VF Corp Looks To Revamp Brands

That philosophy is notable given the pressure VF faces to deliver improved margins and restore investor confidence. Darrell instead framed the situation as an opportunity: “It’s great to be able to push those brands into new spaces,” he said, positioning the company’s challenges as a rare moment to reset rather than simply repair.

Still, he acknowledged the complexity of a “deep turnaround,” where the risk is trying to fix everything at once. “The challenging thing about a deep turnaround is that while you have more degrees of freedom than in a normal job, everything is on the table and the temptation is to go after everything. So, figuring out what you are going to focus on is the key thing.”

Darrell described a familiar pattern in legacy companies like VF, where past success can obscure inefficiencies.

“But when you get turnaround, you are still good at growing but in overhead not revenue, so that needs to be addressed,” he said, underscoring one of the core issues VF has been tackling through cost discipline and organizational simplification.

A central tension for VF remains its multi-brand structure. Analysts have often argued that single-brand companies move faster and maintain clearer identity, something Vans’ recent struggles have highlighted. Darrell pushed back on that narrative.

Multi Brand Has Advantages

“Analysts would say mono brands have the advantage because of a single business focus. So multi brand means you have to leverage the fact that you have multiple brands,” he said.

Drawing parallels to consumer goods giants, he added: “There is a way, if you look at FMCG you will never buy a product called Unilever or P&G… In this industry that has not happened, so to me the challenge of making a multi brand company even better is how you take a business that has best in class processes and apply them to all those brands and create an engine that feeds out and back.”

“That’s really our goal, to create a company that is stronger than mono brands,” he said.

Execution, he stressed, comes down to alignment and communication. Darrell emphasized a hierarchy that favors direct interaction over digital overload, reserving email as a last resort because of its impersonal nature.

Crucially, he tied technology back to brand authenticity, a key issue for VF as it works to reignite cultural relevance, particularly for Vans.

“Our brands are not luxury brands, everyone can afford them. We’ve brought back the Vans tour and, in a world where you don’t know what’s real or not, the tour, the NBA, the World Cup are all real,” he said. “I think these will have more and more value, that they are really experiences and we need to make the brands even more human.”