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

Clotheshorse with Amanda Lee McCarty

The episode critiques the recent Target x dELiA*s collaboration, labeling it 'nostalgia slop' produced by the mechanics of zombie brand lice

Key takeaways

• The Target x dELiA*s collaboration is criticized as a low-quality product of 'zombie brand' licensing rather than authentic brand building.
• Fab Starpoint operates by renting intellectual property, such as Mickey Mouse or Transformers, to manufacture licensed goods without being a primary brand builder.

Main topics

• Nostalgia marketing
• Zombie brands and licensing

Notable quotes

It's giving chat GPT-X Delia's.

Conclusion

The episode serves as a cautionary tale about the erosion of brand ide

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) I'm going to confess something somewhat embarrassing to you. While I'm sure many podcasts are planning out whole seasons, months, and maybe even years in advance, most of the time I'm just kind of making it up as I go along, just sort of like following the threads that interest me the most at that time. And 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 at the same time, once again, purely by accident, I am in no way that organized or strategic, Target announced this Delia's CoLab. And CoLab is in such heavy air quotes, and you'll find out why. So one of my goals this summer was to, well, like reclaim summer. Usually I spend most of the summer being depressed and anxious. For one, summer means thunderstorms, which means wild shifts and barometric pressure, which means lots of migraine headaches for me since I was a kid. Just summer is like being sad and headachy. That's what I think of it as. And I think as 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. Also, nerd alert here, I loved school and I felt sad about not having school, probably because it was a good escape and I felt safe there. 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. There were just too many sad anniversaries happening in the summer and at like the peak, hottest, most miserable days of summer at that. Speaker 1 (2:27) This year, I was like, okay, I'm going to reclaim summer once and for all. And in the past, I have also attempted to reclaim summer. And it always meant something like nonstop, like epic trips and events. And I don't know, when I was much younger, like, you know, drinking a lot and hooking up with people. This year, I took a different approach. Speaker 1 (2:52) For one, I planted a bigger garden than I have ever had. And I worked in it every single day, no matter how late I worked at my job that day. It meant less screen time and less scrolling. It meant reading more books, playing Tamodachi Life on my secondhand Switch. Such a delight. Making playlists and trying even more new recipes, making my own crushed red pepper from peppers I grew in my garden, 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, just generally taking care of my delicate brain. And all that is to say, one, I hope you also have reclaimed some summer this year. But also to say that when it comes to whatever the viral outrage of the week is or the viral product of the week might be, I tend to be late to the game because I've been scrolling a lot less. I mean, I have so many jalapenos to pickle, okay? I cannot be looking on threads for what people are fighting about. Speaker 1 (4:06) But last Monday, I was scrolling through threads, aka where people go to be their worst selves. They should trademark that. And I was scrolling while I was brushing my teeth, and my feed was full of people and maybe bots, probably bots, feverishly posting about this new Target and Delia's collab, which was... confusing to me because Delia's went bankrupt more than a decade ago and the brand's intellectual property was purchased by a company called Fab Starpoint like I don't know within a year after Delia's went under. Now Fab Starpoint who by the way does not even have a website in 2026 says something about how it operates as a brand or lack of a brand, I suppose. Well, Fab Starpoint is a company that has been making licensed backpacks, piggy banks, wallets, cosmetic bags, luggage, and other tchotchkes since the 90s. Basically, they like 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. Trust me, you don't need to be established as a brand and have a brand website and all this other stuff if you are just making money off of other people's brands and intellectual property, right? Speaker 1 (5:37) In the past, the money in licensing was mostly just for kids stuff. You know, like I said, backpacks and lunchboxes, we all grew up with them. I mean, like, did you even live if you didn't have a Cabbage Patch Kids or a Strawberry Shortcake lunchbox? I mean, like every year I got to get a new lunchbox with a new character on it. And by the way, always a big fan of packing my lunch for school. And specifically every day I just wanted to eat a peanut butter and strawberry jam sandwich, like which. It does hold up even now, even if I have bougier tastes in peanut butter and