Dive Brief:

• Fast-fashion teen retailer Forever 21 is working on downsizing its mainly mall-based stores, sources have told the Wall Street Journal.

• The company is talking to landlords about shifting down the amount of space it uses at existing malls, according to the Journal. Forever 21 has expanding fairly rapidly in recent years to larger stores with several sections.

• The privately held retailer is also seeking a $150 million loan, the paper also reports.

Dive Insight:

For a while, fast-fashion, with its bottom-barrel prices and swiftly moving styles, seemed to be the only category seeing success with today’s fickle young consumer. It’s not clear that the situation Forever 21 finds itself in is really a sign that that’s over — the company looks to have overextended itself — but there are apparently limits.

And other teen retailers — those that fast-fashion brands like H&M and Forever 21 in recent years have left in the dust — are actually showing signs of new life, after scaling back their inventories and, most importantly of all, changing up their merchandise. 

Forever 21 is a privately held company — the Korean-American family that began the company from a single Los Angeles store remains in charge — so hard numbers on its finances aren’t easy to come by. But the Wall Street Journal notes that the company surfed the wave of its success in recent years by rapidly expanding. Forever 21 enjoys 10% of the U.S. apparel market, up from 3% in 2003, RBC Capital Markets retail analyst Brian Tunick told the Wall Street Journal. But its recent expansion has been extraordinarily swift, and Tunick also said that stores open longer than a year have been losing money for a year.

“After several years of fantastic results,” Tunick said. “They are facing some of the same struggles that other teen retailers are facing.”