Since its rapid expansion in the early 2000s, Forever 21 has been among the quickest and dirtiest participants in the quick-and-dirty “fast fashion” business that has come to dominate the American apparel market. Fast fashion is what it sounds like: Global behemoths such as Zara and H&M have built massive, highly efficient supply chains in which low-wage garment workers turn cheap textiles into of-the-moment clothing that’s distributed around the world as quickly as possible and sold for next to nothing. At Forever 21, a tank top costs as little as $2.90. The brand’s average store has grown to nearly 40,000 square feet—more than 30 percent bigger than the average Best Buy. That’s a lot of cheap tank tops.
The constant novelty of Forever 21 proved especially enticing to Millennials, who were in their teens and early 20s in the 2000s. For them, walking into a Forever 21 became the teen-retail equivalent of entering a casino: a cavernous, disorienting chamber of sequins and patterns and forbidden pleasures. Instead of booze and gambling, the vices offered were more kinds of $12 Daisy Dukes than a 15-year-old in 2006 could have imagined. Forever 21, like its fast-fashion compatriots Zara and H&M, succeeded because it gave young people the thrill of personal choice, moreso than any other business model in the world. It crippled some of those other models in the process.
Now, Forever 21 is in trouble for exactly the same reason as the stores it out-muscled: It’s being beating at its own game. Unlike Millennials, who were compelled by the abundance of Forever 21 and saw its wares as an opportunity to better adhere to existing trends, Generation Z consumers—kids currently in grade school and college—just see a bunch of cheap stuff that everyone already knows about. The familiar is a hard sell to today’s young shoppers, according to Thomai Serdari, a fashion-branding strategist and marketing professor at New York University. “A big difference with Generation Z is that they’re not all trying to look the same,” she says.
Previous generations of consumers “were not as informed,” says Serdari. “[Gen Z] likes to do research, they have a limited budget, they spend online because they can get better deals.” In other words, being large, cheap, and geographically convenient—Forever 21’s main selling points—are no longer impressive to a huge proportion of its market, even if Forever 21 believes it has the capacity to clothe the goths, the punks, and the VSCO girls.
As young people have become rapidly more digitally adept and more constantly connected, online-only fast fashion retailers like FashionNova and ASOS and smaller specialty brands like Brandy Melville have chipped away at Forever 21’s consumer base with more sophisticated branding, better use of social media, and a better understanding of design trends. They’re also not weighed down by Forever 21’s brick-and-mortar leases for more than 700 stores across the globe, which are widely cited as the biggest practical barrier to the company’s return to profitability.