jelly. Speaker 1 (6:14) In this century, particularly in the last like 15 years or so, 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 on and on and on. Because the adults of now, meaning Gen X, Millennials, and even the older Gen Z, All of us grew up with these characters and logos and brands, all this intellectual property as part of our day-to-day lives. And so now it's being sold back to us either as a nostalgic thing and or, I suppose, not even either, it could be both of these, us establishing who we are based on the brands or characters that we like. There's so much money in letting people show their identity via licensed properties, which when I say that out loud is so sad, but it's true. And I say that as a person who, you know, has many Hello Kitty items in my house right now. It's part of my identity. I have a Hello Kitty tattoo, and that says something about who I am and what my general vibe is, right? And these stores like Hot Topic and Box Lunch make money by catering to that need to assert ourselves in a place and a group somewhere in this world. Speaker 1 (7:58) Side note about Hot Topic and Box Lunch, which I feel are in just about every at least okay, not completely dead mall here in the United States. Huge company, right? Spencer Spirit Holdings, which is 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. That company, Spencer's Spirit Holdings, bought Hot Topic and Box Lunch this summer, forming sort of this like licensed near future garbage megacorp. Because that's the other thing about a lot of this licensed stuff is we don't really need it. Most of it is plastic. And really, most of it isn't like that good. And I mean, like I, for example, once again. Person with a literal Hello Kitty tattoo. I find the vast majority of the Hello Kitty merch that's being sold everywhere here in the United States, whether it's at the mall, at places like Box Lunch, or at bookstores like Barnes & Noble, or at drugstores, or at TJ Maxx and HomeGoods, or at Target, or, or, or, or anywhere, right? It's just like... There's a deluge of it everywhere. It's not cool or interesting. It's just like the same thing over and over again on like a plastic blanket or some other plastic thing. It's just not that great. I don't really buy Hello Kitty stuff when I go to Japan either. It's a lot more interesting and there, I don't know, there's a lot more experimentation with the art and evolution of the brand and storytelling and nicer stuff that it's on. A lot of this licensed stuff here in the U.S. especially is, like I said, is sort of this like near future garbage. But licensed stuff, as I said, has been money in the bank for years. I'm sure Spencer Spirit Holdings is like, we're going to corner the market on this. In the 2020s, as more and more beloved brands have gone bankrupt or were just driven into the ground by private equity, acquiring the logos and branding for these brands via licensing has become a lucrative business too. And we've been talking about these zombie brands. all year here on Clothes Horse. 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, right? The Esprit sweatshirts at Costco and the Esprit collection at Walmart in Canada are just licensed products. Esprit went bankrupt a few years ago, and now it just exists as a brand and logo that companies can rent, aka license, and put on the products they sell. We're seeing that right now also with Justice and Limited Too, and more nostalgic long-gone brands are going to pop up more and more because nostalgia sells, right? One other zombie brand I wanted to call out here that is very close in our memories is Joanne, the much-loved but also so frustrating Speaker 1 (11:35) fabric store mega chain. Right now, you know, Joanne's RIP completely bankrupt. The company is gone. Back in June of 2025, when Joanne went under, Michaels acquired the intellectual property and private label brands of Joanne. So Right now, you can go into Michaels and buy things that are branded as Joanne, same logo and everything. This is not some heartwarming collab between two former enemies, Joanne and Michaels. No, this is just Michaels owning the Joanne logo, basically, and slapping it on stuff. And of course, that appeals to customers who are a little... apprehensive about buying fabric from Michaels. Like they can be like, oh, well, Joanne signed off on this. And that's not the case at all. At this point, Joanne is a zombie brand. Okay, what do Joanne and Esprit and Spencer's and all these other things I'm talking about, what do they have to do with Delia's beloved 90s catalog clothing brands? Well, about a year after Delia's went bankrupt, somehow, and I don't know how, it hung on well into the 2010s. Blows my mind. A company called Fab Starpoint tried to relaunch Delia's as an online-only brand. Remember, they had bought the intellectual property of Delia's. They figured, why not take what we can do and... you know, turn Delia's back into a moneymaker. So basically the product would be made by Fab Starpoint's supply chain with Delia's labels slapped on it. And this is what