Episode 264: pLEAsE, no more nostalgia slop (dELiA*s revisited)

I’m going to confess something somewhat embarrassing to you: while I’m sure many podcasts are planning out whole seasons months (maybe even years) in advance, I am most of the time making it up as I go along, following the threads that interest me most at the time.

Last week I released an episode about nostalgia (and the commodification of nostalgia) after reading, writing, and thinking about it for a full month. The release date was in no way a strategic decision, it just happened to be the moment when I felt like I was ready to share what I had to say…and then at the same time, Target announced this dELiA*s  “collab.”

One of my goals this summer was to…well, reclaim summer.  Usually I spend most of the summer being depressed and anxious.  For one, summer means thunderstorms which means wild shifts in barometric pressure which means lots of migraine headaches for me, since I was a kid.  And as I think I’ve mentioned here before, summer has always been a hard time for me: as a kid it meant being trapped in my miserable, abusive home for three months straight with no contact with other kids.  And as an adult, June and July became this nonstop parade of days of grief: the day my partner died, his birthday, followed by my birthday.  Just too many sad anniversaries.

Well this year, I was like “I’m going to reclaim summer once and for all.” And in the past that would have meant something like nonstop “epic” trips and events, but this year it was just…a bigger garden that I work in every single day, no matter how late I worked at my job. And less screen time, less scrolling.  Reading more books, playing Tomodachi Life on my secondhand Switch, making playlists, trying even more new recipes, making my own crushed red pepper, canning stuff from the garden, drying herbs, spending time with the foster kittens (and Conway), sitting outside on the porch watching birds and other wildlife…and just generally taking care of my delicate brain. 

All that to say, when it comes to whatever The Viral Product of The Week™ is, I tend to be late to the game because I’ve been scrolling a lot less. I have jalapenos to pickle, okay?!

But last Monday, I was scrolling through Threads (aka Where People Go To Be Their Worst Selves) while brushing my teeth, and my feed was full of people (and maybe bots) feverishly posting about this new Target and dELiA*s   collab.

Which was uh, confusing to me because dELiA*s  went bankrupt more than a decade ago. The brand’s intellectual property was purchased by a company called Fab/Starpoint back then.  Now Fab/Starpoint (who btw does not even have a website in 2026) is a company that has been making licensed backpacks, piggy banks, wallets, cosmetic bags, luggage and other tchotchkes since the 90s. Basically they “rent” the right to put characters like Mickey Mouse or Transformers on the items they make and sell.  And there’s major money in that.  In the past, mostly just for kids stuff.  But in this century, entire stores like Hot Topic and Box Lunch are literally just full of licensed products for the whole family, from Hello Kitty to Minions to Rick and Morty.  And everything in between.

Oh side note: in case you missed it, Spencers Spirit Holdings–the company that owns Spencer’s Gifts (aka the dildo store at the mall) and Spirit Halloween (the Halloween store that pops up in dead big box stores every fall) bought Hot Topic and Boxlunch this summer, forming a licensed “near future garbage” megacorp.

Because licensed stuff has been money in the bank for years, right? And in the 2020s, as more beloved brands have gone bankrupt or driven into the ground by private equity, acquiring the logos and branding for these brands via licensing has become a lucrative business, too. We’ve been talking about these “zombie brands” all year here on Clotheshorse. These zombie brands went out of business years or decades ago, and now they exist solely as licensed logos and branding that companies can sort of “rent” to use on their own products. We discussed Esprit last week: the Esprit sweatshirts at Costco and the Esprit “collection” at Walmart in Canada are just licensed product.  Esprit went bankrupt a few years ago and now it just exists as a brand/logo that companies can “rent” (aka license) and put on the products they sell. We’re seeing that with Justice and Limited Too right now, too.  And more nostalgic, long gone brands are going to pop up more and more, too.

But back to dELiA*s : about a year after dELiA*s  went bankrupt (somehow it hung on well into to the 2010s, which blows my mind), Fab/Starpoint tried to “relaunch” dELiA*s  as an online only brand. Basically product made by Fab/Starpoint’s supply chain, with dELiA*s  labels slapped on it. Unsurprisingly, it flopped. Mostly (I think) because it was the wrong time. Too soon! But also because (I’m sure) the product assortment was incredibly uncool and unappealing.

Around 2018/2019–I specifically remember this making its debut when I was working for Nuuly–Dolls Kill launched a “collab” (heavy air quotes) with dELiA*s . Back then I didn’t know the full dELiA*s  backstory, so I was super excited about this.  I bought some pieces for Dylan and me…and immediately returned them because they were the hottest garbage I have ever purchased.  The quality was the worst I have ever seen (in a pre-Shein/Temu world) and remember, I had been at that point a buyer in fast fashion since the 00s. And trust me, I have seen some really bad,  super hot garbage in those years.  This stuff was abysmal.

Also: Dolls Kill is a terrible company.  Just do an internet search for “Dolls Kill controversy” and get ready to do some reading.  I had a feeling it was terrible because all of the worst, most toxic people from Nasty Gal went on to work there. I knew–at the very least–it was a gross, terrible place to work.  But it’s even worse than that.

