Urban Still Rolling In Dough

Sometime in the last few years, American Apparel took the title of “hip clothing store everyone rags on” away from Urban Outfitters. How’d they do it? Unclear. Now that Rick Santorum’s gone, people don’t care the place is owned by a right-winger anymore; by contrast, American Apparel’s owner is creepy as hell¹. Nobody even really makes a peep when Urban brings out its annual “offensive” product in order to get attention.

Well, maybe this will swing the tide back in Urban’s favor: Despite the recession/depression/complete destruction of the American economy, Urban turned nearly a $60 million profit in the third quarter.

The company cited higher profit margins and a tight control of sales-and-administrative expenses. Going into the key holiday-shopping season, the company said it has maintained “rigorous management of inventory and expenses.” In the recent quarter, tighter control of inventory meant fewer items marked down for discount sale.

But the company apparently also attracted shoppers. For the quarter ended Oct. 31, Urban Outfitters had sales of $478 million, up 26 percent from the previous year’s sales of $379.3 million. On a comparable basis, measuring the same stores as a year ago, sales rose by 10 percent overall at its three store brands.

So that explains the resent surge in one-liner t-shirts I’ve been seeing.

¹ My favorite part of that blog post is the line, “That’s a charitable assessment of the November issue; a less generous one is to call it the biggest blunder in the magazine’s 18-month history.” Ohh, no! How will Portfolio ever recover…