VF Corporation is a conglomerate of over 30 clothing and footwear brands, with products ranging from high-performance sportswear to affordable everyday clothing. Some of the most well-known brands include The North Face, JanSport, Majestic, Lee, Wrangler, and recently Timberland. These individual companies are separated into five independently-run “coalitions” – outdoor & action sports, jeanswear, imagewear, sportswear, and contemporary brands. The company employs 57,000 employees and has been expanding across the world over the last few decades. Although one of our presenters has noted that one of the company’s largest challenges is continual expansion, VF has been around for about 115 years and is constantly acquiring smaller businesses and expanding product lines, amassing a total revenue of just under 11 billion dollars last year.
Some of VF’s most recent goals are the transition of sales into e-commerce and into new storefronts. Because the company doesn’t have any dedicated retail sites, they rely on three separate factions of big retailers (Wal-Mart, Target, etc.), departments stores (J.C. Penny’s, Kohl’s, etc.), and specialty/independent stores to sell different product lines. While the CFO of jeanswear specifically mentioned that VF is targeting new and untapped customer bases such as women and Latinos, he also mentioned that it is essential not to leave behind already established and loyal customers. VF is one step past simply innovating on their products themselves; instead of making changes to their jean designs (which I don’t believe change drastically from season to season as much as their advertisements make it seem), they are focused on reducing production costs and optimizing distribution processes instead. Customer loyalty is important, and our class reviewed a couple charts showing the demographics and habits/hobbies of the average Wrangler jeans customer. Marketing and merchandising divisions use this data to effectively market their products to the right audiences, which is currently done through glorifying traditional American cowboys and southern pride. It was mentioned that such marketing strategies aren’t necessarily complex, but are difficult to perfect and implement. The supply chain must be studied, changes in marketplaces and retailer policies are constantly watched, and the price of supplies and distribution must be monitored as well. Specifically, the price of cotton is a major variable, as a minute change in cost will amount to millions of dollars in large-scale production. Some 400,000,000 products are produced by VF each year – this came out to an astounding ~15 products created every second.
It’s quite clear that VF’s customers value high-quality brand-name products – this was implied in the presentation along with the implication that Wrangler/Lee jeans are the most comfortable and relatively inexpensive jeans you can buy. The brand loyalty ties into what the marketing presenters stressed – once the target audience for Wrangler’s advertisements see famous athletes such as Drew Brees and his family casually rockin’ some Wranglers at a picnic and playing some pickup football, then they might be inspired to try some. At this point, the customer would obviously find them to be the single most comfortable pair of jeans ever created and never wear anything different – that’s part of the plan, anyway. In terms of both the jeanswear and other divisions, VF plans to keep on top of fashion trends and produce relevant clothing for its audiences. VF’s strategies have worked so far, as they are officially the largest clothing producer in the USA and hope to gain the same distinction for footwear in the near future.
Follow
