget is the board should be a team as well.
Also, we had never done a board trip outside the U.S. until last year, when we went to London. That was powerful, spending quality time in a third-party location all together, seeing a market we had only ever talked about before. This year, in August, we’re going to a U.S. city to try and replicate the success we had in London. And next year, we’ll go to another country, not an English-speaking country, and perhaps one that I’m not so familiar with.
What practices can boards consider to cope with the fast-changing environment everyone is dealing with these days?
One thing that Abercrombie does really well is making sure that all the publicity about the company and the industry is well communicated to the board. They do a really nice newsletter every Friday. Part of the job of chair, and I certainly do it, is to read a lot. I probably read six newspapers a day. And if I see something that’s relevant, I write it on Fran’s list for us to cover. She may regret the list, but she’s never complained about it yet.
That’s part of the challenge process. You’ve got to keep saying, “This has happened in another industry. How’s that going to affect us?” It’s the chairman’s role to make sure that there are no gaps in what management is looking at. Our biweekly sessions enable us to do that quite effectively.
What about things like AI? How do you and boards as a whole stay up to date?
One of the things I do is give speeches. Speeches are good not just because you get paid for them, but it’s a great way of keeping up to date because you have to actually do some research. So, at Abercrombie, we talk about AI a lot. And we’re very fortunate that we have a team that has embraced it. AI is going to change retail, and every industry, dramatically.
At our football club, we use AI to look at players. You pick up all kinds of things from doing that. I even use AI when I’m recruiting CEOs. Just bang in the name and say, “What are the pros and cons of so-and-so?” And in the interview, I show it to people and say, “Is this right or wrong?”
So I’m very excited about AI. I don’t like the fact that 55 percent of jobs, according to Amazon, are going to disappear. But AI is something that, at Abercrombie, we’ve embraced. We’re highly, highly supportive of people doing courses on governance, compensation or AI. A lot of boards get lazy on that kind of stuff. But a trend going through everything I talk about is that, like most things in life, you have to make an effort. We have a board that makes an effort every single day.
How do you see AI influencing the business of Abercrombie, and is the board discussing that and preparing for it?
First, we probably don’t discuss it enough because it is a subject that is coming up more and more. I mean, it’s quite incredible so I think you have to make sure you use it. I use Perplexity all the time. It’s easy to say, “Well, pass it over to the person running technology and get them to look at it.” But everyone has to embrace AI, keep talking about AI, keep reading about AI. And you have to take a positive approach… Think how far we’ve come with all the [technological developments] right up to AI. We’ve all gotten more efficient, more effective and faster. AI, if we think about it as a tool, will be the same.
Another thing I’ve always done when I was a CEO is attack problems. You have to attack AI. How can AI help you? At the same time, how can you govern it? I was disappointed that didn’t make it into the Big Beautiful Bill—they didn’t address federal governance and AI—because the last thing we want is even more chaos on AI. And you’ve got different countries with different governments responding to it. We need to have one view as much as we can.
When you talk about board composition and board refreshment, what qualities do you look for in board candidates?
Curiosity is one. I’ve seen people on boards where their view is all that counts. So, we try and make sure it’s a good fit. We also have been very keen to make sure that people come with the ability to make a contribution. And we tend to have a bit of an informal matrix that we want to constantly recruit for board succession. I mean, I won’t be chairman for a long time. I’ll probably be chairman for a few more years, but then I will need replacing. And the way we tend to do it is to move people through the chairs of audit, compensation or nominating and governance. We also have an ESG committee. I think that’s an important thing to take into account.
Do we have people with the ability to move up? With the ability to contribute in a special area? It may be HR, it could be AI, it could be technology, you name it. How well will they get on as a board member? We ask them all kinds of questions in the interview, “How will you approach management?” And very quickly, you get some idea of what they’re like.
What about tariffs? How is Abercrombie going to navigate the changing tariff environment?
Internally, we looked at the worst case. And then, one of the things that management has done remarkably well is they have an excellent set of relationships with the suppliers. They have a very open relationship. They share a lot. In my observation, having worked in companies for a long time—not enough sharing goes on.
Fran has great relationships with the suppliers around the world, places like Vietnam, Cambodia, Bangladesh, India, you name it, China. Those suppliers understand the business extremely well.
That’s step one. Step two is you have to make decisions. I’m not going to go into the detail because that’s for the management to communicate. But we’ve got a nice approach to how we’re going to price as a result of tariffs.
You just mentioned being prepared for the worst-case scenario. How does that translate into the boardroom?
If you add up all the experiences on our board, it’s a lot of experience at a lot of companies. So, we pressure-test management for just about everything that we see in other companies. Sometimes this industry is impacted more, sometimes less. We effectively say, “This is what’s happened here. How’s Abercrombie set up for it?” We know that they do all kinds of tabletop exercises in terms of, let’s say, potential risks to the business. We run through that.
Our board, in our interaction with management, is really very good at raising potential hazards that are going to hit us. Fran hates me talking about this, but in my life, I’ve seen multiple plane crashes impact companies. When I was at Burger King, a hurricane took out the headquarters. On Servpro up until yesterday, I saw all kinds of disasters. All these experiences help you plan for the unexpected.
What advice would you give a first-time board member or first-time board chair on how to do those roles well?
First, you have to get out and see the business. I don’t think enough boards get out and see the product in the marketplace enough. I’m also shocked at how many board candidates we interview answer the question, “So, what do you think of our stores?” with, “Well, I haven’t had time to visit a store yet.” That happens, remarkably, a lot.
The second thing: You have to read. I’m not a fashion expert, but I try and read what’s going on in the industry all the time. I even read “China Daily” because we’re in China. You have to keep up to date, read the materials. And before the next meeting, perhaps go back and just reflect on what happened last time.
For the board chair, I’d say, you’re only the chair of a group. You have to talk to your colleagues and use your colleagues, and the board is only powerful as a team. So, you have to focus on making that team really powerful. I mean, my football club in London has done very well. But on the actual playing side, the strength isn’t just the head coach, it’s the strength of his analytics team, the coaches. So I’m a great believer in the team concept, and the team has to work well. The chair has to nourish that team.
The other thing, and you raised it earlier, is that the unexpected will happen. You’ll have a board member who’s done something terrible or a management person who’s done something awful. These circumstances come up, and you have to deal with it. You just have to be calm, be vigilant, do your homework. If you focus on doing the right thing always, you’ll get there.
