The Challenge

When I joined Abercrombie & Fitch, the brand was in the second year of its rebrand, transitioning from a legacy retailer with a lot of baggage into its renewed life as a modern lifestyle brand. The business was just beginning to gain traction, and leadership set a clear mandate: maximize profit generation so the company could reinvest into fueling what it called its “rocketship” growth strategy.

Resources were limited: the marketing team was lean, cross-functional, and highly scrappy. Paid media needed to deliver outsized impact without additional budget.

The Insight

The opportunity was to spend smarter. By embracing automation and aligning paid search and paid social strategy with merchandising priorities, site experience, and IT development, we could drive incremental revenue without scaling costs. Paid media could become a profit engine that directly accelerated the rebrand momentum.

The Strategy

I led the paid search program for both A&F Adults and A&F Kids with a focus on:

• Automation adoption to increase efficiency and unlock revenue growth at scale.

• Cross-functional alignment with merchandising and site teams to ensure campaigns matched real-time demand and inventory.

• Profit-first optimizations to generate incremental dollars that could be reinvested in broader brand initiatives.

When a team member left, I also stepped in to lead paid social and display for A&F Kids, expanding my role while continuing to drive SEM for both brands.

The Execution

• Paid Search (Adults & Kids): Implemented automated bidding and dynamic campaigns to capture demand efficiently while reducing wasted spend.

• Paid Social & Display (Kids): Built performance campaigns designed to complement SEM, focusing on creative testing and messaging to grow Kids’ online business.

• Cross-Team Collaboration: Partnered with IT/Dev to improve site tagging and data capture, and with Merchandising/Site teams to ensure promotions and creative aligned seamlessly across channels.

The Results

The scrappy, integrated approach delivered transformative results:

• 3X increase in paid search revenue while maintaining the same budget

• Improved margin contribution, creating reinvestment dollars for brand growth

• A more sophisticated, cross-channel approach that laid groundwork for long-term scalability

The Takeaway

At Abercrombie & Fitch, I proved that strategic use of automation and cross-functional alignment could deliver growth without additional spend. By tripling paid search revenue and taking on multi-channel leadership, I directly contributed to A&F’s rebrand momentum and established paid media as a core profit driver during a pivotal moment in the company’s turnaround.