Your favorite brands got worse on purpose

Pick up a Brooks Brothers shirt and turn it inside out. Look at the shoulder stitching. If it looks like a rat’s nest of tangled thread done by someone who couldn't give a shit, that's the business model working exactly as designed.

Brooks Brothers was founded in 1818, dressed 40 presidents over the following two centuries, and made the coat Lincoln was wearing the night he was shot. For most of that run the name meant one specific thing: quality American tailoring at a price that reflected it.

Now think about Eddie Bauer. They used to sell gear with a lifetime warranty, the kind where you could wear a jacket for a decade, bring it back when it wore out, and walk out with a new one. People built real loyalty around that promise. In the spring of 2019, Eddie Bauer quietly scrapped the lifetime guarantee and replaced it with a one-year return window. Customers found out the way you'd expect, by trying to use the guarantee in store and getting turned away. Then in February 2026, the operating company filed for bankruptcy and the court filings made it official: all sales final, no returns, no exchanges.

The Company

The same company owns both brands. It's called Authentic Brands Group. They're valued at over $20 billion. CEO Jamie Salter founded the company in 2010 with backing from private equity firm Leonard Green & Partners. Revenue went from $1 million in its founding year to $489 million by 2020, according to their own 2021 SEC filing.

The playbook is simple.

Wait for a beloved brand to hit financial trouble. Buy the intellectual property out of bankruptcy: the name, the logo, the trademarks. Strip out whoever made the thing worth buying. That means the designers and the factory workers and the quality control infrastructure, all of it gone. Then license the brand name to third-party companies who actually make and sell everything. ABG collects royalty checks.

Their own S-1 filing said it plainly; they "generally do not design or manufacture the products associated with our brands and therefore have more limited control over such products' quality." That's a direct quote from a company that owns 50+ brands you grew up with, publicly admitting in a federal securities filing that it does not control the quality of the products sold under those names.

They call themselves "brand guardians." Their words, right there in the prospectus, sandwiched between risk disclosures about licensee bankruptcy and quality control failures. What they guard is the trademark. The stitching, the materials, the workers who made the thing worth buying in the first place are all somebody else's problem.

ABG doesn't just own clothing brands, either. They own the licensing rights to the names and likenesses of Muhammad Ali, Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe, David Beckham, and Shaquille O'Neal. Shaq licensed his name and likeness to ABG in 2015 and took equity as part of the deal. He has since stated publicly (and ABG's leadership has confirmed) that he is the company's second-largest individual shareholder behind only the founder.

The Body Count

Brooks Brothers got bought out of bankruptcy in 2020 for $325 million by SPARC Group, a joint venture involving ABG and Simon Property Group. They launched a cheap diffusion line called "B by Brooks Brothers" through Macy's. Retail Dive reported that the new line uses polyester and viscose blends where the original used 100% wool. The logo is identical across both tiers, but the actual garments have almost nothing in common.

Eddie Bauer's warranty death was just the visible symptom, but the design rot started before it. A former Eddie Bauer designer described the turning point: the CEO decided to start carrying footwear and bypassed the internal design team entirely. They went to a Chinese white-label manufacturer, picked synthetic shoes out of a catalog, stamped the Eddie Bauer logo on them, and shipped them to stores. Nobody designed the shoes. Nobody tested them.

Forever 21 was bought out of bankruptcy in 2020 and went bankrupt again in 2025. Champion was acquired from HanesBrands in October 2024 for $1.2 billion, with plans to convert it to a licensed model. Dockers was sold to ABG in February 2026 for $311 million. ABG also owns Volcom, Quiksilver, Billabong, RVCA, Roxy, DC Shoes, and Element.

Sports Illustrated

ABG also bought Sports Illustrated for $110 million in 2019. The magazine that defined American sports writing for half a century, handed off to a brand licensing company. Under ABG's model, the publication was passed to operating partners to run. And in November 2023, Futurism reported that SI was publishing articles attributed to fake authors who didn't exist, using AI-generated headshots. Faces that were never real, attached to bylines on one of the most storied publications in American media.