Fab Starpoint is good at, right? Like making stuff with other people's brands and intellectual property on it. So they're not developing a brand themselves. They're just taking other people's stuff, right? Speaker 1 (13:48) So they relaunched this website. There was actually quite a bit of fanfare, but unsurprisingly, it flopped. And mostly, I think it because it was just the wrong time. It was too soon. But also, because I'm sure, I kind of remember looking at it, the product assortment was incredibly uncool and unappealing because Fab Starpoint is not a brand builder. right? It's a company who just takes what already exists and puts it on stuff. They couldn't really I don't know, they couldn't really maximize on a brand like Delia's that really had strong branding and emotional connection built into it, like from the ground up, right? This is just not something that Fab's star point can make sense of. Also, there is a big difference between making licensed backpacks and lunchboxes and clothing. And I've seen people try to do both, and usually it doesn't go very well. And this was just one example of that not being the right fit. So fab Starpoint gave up. Like, no one wanted to buy quasi-delius clothes from them. Around 2018, 2019-ish, it was specifically when I was working for Newly, Dolls Kill launched a collab, heavy air quotes here, with... Delia's. Now back then, I didn't know the full Delia's backstory. So I was super excited about this. Like, oh my gosh, Delia's is coming back. They're partnering with another brand. Like, this is amazing, right? I bought some pieces for Dylan and me and immediately returned them because they were the hottest garbage I have ever purchased, I have ever seen, possibly two. The quality was the worst I had ever encountered in a pre-Shi'an Timu world. Of course, Shi'an was like, hold my beer, look at this. But before Shi'an was as big as it was, this was kind of the worst stuff I had ever seen. And I think it's important to remember that I had at that point been a buyer in fast fashion since the 2000s. And trust me, I have seen some really bad, super hot garbage clothes in those years. That's just how shockingly bad this Dolls Kill Delia stuff was. Also, I didn't know this then, but I had an inkling. 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. And I knew at the very least it was a gross, terrible place to work. But it's even worse than that. So Dolls Kill continued to churn out horrible Speaker 1 (16:56) Delia's, heavy air quotes again, Delia's 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 Kill supply chain under license from Fab. Starpoint. And I'm guessing Fab Starpoint was just glad to finally recoup some of the cost of buying Delia's. Remember, it had flopped when they tried to relaunch it. So they're probably so glad that finally they were making some of that money back that they didn't care a ton about the quality of the product or even the company selling it. Now, I suspect based on what I've 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 stuff on their website right now is on sale, like deep sale. It also seems as if they are pushing other licensed zombie brands like Ed Hardy right now. All that to say, Fabstarpoint, no longer making money off of licensing Delias to Dolls Kill, is looking for other ways to make money off of that license. They spent a lot of money to buy Delia's. And voila, they have someone. It's Target. Speaker 1 (18:21) How I suspected this all worked was this. Someone in buying at Target works with Fab Starpoint on other licensed products, like likely kids' 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 the Target x Delia's collab. heavy air quotes. Now, I'm not saying this is definitely what happened, but you have to remember, I have had a lot of experience as a buyer, and this specifically is the kind of experience that I have had. 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, hey, just so you know, we have the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile license if you want to do something with that, right? Trying to sell me like soda logos and food product logos and candy logos and on and on and on. Often these companies that specialized in licensed merch, like Fabstarpoint, will just send you a PDF showing their entire list of licenses. And usually it's just like a massive eclectic assortment. And you can say like, oh, hey. I see that you have the license for strawberry shortcake. Do you have that for backpacks? Do you have that for clothes? Do you have that for socks? Here are the categories I'm thinking. And they may not have the license to manufacture across all product categories. They'll be like, oh, we can only do purses. But in the case of Delia's and Fab's Starpoint, they could make anything for you because they literally own the branding outright. It's sort of similar like if... Michaels wanted to start cashing in in other ways on customers, you know, incredible grief for Joanne. They could. They could say, hey, t-shirt company, how would you like to buy the license to make Joanne t-shirts, right? And