Dolls Kill continued to churn out horrible quality “dELiA*s  ” (heavy air quotes again) collections for years.  And people kept showing up to buy it.  But none of it was actually made or designed by dELiA*s  …it was all just manufactured using Dolls Kills’ supply chain under license form Fab/Starpoint.  And I’m guessing Fab/Starpoint was just glad to finally recoup some of the cost of buying dELiA*s  , that they didn’t care a ton about the quality of the product or even the company selling it.

I suspect–based on what I have been reading here and there across the internet–that Dolls Kill has been struggling for the past couple of years. And all of the dELiA*s   stuff on their website is on sale.  It also seems as if they are pushing other licensed zombie brands like Ed Hardy right now.

All that to say–Fab/Starpoint is looking for other ways to make money off that dELiA*s  license.  And voila! It’s at Target now.  How I suspected this worked was this: someone in buying at Target works with Fab/Starpoint on other licensed products–likely kid’s backpacks and lunchboxes or pop culture merch–and Fab/Starpoint was like “oh hey, do you know that we own the dELiA*s  label? We could make some merch for you.” And then there were conversations back at the Target offices…and here comes this Target x dELiA*s  “collab.”

I say this because I have had this experience over and over again as a buyer.  Never the dELiA*s  label, but definitely other long gone, zombie brands like Von Dutch and Ed Hardy.  Heck, one company was like “we have the Oscar Meyer Weinermobile license if you want to do something with that.”  Often these companies that specialize in licensed merch (like Fab/Starpoint) will just send you a PDF showing their entire list of licenses and usually it’s a massive, eclectic assortment.  

Now, I can see Target being excited about the idea of a dELiA*s  “collab.”  Sales have been bad for YEARS…even before they decided to walk away from DEI. Even before they made a racist Halloween costume.  The fact is that Target made a lot of bad strategic decisions back in 2020/2021 that continued to drive the business into the ground: namely trying to get their customers to shift away from IRL shopping and into “buy online, pick up in store.” Btw the acronym for that is BOPIS and it always makes me laugh. Sounds sort of like an insult. “That guy’s a real BOPIS if you know what I mean.” And the guy we’re calling a BOPIS is the former CEO of Target, Brian Cornell. Brian Cornell is in fact, a real BOPIS.

Anyway, this shift into getting customers to stop shopping in stores dramatically reduced sales because half of Target’s success was getting people into the store to buy cat litter to leave with a cartful of stuff that they impulsively purchased along the way. But also–the stores were forced to pull staff away from important sales-driving tasks like restocking the store in order to pack these BOPIS orders.  So for IRL shoppers who were excited to get back to wandering around Target, they encountered bare aisles and messy departments.  

That said: Target is not a good company. Long before that BOPIS Brian Cornell decided to bend the knee and kiss the butt of the Trump administration by getting rid of DEI policies, it was a bad place to work.  I knew that from friends who had worked in the corporate offices.  And I knew that from the stories I had been reading on the Target employee subreddit.  All of it was too reminiscent of all of the bad places I had worked.  So I had stopped shopping there about 4 or 5 years ago.

So yeah, it’s 2026 and Target is ravenously hungry to get people to shop from them. Particularly a specific cohort of customers that was so lucrative for them in the past: middle class women–particularly mothers–in their 30s-50s who were once so reliable for them. For years, social media has had this “genre” of content creators who are basically white women who call themselves “Target moms.” They share videos of buying Stanley cups and Tide at Target.  They post about their “Target runs” and new stuff they saw there.  And people EAT IT UP.  I don’t know what is wrong with us as a species, but we sure do love watching people buy stuff.  

But since boycotting Target became a mainstream conversation in early 2025, a lot less women want to be a Target mom. And even if they are still shopping at Target, they probably feel a little embarrassed about it (unless they are MAGA).

So Target is desperate to get those Target moms back in the store.  Why not a super nostalgic brand? I mean, look how great Esprit has been for Costco (and I’m assuming Walmart in Canada)? dELiA*s  is exactly what Target needs right now.  

But wow, the dELiA*s  stuff at Target is so….bad? Forget about the quality. We know that a $35 dress or a $40 cardigan is not going to be good.  And these prices are LOWER than they were in the dELiA*s  catalog THIRTY YEARS AGO. Yes, sorry friends, that number is correct. 30 years.  Those items would be more than $90 today.

So yes, lower quality. But also…just not as good from a design perspective.  As I said on instagram, “it’s giving ChatGPT x dELiA*s .” Just a weird watered down version of dELiA*s  overall aesthetic.  Like dELiA*s  past designs were communicated through a massive game of telephone.

And also: a big chunk of the collection is just tees and sweatshirts that say “dELiA*s  ” on them…which as a former dELiA*s  employee shared on instagram: dELiA*s  would have NEVER made a branded logo tee. Major poser situation to me, which btw being called a “poser” in high school was the most scathing insult anyone could throw your way.

