Unwinding VF Corp ($5B)

🧠 The Takeaways

Today we’re reading VF Corp and turning around this sack of has been brands.

1. Dumping Dickies and focusing on the portfolio winners.

2. Refinding the brand identity behind these “cool” brands.

3. Poaching Crocs Execs to bring the magic to the portfolio.

+ How we’ve grown Coco 40% this year with only 2.5 people.

LBAB! Community - How I’m using AI to 2x Coco this year with a team of 2.5 people. 

Currently the Coco team is 2.5 people.

1. Myself: Handling every that isn’t product development.

2. 1 FT + 1 PT: Developer: building incredible product.

I can’t share our exact size yet, but let’s say we aren’t Klaviyo, but also aren’t a rinky dink Shopify app just getting started. At 654 brands trusting Coco to power their WhatsApp we’re at a growing but meaningful scale of Revenue.

Wearing many hats and running many processes, here's how I’m running the show on every department.

A lot of Automations + AI.

Here’s a breakdown of how we’re using AI in each section of the business.

Sales 

Lives out of Hubspot where I’m using a lot of sequences and templates to power the process. I handle all sales calls and follow ups. We just started to test automated Outbound flows running with AI Agents.

Support/Success

This is where Automations + AI is really coming in handy. Don’t get me wrong our quality and speed of support has a long way to go and an area we’ll be investing more heavily in over the next 9 mos.

But live chat support powered with Crisp’s self learning AI + a good process of templates and automations has been really helpful in making our systems work.

Marketing

ChatGPT + Claude are my best friends here. Content creation and distribution are heavily supported by AI where I’ll throw my ideas/outlines (mostly sourced from AI analysis of Sales call recordings) into an LLM to generate: newsletters, social posts, ebook etc.

Product 

This is the main area I haven’t really figured out how to crack with AI. 

Finance

I’ve started rolling out AI support as my Financial analyst here. I’ll toss some of our data into an LLM and have run like an FP&A manager. Build different scenarios, run what this model would look like and what do I need to be aware of. I”m still doing our books pretty manually, but in 18 mos this is an area will be 90% AI.

Let’s Examine This Biz

Note: As always, none of what follows is legal, tax, investing, financial, or any other sort of advice. And I was never here.

VF Corp, the original DTC PE aggregator who scooped up North Face, Vans, Timberland, Dickies, Supreme and smaller brands, is feeling the wrath of forced contraction in the public markets.

• Share price: $13.08

• Market Cap: $5.1B

• L5 Performance: -79%

• P/E Ratio: N/A

Sales are down for the middle of their turnaround which is kind working, but their financials are treading water and their brands are aging out of relevance as so many brands need to be turned around.

Financial Summary

2025 Financial Statements (YoY Comparison)

Sales: $9.5B (-9%)
Gross Profits: $5B (-10%)
OPEX: $9.2B (-9%) 

Net Income: -$189m (+80%) 

Link to Company’s earnings

TLDR Analysis: Dying slowly

• Rev declined by 10% for the 2nd straight year. Rev declined 3 yrs in a row. 😰

• Gross Margin % is declining 54% LY -> 53%.

• Net Income Collapsed from $1B in 2022 -> -$198m LY.

This is what happens when you place your bets on synergy. When the market is hot you look like a genius because everything is going up so your strategy and execution doesn’t matter as much. But once the tide rolls out you see that these plays are a disaster.

These brands aren’t actually as similar as they appear on the surface. They are all unique and require their own energy, attention and focus. We’re seeing what happens when you grow too many plants in one garden, they all start to wither and die from not getting enough sunlight and nutrients.

Let’s Save This Biz

Here are the 3 ways I’d save this flailing portco of brands that are losing their edge.

1) Carve Out Workwear brands (😮‍💨 Dickies)

It’s time to let go of this fantasy that we can aggregate a bunch of brands and it’ll work. @ 5% of total Rev Dickie’s is just too small to keep focusing on.

Every major brand is under attack. No brand is meaningfully growing. Most are shrinking. You can’t fight 5 fires at once.

I have no problem with Dickies. It’s a great brand that needs to be set free so it can thrive.

Falling from $725m in 2022 Topline -> $542m in 2024 Topline won’t get us the top dollar acquisition offers, but whatever cash we recoup, we can plow it back into our crown jewels (North Face and Vans to grow out of this death spiral.

And the only Timberland (@ 15% of the portfolio’s Rev) is safe today is because it’s the only brand that’s growing. But that would be all the more reason to sell off both.

Takeaway: In hard times always reduce surface area to protect the most important ground.

2) Stand for Something

All of these brands used to be a clear representation of a customer’s identity.

• North Face: The rich suburban outdoorist

• Vans: The Skater

• Timberlands: The Hip Hop head (especially in NYC).

Now who do these home pages are speaking to?

This just looks like these teams are phoning it in. At least on Vans and Dickies sites they are trying something interesting.

But this is every brands fear when it gets bought by spreadsheet jockeys. They completely lose who they are.

I’m not saying the brands need to start making political donations or working with charities, but they need to recapture their identity or create a new one.

Within seconds of seeing these brands we all should know immediately who’s going to buy from them. I’ll give Vans credit. It’s clearer for their brand, but the rest of the portcos need to go on an Eat Pray Love adventure.

Takeaway: Always speak to a defined audience. Or you’ll speak to no one.

3)  Poach a Crocs Exec

The entire portfolio of brands needs a shot in the arm and a complete re-imagining so they become “cool” again.

And for better or worse the best training ground for Exec who understand how to turn commodity products into the most relevant “cool” products on the market is Crocs.

Look at their run over the last 10+ years for what are essentially plastic clogs. If that isn’t impressive enough, the exec behind Stanley1717 complete reinvention was…

You guessed it, an ex-Crocs exec.

The core brands (North Face, Vans, Timberland) need a push in the right direction to become cool again.

I’m not even going to waste our time with an exec search. The only mission to hire 1-2 heads of/up and comers from Crocs Marketing and Sales department to bring the Crocs magic to these portfolios.

The Crocs playbook will need to be adapted, but if they can have 1/2 Crocs magic applied to each of these brands we’re back on track to become a $10B biz.

Takeaway: When another biz has excellency in your needed field. Take it.

Final Thought

This is another situation where we are going to slowly watch the train crash. It’s clear that no one at this biz wants to make the hard calls to get the portfolio back on the right path.

What would create the most shareholder value would be to break apart the portfolio.

• North Face, Vans and Timberland are all large enough to be public companies on their own.

• Some of the smaller brands like Supreme, might have to be bundled in or sold off.

But I don’t believe that they’re worth more together than apart. 

There are no synergies across these bizs. They are actively dragging each other down. 

As my radical play if I was at the helm of VF corp is I would put every brand through a 90 day bootcamp. 

1. Rank order them by size.

2. Put the A team on getting them in shape in 18 mos.

3. Launch the IPO process and spin each biz out.

Eventually the Core port co shuts down 90% of its operations and just collects checks from their ownership stake in each brand which is publicly traded. Just like Conde Nast did with Reddit.

All of their brands are dying under the portfolio model’s yolk. With the right management teams and a clear focus all of these could be $5-10B brands.

(I believe this analogy applies to big tech as well).