Dive Brief:

• Abercrombie & Fitch Tuesday said it’s hired a new team of executives and designers from top fashion brands as it continues work on its turnaround.

• The teen apparel retailer has been struggling in the face competition from fast-fashion brands, and has been without a permanent CEO since Mike Jeffries left the company in December.

• This summer, the company hired Aaron Levine from Ralph Lauren Corp. to head its mens design, and Kristina Szasz from PVH Corp. (which includes Karl Lagerfeld and Tommy Hilfiger) to head women’s design. The retailer has also hired Kurt Hoffman from Club Monaco, Monica Margerum from Kohl’s, Amy Sveda from Carter’s, and has appointed its own Stacie Beaver to a newly-created position of general manager for women's.

Dive Insight:

Mike Jeffries may have stayed too long at the company and his “cool kids” approach to marketing and logocentric approach to merchandising may have set the company back in recent years. But these days, the retailer is not so much annoying people as escaping their notice. Teens find the logocentric approach tiring, and much of the merchandise seems easily found elsewhere, sometimes at cheaper prices.

"One of the main tasks of the new team, in our view, is to figure out what A&F should be and who the customer is," Topeka Capital Markets analyst Dorothy Lakner wrote in a note. "When we walk into stores now, we just don't know.”

The other thing that Lakner and many others say is that the changes that Abercrombie needs may take some time.

The company’s stock took a beating on Wall Street Tuesday as investors realized just how much time that may be.