Mediocre and disappointing across the board.  And once again, I have to say: fast fashion, AI, all the bad industries, people, and systems only thrive when we get comfortable and complacent with mediocrity and disappointment.  

Now, last week, I became aware of this dELiA*s  “collab” thanks to the ecosystem of “Target mom” content creators who were posting about it all over the place. I’m sure they were paid for this.  But I also saw people saying like “I’ve been boycotting Target but I don’t know if I can resist any more because of this dELiA*s  collab.” And guess what? That was the intention.  Target was basically like, “THIS will break their resolve.” Because as I’ve said many times before, these companies (and fascists) think that we are weak, lazy, and selfish. That we will break our resolve the moment anything appealing is dangled in front of us.

So OF COURSE I waded into the danger zone by posting about the true nature of the dELiA*s  stuff at Target. And I’m happy to say that while some people showed up to be like “way to be a buzzkill and take away my joy,” most people were like THANK YOU.  And yes, many admitted that the prospect of some good old (powerful) dELiA*s  nostalgia WAS making them consider a return to Target. And it’s a slippery slope: first you’re breaking the boycott “just” for  some dELiA*s  stuff…and soon you’re doing your whole shopping there, even if you won’t admit it publicly.  And I know this because I’ve been in a lot of bad relationships in my life.  I know how it goes.

Now one snarky person asked me “What are you, a dELiA*s   expert?”

And well…yeah, I guess I am. Because back in 2020, in the very early days of Clotheshorse, I decided to take a deep dive into dELiA*s , because I was feeling that nostalgia.  And I needed the comfort of nostalgia.  I had just been laid off by Nuuly, left with no health insurance and two weeks of severance. I was months away from receiving any unemployment compensation, there were no jobs to be had, and I didn’t know how I was going to support my family.  I was really scared.  And in addition to dealing with the trauma of the pandemic, I was also dealing with the trauma of working at Nuuly, where some really fucked up stuff had happened to me.  Everything was terrible.  I coped with it by going down a dELiA*s  research rabbithole and writing an episode about it. Like all early Clotheshorse episodes, it was recorded a few feet away from my bed in our sweaty, dark rented rowhouse in South Philadelphia. 

I thought I would bring that episode back to share with you today.  For one, it might stir some positive nostalgia for you. But also, it will help you understand the silliness of this Target “collab,” too.  But keep in mind–again–that this was recorded in 2020, six years ago.  Some aspects of it might feel out of date to you.  Please do not email me about that. But I hope you enjoy it!  Thanks again for showing up and listening to me talk!

Hi, welcome to Clotheshorse, the podcast that still loves a good daisy print.

I’m your host, Amanda.

Today’s minisode is all about a brand near and dear to my heart:  iconic 90s teen catalog brand, dELiA*s!!!

When I first began researching the rise and fall of this beloved brand, I wasn’t sure what I would find.  In my mind, it had just disappeared one day.  But the story was much more exciting than I imagined…or at least exciting for me as a retail nerd! I can’t wait to tell you all about it!

I received my first dELiA*s catalog in 1993, the year the brand launched….probably because I already subscribed to Teen, Seventeen, Mademoiselle, YM and Sassy…I loved a magazine and  my wall was covered with collages of magazine photos). In a pre-internet, pre-email era, your mailing address was solid gold to companies that already had it.  So it wasn’t surprising to receive random samples, catalogs, and magazines in the mail after you already started subscribing to something.  

dELiA*s was love at first sight for me.  I lived in rural Pennsylvania, where the shopping was pretty non-existent, the internet didn’t exist yet so it was hard to know what was happening in the outside world, but I saw cool shit in Sassy that I could never afford or even figure out how to buy. Like, I was I going to get a pair of John Fleuvog shoes when the store was in Manhattan?

And I think it’s important for context to explain a little bit about what it was like to be a teenager in the 90s, especially a teenager whose interest was a little bit less mainstream.  

Obviously clothes shopping was difficult if you weren’t into the usual stores like Limited, Express, and Gap.  Sure catalogs existed, but they were primarily for either department stores like Sears or really specific grown up brands like Spiegel and the Vermont Country Store.    And the internet didn’t exist yet.  In rural PA where I lived, there was nary a vintage store or even a skate shop, unless I got someone to drive me 45 minutes to Lancaster, where there was a cool vintage store called Checkered Past that also sold Manic Panic.  And I think there was another store outside Harrisburg–another 45 minute drive–that sold Doc Martens and some of the skate brands.  That was it.  So I did most of my shopping at thrift stores.  There was an incredible Salvation Army in York where I scored so much great 70s clothing.  And there was also a place in Harrisburg called Rubin’s, were everything was 25 cents a pound. A proto goodwill bins, that was only clothes.  While I had all of these sick outfits, wearing thrift store clothes to my school in the early 90s meant that I was immediately a freak, a weirdo…and people used to yell “punky brewster” at me in the hallway.  But I knew that this style was Sassy magazine-approved.  If I had been teleported to a big city, I would have been instantly cool and popular

