Bracken Darrell has been on a mission to reinvent VF Corp. since becoming president and chief executive officer in August 2023.
And he’s been busy.
The former Logitech chief and turnaround artist sold off Supreme to pay down debt, cut costs, reset the operating structure and installed new leadership, almost across the board, putting fresh eyes on The North Face, Vans, Timberland and Dickies.
In October, he took his turnaround to Wall Street with an investor day that laid out the corporate nuts and bolts. On Thursday, he was back with part two, introducing the brand presidents to analysts and investors.
Darrell said the company’s brand presidents now “own” their businesses globally, but that their focus is on “product creation and brand building.”
Meanwhile, he is continuing to rebuild and update the VF superstructure, which is intended to power those brands and not get in the way.
“Growth is not just going to come from what we do within each brand, but how we build those key capabilities that will enable us to leverage the multibrand platform across VF and turn it into a competitive advantage,” Darrell said.
“We’re adopting best-in-class processes, a standard way throughout the company in each area. This will happen over the years, and we’re calling this the VF Way. Take product creation. Previously, there were over 30 processes for creating products across our regions and brands, none of which were the best in class. The VF Way now replaces these 30 ways of creating product with a single unified approach across the enterprise — one vocabulary, one process, one way.”
But the CEO was quick to stress that while VF is standardizing, it is not centralizing — an approach used by many multibrand houses in the past that has led to products that inevitably start to look too similar from brand to brand.
“This is the opposite of a consolidation move where more is run from the top, our top is going to be fine,” Darrell said. “In our world, almost everything can be run closer to the customer.”
Bracken Darrell
Courtesy
While VF is still in the process of getting its house back in order, it’s a house that will eventually have room to accommodate additional businesses.
“One day we will likely go back and buy good brands and underleveraged businesses as we did with Vans and The North Face years ago,” Darrell said.
VF’s return to Wall Street on Thursday wasn’t greeted kindly, however.
Shares of the company fell 12.3 percent to $20.56, but BMO analyst Simeon Siegel attributed that not to anything VF said at the meeting, but to the market, where other fashion companies have been beaten up recently because of concerns over tariffs and consumer confidence.
“Because VF had their analyst day on the calendar, its stock held in whereas the rest of the consumer discretionary group has seen pressure,” Siegel said.
VF is also coming to market pitching a vision of a better future when investors are looking for something more solid.
“Rightly or wrongly, there is minimal, if any, appetite to invest in a turnaround, to invest in hope,” Siegel said. “Valuations for businesses that are not flawless continue to get pummeled.”
It’s a dynamic that in itself could be an opportunity.
“That begs the Buffett question,” the analyst said, referring to famed value investor Warren Buffett. “Is this when [savvy investors] are going to be greedy, when everyone else is fearful?”
While Wall Street is still gauging just how to treat VF’s stock, the analysts have had a chance to take the measure of the CEO.
“We’ve all met and know Bracken,” Siegel said. “Bracken has continued to show that he under-promises and over-delivers, that when he offers something up, it’s to be believed.”
What he was offering up on Thursday was a cadre of recently installed brand presidents who laid out plans for big things ahead.
Here’s what leaders of some of the company’s biggest brands had to say.
Sun Choe, global brand president, Vans
While Sun Choe really came into the spotlight while at Lululemon Athletica Inc., there’s something grittier beneath what she called the “polish” of adulthood at the meeting — an Asian kid growing up in the preppy monoculture of suburban Maryland and ardent member of the D.C. punk scene.
So stepping in to lead Vans was a return to her youth.
And she’s been working to get Vans back to its own hardscrabble roots.
“The brand wandered away in pursuit of chasing trends at the expense of core consumer focus,” Choe said. “We expanded into value channels and devalued the brand itself. We ended up with the consumer who adopted us early in life. We lost sight of who we are. It was a mistake [made by former management] and we’re fixing it. We’re reconnecting to the authentic values of our early days, the pioneering spirit that tapped into overlooked niche activities and kick-started an action sports movement.”
Vans has been reducing its reliance on the value channel and reset in the marketplace, while pivoting to a more expansive vision of the brand.
“While we’re proud to have such broad-based unisex appeal, it’s the female audience that really moves the needle in revenue and brand culture,” Choe said. “Women need to be a critical part of the Vans community, which has up to now luxuriated in its badass heritage of skateboarding, traditionally a male-dominated sport.
“Revenue from women is at an eight-year low at Vans,” she said. “Let that sink in. That’s almost a decade. In my previous lives, that would have been a five-alarm fire. It’s not going to fix itself. We’re not going to grow out of it. Before we hit a decade, we have to reverse that slide. Our casting isn’t awesome, our photography is flat, and our styling is missing the mark with young audiences. It’s been addressed and you’ll see that. We need to design for her.”
Caroline Brown, global brand president, The North Face
Caroline Brown came to The North Face last year with a long résumé in fashion, including a stint as CEO of Donna Karan International.
So Brown said she is often asked if she’s going to turn The North Face into a fashion or luxury brand.
“This is very easy to answer,” she told analysts. “Absolutely not. The North Face is so much more.
“But there are some aspects of these segments that are applicable here, and we will take advantage of those,” she said. “We can be a performance company and also have beautifully designed and elevated products. We can extend our range of products and price points while still offering the core collections that we are known for. We can be aspirational in marketing and in the marketplace and still reach a very broad consumer base.”
While The North Face hasn’t always done this in the past, she said the brand would now.
“At its core, The North Face is and always will be a brand that protects athletes in the most extreme conditions,” she said. “It has proven itself over and over on the harshest piece on Earth and it delivers performance when it matters. It is full of grip and toughness. It is much more than just the products we make.”
The brand — which has been VF’s strongest performer — has 7,000 points of distribution, 6,000 employees and produces over 80 million products a year.
But Brown said the business can be “far bigger,” tapping into both the hard-core athletes and the people who are simply inspired by “spirit of adventure.”
“This reach from one extreme to another is rare and it is one of our biggest assets,” she said. “We have a solid on both edges of this brand and it is this balance that makes us the biggest yet.”
To take full advantage of that, the company is making significant changes in its product strategy. It is editing down from 20 categories to focus on just three (snow, climb and trail), while elevating design, offering full head-to-toe looks and embracing a “new creative design language that will be instantly recognizable.”
Nina Flood, global brand president, Timberland
Nina Flood said Timberland is much more than its iconic yellow boot.
“Timberland is deeply ingrained in culture and has a powerful connection with consumers in a world full of trademarks and brands,” she said.
The trick is to effectively capitalize on that.
Flood said Timberland “hasn’t clearly been articulating the power of this brand. Instead, it started chasing trends and straying from its core identity.”
Now the company is focusing in on its core.
“Our goal in footwear is to reclaim our position in leather leadership, innovate on comfort fit and weather readiness, and always be unapologetically bold and uncompromisingly crafted for apparel,” Flood said. “It’s a smaller part of business today with tremendous opportunity here.”