maybe 10, 15 years from now, we're going to be walking through the mall. We'll be walking by a massive Spencer's slash Spirit Halloween slash Hot Topic. It'll be two stories. It'll be huge. And there will be Joanne t-shirts in the window. I mean, it's entirely possible, right? Speaker 1 (20:47) Anyway, I can see Target being very excited by the idea of Adelia's collab because sales have been bad for years. Even before they decided to walk away from DEI, even before they made a racist Halloween costume, even before they started letting ICE come into their stores and take their employees away. The fact is that Target made a lot of bad strategic decisions back in 2020 and 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. And by the way, the acronym for buy online, pick up in store is BOPIS. And Bopas always makes me laugh. It sort of sounds like an insult, like that guy's a real Bopas, if you know what I mean. And the guy we're calling a Bopas in this situation is absolutely the former CEO of Target, Brian Cornell. Brian Cornell is in fact a real Bopas. Speaker 1 (22:06) He stepped down, I want to say February of this year, but he has been running that business into the ground for years. This shift into getting customers to stop shopping in stores actually dramatically reduced sales because half of Target's success was getting people into the store. to buy, I don't know, cat litter, and then they would leave with a cart full of stuff that they impulsively purchased along the way. And you just don't get that when people buy stuff online, right? There's a lot less impulse shopping. But also, the stores were forced to pull staff away from important sales-driving tasks like, oh, I don't know, restocking the store? or helping customers in order to pack these BOPIS orders. So for IRL shoppers who, especially as vaccines were more prevalent and we were being forced into going back to normal in the midst of the pandemic, IRL shoppers who were excited to get back to wandering around Target, they encountered bare aisles and messy departments. And it's just like, never bounced back. That said, like, I don't have any sympathy for Target. Target is not a good company. Long before that BOPUS, 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 worked in the corporate offices. They had horrible stories for me. And I knew that from what I was reading on the Target employees subreddit, which was also filled with really terrible stories. All of it was way too reminiscent of all the bad places I had worked. So yes, coming out and showing sort of unmasking who they really were with the whole DEI thing. Yes, turning point. But... That was just the mask off moment. The company had been rotten for a long time. This was just the first time they very clearly broadcast it to the rest of the world. So I had stopped shopping there about four or five years ago because I was just like, I can't. I can't with this company anymore. I'm glad because when it was time for like a major boycott of Target, I was like, hey, I'm already like an expert in how to not shop at Target. Come talk to me. I will help you out. Speaker 1 (24:41) But yeah, right now 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 to 50s who were once so reliable to them. For years, social media has had this sort of like genre of content creators who are basically white women who call themselves Target moms. They share videos of buying Stanley Cups and Tide and everything else at Target, literally just videos of them rolling the cart through Target. They post about their target runs and the new stuff that they saw there. And people, at least for years, were eating it up. Because I don't know what is wrong with us as a species, but we sure do love to watch people buying stuff. Speaker 1 (25:47) 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're MAGA. So Target is like 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 also assuming it's great for Walmart in Canada. Delia's is exactly what Target needs right now. Speaker 1 (26:30) But wow, the Delia's stuff at Target is so bad. Forget about the quality, okay? 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 30 years ago. Yes, sorry, friends. That number is correct. 30. years. These items that Target is selling as Delia's right now would be more than $90 today if they were remotely comparable in quality to what Delia's was selling in the early 90s. So yes, lower quality, but also just not as good from a design perspective. And as I said on Instagram, it's giving chat GPT-X Delia's. It's just like a weird watered down version of Delia's overall aesthetic. It's like Delia's past designs were communicated to whoever designed these new ones via a massive game of telephone. And so what started as one thing is definitely not that at the end. It just doesn't capture anything about what made the brand so beloved to so many people. Speaker 1 (28:04) 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 reminded me on Instagram, Delia's would have never made a branded logo tee. It's a major poser situation to me, right? If