This isolation extended to all facets of life. If you wanted to hear a new band you had read about in Sassy, you could hope someone at school had the album already and was willing to copy it on to a blank cassette for you.  But that was complicated too, well sort of…if it was just another female friend, then it was no big deal to copy tapes and cds for them. But if you asked a boy, or copied a tape for a boy…well that was a whole “thing” and not worth the confusing conversations and gossip that would result from a tiny incident of piracy.  So then you could either go to the record store and spend your limited cash on a tape or cd.  There was no downloading and there was no streaming.  Often you have to spend extra cash on import cds because somehow all the best music was imported.  And to know of these bands and albums in the first place, you would have to buy a bunch of magazines to learn what cool people were listening to.  I was lucky that we *finally* got cable tv in 9th grade so I could watch MTV, in particular, 120 minutes.

So dELiA*s was like a gift from heaven.  Now I could buy clothes that were more like what I was seeing in magazines and it wasn’t going to be this epic undertaking.  I wasn’t going to have to beg someone to drive me hours to buy cool clothes.

.  Of course, I was broke AF.  As you know by now if you’re a regular listener, my family was not well off.  In fact, we hovered right around the poverty line, with some better years, and some worse years when I was growing up.  So dELiA*s felt expensive to me.  But I saved my baby sitting money and I worked all summer long–sometimes two jobs, at a day camp on the weekdays and a convenience store on the weekends. So I could afford to buy some dELiA*s stuff here and there.  And at some point along the way, my grandma discovered the dELiA*s outlet in Reading, like a true, overstock from the catalog outlet…the sort of shopping adventure that no longer exists in the world.  

Anyway, what I’m trying to say is that for me, dELiA*s was “aspirational.” And I know it was the same for millions of other teenage girls of that era.  

Every brand that has existed in our lifetime has dreamed of being aspirational to someone.  

That’s why luxury commands the price it does.  It’s universally aspirational.  

 I’ve been in meetings upon meetings upon meetings during my career where we’ve talked about our dream product offering being aspirational to our customers.  Sometimes we’ve nailed it…sometimes we haven’t.

The internet tells me that the purest definition of aspirational is”having or characterized by aspirations to achieve social prestige and material success.”

In other words, acquiring things from an aspirational brand feels like a goal, something you earn, and when you achieve this goal by owning things from this brand, you will be someone better than you are now. 

We’ve all had these feelings about some brand or another, right?

I think I’ve had a harder time feeling that level of aspiration, of desire for any brand in the past few years, but maybe that’s because the landscape has been kind of uninspiring.  Maybe I demand more.  Maybe I’m unimpressed by the products of clever marketing because I’ve been so deep within for so long.  Hard to say.

But outside of the Esprit bag I dreamed of owning in junior high…which btw never happened and so I still hope to find a vintage one some day…dELiA*s was the first brand that roused those strong feelings of all caps NEED WANT COVET.  Even now, looking at scans of old catalogs makes me kind of giddy and inspired.

So now you know how I feel about this brand.  The love is still there.  I suspect many of your clothehorse listeners feel the same way!

I want to tell you a brief related story that happened in my adult life.

I’m going to start by saying this…and it’s specifically based on my own observations and a few conversations with friends who share a similar background.

When you grew up poor, you worry about money for the rest of your life.  It’s on your mind all the time.  Not just when you’re negotiating a salary or thinking about bills or dreaming of buying a house.  The fear of being poor again is always there.  I have regular nightmares about being evicted, of all my teeth falling out, of finding that my checking account is empty.

When you  are like myself, and you grew up poor, came from a largely disadvantaged background, the sense of imposter syndrome never goes away.  Maybe you can have a good job, be good at what you do, have nice clothes, seem put together…but you are always afraid that everyone knows you are not “one of them.”  Maybe your imperfect teeth will give you away.  Or someone will look up your family on facebook.  And you hear mean, classist remarks all around you all the time.  Ask me how many times I’ve had to hear jokes about white trash or trailer trash.  In fact, I was part of a larger social group in Portland that I completely divorced myself from after most of the women in the group spend the weekend at a vintage RV park  and hashtagged everything “trailertrash” 

I can only assume it’s ten thousand times worse for people of color, probably twenty thousand times times worse for people of color who grew up poor.

So here’s the story:

I was at work and I brought up dELiA*s somehow.  Once again, this was not that long ago.  It probably came up because the wave of 90s nostalgia was cresting.

My boss–who like many of the people I worked with came from an incredibly privileged background–said “oh my mom never bought me stuff from dELiA*s.”

And I stupidly said “oh yeah, neither did my mom because my mom thought it was too expensive.”

And she practically spat back “no, she wouldn’t buy me stuff from dELiA*s because it was cheap and trashy.  She bought my clothes from j.crew.”

And I felt like such an asshole.  Like this brand that I admired, that I ASPIRED to own was cheap and trashy.

