Old-Line Retailer Outfitted Roosevelt, Earhart : Oshman’s to Sell Abercrombie & Fitch

Abercrombie & Fitch, which outfitted Theodore Roosevelt’s safaris and Robert E. Peary’s explorations, is being sold to an investor group by Oshman’s Sporting Goods, a Houston-based retailer that has struggled for nine years to build a chain around the legendary name.

Oshman’s said Thursday that it has agreed to sell “substantially all of the assets” of its 27-store Abercrombie & Fitch division to a group headed by Michel Zelnik, vice chairman and former president of Bidermann Industries, a New York-based unit of a French wholesaler of men’s and women’s apparel.

Abercrombie’s performance “has bounced around,” said Oshman’s vice chairman, Alvin N. Lubetkin. “In our hands, it was about 12 to 18 months away from starting to show some significant profit improvement.”

Under the deal, Oshman’s would receive $30 million in cash and $20 million in notes and, Zelnik said, would retain 15% of the common stock of a new corporation being formed to buy Abercrombie & Fitch. It would also have the option to buy an additional 4.9% of the stock, the per-share value of which cannot yet be determined.

Zelnik, who has extensive experience in buying merchandise overseas, said he wants to “try to bring (Abercrombie & Fitch) back to what it used to mean--a very safari-oriented and life-style kind of store.” He added that he hopes to expand the chain to 100 stores within seven years.

Since buying the name of Abercrombie & Fitch after the original company went bankrupt in 1977, Oshman’s has attempted to rebuild the store’s image while appealing to a broader clientele. Analysts said, however, that it failed to establish any clear identity.

“It should be a high-return business and hasn’t been,” said Terence J. McEvoy, vice president with Prescott, Ball & Turben in New York. “I’m not sure with a value-conscious consumer whether they’re willing to pay the premium that Abercrombie seems to be asking them to pay.”

For years, however, the likes of Ernest Hemingway, Amelia Earhart and assorted potentates willingly paid a premium for custom-made hunting rifles and bejeweled leopard’s collars at the company’s landmark Madison Avenue store in New York.

The business was founded in 1892 by a gentleman hunting shop owner from Scotland named David T. Abercrombie, who later joined forces with an English-born lawyer from Kingston, N.Y., named Ezra Fitch.

For more than eight decades, the Manhattan store served adventurous aristocrats. At one point, Fitch inhabited a log cabin atop the store, where he and customers would practice fly casting in a rooftop pool.

But the company did not adapt well to a changing marketplace. Nor, analysts say, has Oshman’s strategy of aiming at a broader-based clientele worked well, either.

The Abercrombie chain, which includes six Southern California stores, only recently became profitable. The business “has distracted management from the main task of merchandising Oshman’s in recent years,” said Edward Weller, an analyst with Montgomery Securities in San Francisco.

Recently, sales at the 188-store Oshman’s sporting goods chain have suffered, analysts say, from the oil-related recession in Texas, disastrous ski seasons and the lack of a new, popular sports activity. Abercrombie & Fitch accounted for $48 million of the parent company’s $323 million in 1986 sales.