Dive Brief:
- The North Face and Timberland posted more robust topline results for parent VF Corp. on Wednesday, but slivers of growth in Vans’ U.S. and Americas business got most of the attention.
- In Q4, The North Face revenue rose 12% year over year, Timberland rose 8% and Vans dropped 1% – but Vans rose 5% in the Americas. Overall company revenue rose 1% to $2.2 billion.
- For the year, The North Face and Timberland each grew 8%, and Vans fell 9%. But VF Corp. CEO Bracken Darrell noted momentum at Vans, thanks to growth in direct-to-consumer sales in the Americas for the first time in over four years. Overall revenue rose 1% to $9.6 billion.
Dive Insight:
Vans’ latest turnaround may be its most important so far. Changes there are led by brand chief Sun Choe, who arrived from Lululemon in 2024 to expand Vans beyond its skateboard roots and teenage demographic.
As a whole, the VF Corp. enterprise, which has been trimming its portfolio in recent years, is growing again. Excluding Dickies, which the company sold last fall, results were even better for the quarter and the year.
“For the first time in three years, we returned to a full year of growth and expect to keep growing in FY’27,” Darrell said in a statement.
The North Face did the heavy lifting, however, thanks to “continued brand heat from product elevation and credibility drivers such as its new US Ski & Snowboard partnership,” GlobalData Apparel Analyst Chloe Tedford-Jones said in emailed comments. And Vans weighed the company down, she said.
“Vans still needs more consistent consumer engagement to translate marketing traction into sustained top line growth, and full year sales remained weak,” she said.
Yet other analysts seized on the progress at Vans.
Needham analysts led by Tom Nikic acknowledged the declines there but said “the real story here is the inflection in the Americas.” That ended 14 straight quarters of declines for the brand, thanks to apparel and new products like the Pearlized shoes, according to a Wednesday research note.
“With Vans now growing in the U.S., we believe the international business will follow,” Nikic said.
The story at Vans is hardly over, though, according to Evercore ISI analysts led by Michael Binetti, who noted that Vans faced easy multi-year comparisons, “lapping two rounds of resets in F4Q in the past two years.”
Like others, Binetti sees the Americas region as “the beachhead of Vans recovery.” But VF Corp.’s outlook for the brand this year is for revenues to drop mid-single digits, with a potential high-single digit decline in the first half of the year. That could drop consensus estimates for Vans by 2% in Q1, Binetti said.
Moreover, the outlook “doesn’t show the most confidence for the brand during back-to-school, which is in [the first half of the year]… a very important litmus test for the brand,” he said.