I mean, by the time I reached a point in my life where I could afford J. Crew, I thought it was so deeply uncool that it never even occurred to me to buy something there.

It was then that I knew I would never fit in at this job, that maybe people would respect what I did, appreciate my experience, but they would always know that I was not on of them and I would reap the repercussions down the road.  And I did.  

However, I still maintain that dELiA*s was aspirational.  The marketing, the design, the assortment…it was what brands today try to do over and over again, and yet can never nail it. To believe that dELiA*s is trashy or worthy of contempt…to feel that way is to dismiss something that laid the groundwork for every brand that came after it.  To scoff at dELiA*s is to say you care nothing about understanding your customer and giving her things to daydream about.  

As a person who geeks out about branding, marketing, and understanding customers..I mean, I just can’t not love what dELiA*s accomplished, in a pre internet, pre social media era.  Somehow they nailed it…via MAIL, MY FRIEND. Ye old snail mail!

So let’s get into the store of dELiA*s.  And sorry for the public therapy session.  

Okay, so first off…let me tell you something that BLEW MY MIND.

dELiA*s was in business until 2015.  Like WHAT?!  I thought it had disappeared years before.

In fact, the last day of business was March 11,  2015 when dELiA*s officially said goodbye after a massive clearance sale and shut down its website. 

• The company filed for bankruptcy in December 2014
• Just a few months before that, shares of the company had been trading at a mere 19 cents each and the NASDAQ was threatening to give the brand the boot if the stock price didn’t rise above $1. For context, when I was researching this episode, Gap stock was trading at $14!!! So this is a pretty dire situation
• Sales were declining each quarter, down 17-25% from the previous year.   
• A negative comp–when your sales are less than they were last year–can be disastrous.  
• First ,there is the previously mentioned budget issues. dELiA*s annual operating budget–meaning all the  money it can spend every year–woould have been directly tied to a sales plan that was clearly missed. So now it’s time to start thinking about cutting expenses…and that could range from cutting shipping expenses by renegotiating with the shipping carrier to maybe holding off on to some new hires to actually laying off some employees
• And…these declining sales lead to excess inventory (because remember, inventory is tied to a sales plan…when you miss your sales plan, you are left with too much inventory). 
• But you still paid for that inventory, so you’re spending cash that you aren’t making back.  You’re also still paying for your warehouse, your employees, your stores, etc.  
• In this way, missing your sales plan also leads to a negative cash flow situation. Ie, not enough money to keep moving forward.  In the first half of 2014, dELiA*s lost about $26 million.
• dELiA*s warned at the end of the quarter, in its Form 10-Q filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, that, if trends continued, “the company will not have sufficient liquidity to meet its anticipated cash requirements through the next 12 months.
• At this point I should say that I was very surprised to learn that dELiA*s was publicly traded!
• At that time (October 2014) the CEO, Tracey Gardner said that several companies had reached out to discuss acquisition, ie buying dELiA*s.
• Unfortunately a buyer never came through, and in december, the brand filed chapter 11 bankruptcy and worked out a deal to liquidate all of its inventory and assets

And that was the end.  At the time, the brand still had 95 retail stores.

So let’s go back to back to the beginning, because that’s the only way we can explain what happened in the end.

• dELiA*s was founded in 1993
• It was founded by Stephen Kahn and Christopher Edgar, former college roommates who set up shop in New York City’s West Village.  Two men!!!
• In the beginning, they focused on college age women.  It was kinda meh.  They distributed via college representatives. In the first year, they hit $139,000 in sales. Not much was left after the deducted the cost of the inventory and the catalogs.  
• But they decided to pivot when they realized they could make more money catering to this younger crowd all across the country.  Sales increased to more than $5 million.
• . 
• And teenage girls were the fasted growing part of the population in the mid-to-late 90s.  All those millennial girls were starting to grow up!
• They had money to spend. According to the New York-based Rand Youth Poll, in 1997, Girls between the ages of 10 and 12 spent just $2.60 per week on clothing, But their older sisters–using a powerful combination of allowances, part-time jobs, birthday cash and easy access to mom’s or dad’s credit cards–drop an average of $28.95 per week on apparel and accessories. That’s about $50 in 2020 money.
• Through dELiA*s, small-town and suburban girls would have the opportunity to dress like they lived in a major cosmopolitan city
• Thanks to strategically placed advertisements in teen magazines, the demand for dELiA*s catalogs grew.  As an avid magazine subscriber, I can attest that the ads were EVERYWHERE.  And it seemed like everyone was talking about dELiA*s overnight.
•  In late 1996, with more than one million names in its database, catalog distribution in the United States and Japan, and sales at more than $30 million, Kahn and Edgar took dELiA*s public. The IPO raised approximately $20 million. Six months later, a secondary offering brought in another $20 million.
• In 1997 they opened my beloved outlet store in Reading, PA.

As I’ve mentioned early, shopping in the 90s, the pre-internet era was really hard for girls who lived in suburban and rural areas.  

