Vans, Timberland and The North Face Leaders on What It Takes to Reignite Brand Energy

Global brand presidents from Vans, Timberland and The North Face took the keynote stage at NRF’s Big Show in NYC on Tuesday to discuss how they’re shaping parent company VF Corp.’s growth strategy amid its turnaround.

Among the key strategies examined included bold leadership, organizational overhauls, and consumer-centric approaches to drive brand energy – a buzzword heard throughout the panel discussion.

Nina Flood, global brand president of Timberland, kicked off the session describing how she began an “overhaul” when she started her role in December 2023. “When I came in, I recognized a lot of elements that were ready for transformation, from the org structure to our leadership team to our planning process to our global brand architecture, and we began to overhaul all of that,” she said. “For true transformation at Timberland, we needed to have a complete and total mind shift change. We needed to reset the culture, to reignite energy and believe in the brand internally and externally.”

Flood noted the team went full steam ahead on “disruptive” amplification of Timberland’s rules and culture. “This meant uncompromisingly executing in our product and our marketing in our marketplace,” she said. “And by no means is our transformation complete, but I would definitely say we have good energy around the brand, and the team is in lock step moving forward in the transformation.”

Caroline Brown, global brand president of The North Face, shared that the outdoor brand streamlined its focus to snow, climb, and trail categories while also leveraging its strong athlete team to continue to win.

“In our new strategy of focus, we pulled back from a lot of areas that we were touching to focus on three to four categories where customers want us to win, where we can win and where the brand deserves to win, and those are the areas of snow, climb and trail,” Brown said. “Maybe that decision drove all of the decisions of how we structure the company from an organizational perspective, from a marketing and a messaging perspective for what we want to put forth to consumers in our retail stores and our wholesale outlet. So, they all fell from that tree, but it was really luxury to come and in fact, those find those strong foundational pillars, which has allowed us to move quickly.”

But for Vans, which global brand president Sun Choe admitted that the skate shoe company is in its “earlier innings” of its transformation and turnaround, more is needed to bring the label back to “winning.”

“When I first started, it wasn’t necessarily a brand awareness problem, but really, I think people over the years have kind of maybe put Vans in different styles of what they thought the brand represented, whether it was skateboarding exclusively or action sports,” Choe described. “And the thing that I think has always been relevant and cool about the brand is the intersection of action sports and California, and our legacy in art and music. So, we really are looking at the intersection of those versus just thinking about it in terms of silos.”

Choe added that she also worked on building the right team by balancing both the continuity and the importance of employees that had tenure, as well as making sure to bring in new people that could offer a different perspective to the brand.

A focus on product was also a key fixture of her turnaround approach. “We have to make sure we are really obsessing over product excellence and making sure that we were not designing just for sales volume,” Choe noted. “So, we are doing things that were incremental and beautiful, with a creative desire to just make fewer things with deeper meaning.”

“What makes Vans so special is the fact that it has so much elasticity,” Choe added. “We can collaborate with Valentino and be in Paris fashion week, and then show in Long Beach, Calif. and host The Warped Tour.”

These insights come after VF Corp.’s second quarter bested Wall Street’s consensus estimates in October. For the three months ended Sept. 27, VF posted net income of $189.8 million, or 48 cents a diluted share, up from net income of $52.2 million, or 13 cents, in the same year-ago period. Revenue rose 1.6 percent to $2.80 billion from $2.76 billion.

By brand, revenue for The North Face in Q2 rose 6 percent to $1.16 billion, Vans was down 9 percent to $606.9 million, Timberland was up 7 percent to $506.4 million, and for VF’s other brands – Altra, Icebreaker, Napapijri, Packs and Smartwool – it was up 2 percent to $532.3 million.