• You were limited to whatever your mall offered–and it was usually the standard stuff like Gap, Express, Limited, department stores, we briefly had a Benetton but I didn’t know anyone who could afford to shop there.  
• If you weren’t the sort of girl who was motivated solely by branding, like Esprit and Guess, you were out of luck when you went shopping.
• dELiA*s was unique because it had no brick and mortar stores to fall back on for driving sales.  And as we’ve discussed before, physical stores can be both a financial burden and a useful marketing tool.
• dELiA*s was all about the catalog.
  • In a 1997 Los Angeles Times article, the company CEO claimed that dELiA*s had convinced its private investors of its unusual “magalog” business model (a combination of “magazine” and “catalog”) by comparing it to MTV. “We told them to think of us as a ‘channel’ through which you can program different types of apparel brands,” “We, like MTV, stay constant . . . but we’ll provide them with a constantly changing assortment of designs and brands.
• And in so many ways, dELiA*s was ahead of its time
  • The catalog format, more magazine than store-in-paper format, allowed dELiA*s to sell a lifestyle as well as products. This idea of selling a lifestyle has been the directive behind almost every brand you know today.
  • So when you think about it,  dELiA*s foreshadowed the direct-to-consumer fashion revolution, where small startups target specific demographics with editorial content and media as much as traditional advertising.  Think about it. Nasty Gal, Modcloth, Glossier, Outdoor Voices.  All of these brands are following this path trailblazed by dELiA*s
  • in its heyday, dELiA*s sold the idea that you could look like the models in the catalog.  You could live their lives.  . All you had to do was dial 1-800-DELIA-NY.  That’s right you had to either dial the number and pay with a credit card OR fill out the form in the center of the catalog and mail it off with a check.

So let’s talk about all the things dELiA*s was doing right

• First off, there was the product offering.  You know it well.  Striped crop tops, wide leg pants, chokers, cute back packs, girl-sizes skate sneakers, platform mary janes.  
  • Even though this company was founded by men, they hired the right women to pick the product, buyers who really understood the customer
  • In fact, the majority of both the product and creative teams were women, led by women.  This was really unusual for the time.
  • The buyers were young–either in college or just out of college, and they looked/dressed/lived like the girls in the catalog.  They were living embodiments of the aspirational brand. 
  • The other great thing about dELiA*s is they were bringing brands to their customers that they couldn’t ordinarily find in their local malls:  Sugar, Roxy, Tasty, Rocket Dog, and tons of skate brands that don’t exist any more. Most of these brands came from LA or New York, so they weren’t accessible to anyone who lived in between.  Some analysts believe that dELiA*s was the beginning of the “death of regionalism,” or this idea of individual culture, fashion, and trends being dictated by where you live.  The internet completely obliterated this.
  • Over time dELiA*s become more and more private label–meaning that the bulk of the product in the catalog carried a dELiA*s label, but the early years of dELiA*s helped tons of small brands build up business and gain wider distribution.
  • And dELiA*s wasn’t just clothes and accessories..because remember, it was a lifestyle.  There was stickers, pens, school supplies…eventually home decor like cute bedding with matching lamps and curtains.  All incredibly desirable and on point.  
  • Another great thing about the stuff in the dELiA*s catalog: the price was right.  The brand’s target audience—young women ages 10 through 24—were at the stage in life where they were beginning to find their voice, and dELiA*s helped amplify it. The price point for its products were within reach for girls of middle income households who were receiving the catalog.  All of the prices were in line with what you would encounter at the mall, but this product was 100 times cooler and more unique.  Somehow aspirational without being a luxury price point.

• And I’ll tell you, this was also the genius behind the Nasty Gal in its heyday.  Nothing too expensive, but always cool and unique.  Aspirational as hell.  
• Being aspirational without being expensive…that’s the special sauce right there.  Like, Chanel is aspirational because it’s luxury and only some people can afford it.  That makes sense. But we rarely think as inexpensive things as aspirational. Like, think about Forever 21.  They used to sling a shit ton of clothes and shoes, but no one ever “identified” with Forever 21.  They never aspired to be seen in Forever 21 clothes.  It was more a means to an end.  So to hit that lower price point and still be something that girls dream of owning…that’s just genius.
• Brands and retailers dream of achieving that balance.  It’s so hard.

Next, was the catalog.  A masterpiece of design and copy.  Seriously, people write nerdy design thinkpieces about the genius of the dELiA*s catalog.  Keep writing them, because I love reading them.

• The catalog came out 10-12 times per year.  
• The brand’s upper/lower-case font mash-up with a casually placed asterisk was the epitome of cool, early-Internet chic.  It inspired years of slightly obnoxious conversations on AOL Instant Messenger.
• The font itself…I’m sure you can picture it when you close your eyes…was inspired by the font used on the cover of my all time favorite teen magazine: sassy! Not the Sassy logo, but the other font used on the cover to lure you with exciting promises like “20 prom dresses that aren’t disgusting” and “we take you to the gynecologist”
• The copy and the content was not unlike Sassy.  Rather than the “how to get a boy to kiss you” content of most of the other  media aimed at teen girls of this era, the voice was irreverent, casual, empowering.  The focus was on the girls and their personal style and lifestyle…not on boys, dating, the male gaze
• There was nothing else out there like this at the time.
• Charlene Benson was the creative director of photography and she is responsible for the brand direction and general vibe.

 “I didn’t want the copy to repeat and say what the person was already saying; I thought of it as an opportunity to have this parallel dialogue with the shopping experience,” Benson explains. “And there were a couple styles of typography [so we] could fit a lot on the page but still have it feel fun and wonderful. In the end we just really wanted to have some fun. And the line type going through the page kind of gave it some structure.”

she decided to not have any letterforms stop at the end of a page to encourage shoppers to keep turning and reading the catalog’s story.

• And then there was the unique, white background photography. 

“In the beginning, a lot of [the design choices] were about timeline and budget. But for the most part, the first people that worked on [the catalog] just wanted something really simple,” Benson says. “I loved figures on white, and I was working at Mademoiselle at the time, so I wanted to do something that didn’t quite look like what we were doing at Mademoiselle.

• The catalog also featured free gifts like super hot music cds and surprise gifts and samples.
• In addition the brand really wanted to hear from customers.  We’re used to that now in the era of instagram comments, retweets, and customer reviews.  But how do you accomplish that via snail mail? More from Charlene Benson:

“Very early on, we were always creating things to drop in the packages, and we made a little postcard where girls could put a picture of themselves to show us who they were,” “We got hundreds and hundreds of photos, and it was really the beginning of what we see now where people can’t stop taking pictures all the time. It got them in the conversation, so then we became in conversation with them.”

• To be honest, the marketing team at dELiA*s did a few super smart things that went beyond just great art direction
  • In 1997, the company acquired TSI Soccer Corporation, a privately held direct marketer of specialty soccer apparel and equipment.  This added another million names to the dELiA*s mailing list, giving them the largest database of teenage consumers in the U.S.
  • The same year,  dELiA*s acquired gURL Interactive Inc. gURL Interactive was the owner of gURL.com, an entertainment web site for girls that featured magazine-style articles, interactive games, bulletin boards, and chat rooms. The popular gURL site, which had been developed by three female students in New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, had a loyal following of young women just the right age for dELiA*s fashions. The company planned to use its newly acquired web site as the cornerstone for a whole teenage Web community.
    • And Gurl.com was a perfect fit.
    • In a post Sassy, pre Rookie era, this was the only media outlet for teen girls that spoke frankly and casually about what it was like to be a teen girl.
    • TBH, I had a gurl.com email address for years and years.
    • So at this point it would seem that the brand was getting ready to embrace the ecommerce era, without knowing it.  Hmm…well it didn’t exactly work out that way, but we’ll get to that. 
  • And in 1997–clearly a peak year for dELiA*s, the brand expanded into home and launched a spinoff catalog  for it called Contents
    • It was initially mailed as insert in a dELiA*s catalog, but soon began arriving on its own.
    • In addition to cute and cool home furnishings, it gave tips on how to decorate, all in that dELiA*s voice.
  • In 1998, the brand launched dELiA*s.com.  It wasn’t just product, there were also articles, quizzes, contests, etc…and it all tied back to an expanded gurl.com
  • They also bought another huge database of teen addresses from a catalog company called Fulcrum direct, who focused on preteens.  By the end of the year, their mailing list contained more than 11 million names! Nearly double of the previous year.
  • The also launched Droog, the first ever catalog aimed solely at teenage boys.  
  • The company was making SO MUCH MONEY.  The made $80 million in PROFIT that year.  I mean, I’ve worked so many places that DREAM of that. 
  • In 1999, they opened their first store in White Plains, NY. By 2011, there were 115 stores across the US.
• Competitors began to pop up everywhere!
  • * MoXiegirl filled 76 pages in its August premiere issue. The Manhattan Beach-based newcomer bills itself as a “magalog,” because its ads and editorial content lean heavily upon what teens see in leading magazines.
  • Girlfriends LA, a Northridge-based catalog, mirrors the squeaky clean look of dELiA*s. It features a six-page section jammed with accessories ranging from temporary tattoo art and body paints to hand-painted designer light bulbs and “frou-frou-scented” pillows.
  • Airshop and Alloy, which operate Internet sites, have announced plans to offer print catalogs.  Later Alloy acquired Girlfriends LA. Now I want you to remember Alloy, because they are going to come back in the picture a few years later.

• So what happened? How did everything fall about by 2014? 
  • It all started in 1999, when dELiA*s signed on to some very expensive leases on stores.  The stores just weren’t making enough money to pay these leases!  We’ve seen before how opening too many stores, too fast can really destroy a company financially.  As we’ve talked about in our ecomm episodes, store are SO EXPENSIVE.
  • And then there were a lot of issues with its ecommerce business.  Basically they had tried to spin it off into its own company, then they brought it back in house 18 months later, and well, it cost them a lot of money and time.  Millions of dollars They just couldn’t catch up
  • dELiA*s ALSO went on a spending spree, buying several children’s apparel and sporting-gear catalogs. It sold or closed all of its noncore properties by the end of 2001, including Droog, the boys catalog. In 2001, it sold gurl.com to Seventeen. 
  • By 2003, dELiA*s was hurting.  Ecomm wasn’t performing, the stores were breaking the bank, and so on.
    • In swooped Alloy!  Despite starting business almost two years after dELiA*s, they were in a stronger place financially.
      • They had bought other competitor catalogs.
      • They never opened brick and mortar stores
      • They bought other marketing companies so they could expand their reach to teenagers.
      • And lastly–and if you’ve listened to our previous episodes, you know how important this is…they had nailed the logistics of warehouses and order fulfillment.
    • And Alloy had a bigger database. In 2003, total circulation at dELiA*s was about 35 million, while Alloy’s was 55 million-60 million
    • Alloy bought dELiA*s for a mere $50 million.  
    • This seemed like an amazing plan, basically this mega company would just completely own the teenagers of the world.  Their mailing list constituted 30%–40% of U.S. consumers who were 12–18 years old.
  • But it just didn’t work….
    • The new mega company continued to roll out more and more stores.  
    • And now there were new, cheaper competitors on the landscape: H+M, Zara, Forever 21.  Their product was incredibly similar to dELiA*s, but half the price.  So yeah, you can also blame fast fashion for killing dELiA*s. 
    • But there’s more!
    • And retailers like Pac Sun and Hot Topic brought the alt girl aesthetic to every mall in america. 
    • And in fact, the dELiA*s assortment seemed more lost than ever:  mostly graphic tees and low rise jeans, none of the cool factor that it had in the 90s.  Basically just boring clothes
    • And then there were new edgier competitors out there like American Apparel.  American Apparel was more expensive but it was sexier, cooler…in fact, the cool girls that had once looked to dELiA*s as their bible now shopped at American Apparel, regardless of age.
    • The aspirational quality of dELiA*s was gone.
    • And so began the hemmorrage of money.  Sales were dropping, the inventory was rising… a story we know too well.
    • Tracey Gardner joined dELiA*s in May 2013 as CEO.  
      • The company thought it found a solution to its woes in Gardner, who was part of the team that turned J. Crew from an ordinary, preppy clothier into a bedrock fashion brand rocked by the likes of First Lady Michelle Obama.
      •  She brought on executives from J. Crew and Coach and sold off the struggling Alloy business
      • She had an idea:  why not turn the brand into a niche option for wealthier teenage girls by ramping up the pricing, maybe bringing in some more expensive shoe and accessory brands.
      • Well, I’ve seen this fail time and time again.  Kim and I discussed how this happened at Nasty Gal on our ecommerce episodes.  It just doesn’t work, especially if you’ve already lost that customer.  
      • And so the deal was sealed. 
      • dELiA*s declared bankruptcy a year later.

In 2015, Steve Russo of Fab/Starpoint acquired the brand for $2.5 million.  He briefly  re-opened the store with an online-only presence but it was incredibly unsuccessful.

In recent years, Dolls Kill has been licensing the dELiA*s brand name and designs to create new product, and while it looks a lot like it’s ancestors, the quality is pretty egregious.  LIke really really bad.  Fast fashion at it’s worst. 

Alloy is still around sort of, but the branding couldn’t be more different than it’s skate/rave origins.  In fact, it seems to focus on clothing for tall women, which is really fucking smart.  Always the smartie that Alloy!

RIP an incredible era.

Still dELiA*s paved the way for the way brands talk to us now. 

• They nailed the voice of their customer.  They broke down the fourth wall and spoke directly to their customer, like a super cool friend!
• They presented more than just product, they had actual content, so they were more than just a retailer, they were a lifestyle, a brand that felt like a person you knew.  You felt like you were part of something.
• The catalogs—and their smart design and editorial vision—defined the aesthetic of the millennium.
• I look at a brand like Glossier and I know they couldn’t exist without dELiA*s. 
• Conversely, it seems that while brands have been emulating dELiA*s style of marketing and customer connection, they haven’t learned from it’s mistakes, as we’ve seen overexpansion into stores and the really ill-advised pivot into high price points take down so many brands over the past few years.

I think dELiA*s is a timely story for 2020, as it was destroyed partially by hubris, and partially by a changing tide in the industry…both ecommerce and fast fashion.  It couldn’t adjust it’s plan.  It couldn’t grow with the times.  It just couldn’t pivot.

Now in 2020, in the midst of both the alleged retail apocalypse and a global pandemic, brands are dropping like flies.  Stuck in their ways for too long, they don’t know how to adjust.  They forgot to pivot into ecommerce or they were unwilling or unaware to make the shift into more sustainable, ethical practices.  Maybe they were also too foolish to offer inclusive sizing.   They continued to move along with the model of selling as much as possible, everything else be damned.  

This is the time to start your own thing, to do it right, to build something magical.