VF’s Mission
The Mission of VF is to effectively and efficiently manage, produce and market clothing products to an extremely wide range of customers. Broken up into five coalitions: Outdoor and Actions Sports, Jeanswear, Imagewear, Sportswear and Contemporary Brands, VF Corporation is an enormous company. Their direct mission is “To grow lifestyle brands that excite consumers around the world.” And as I learned today, there is a lot that goes into exciting their customers. But more importantly, they need to find which customers in which to excite. By researching new trends, staying up to date on cotton prices and other factors related to fashion around the world, VF continues to produce products that their customers want. As a whole, they are organized mainly by Marketing Units and they are Mass Marketing, Lee, Specialty and Rockin Republic. Each have their own marketing strategy which is interesting because they are all basically on the same team.
VF’s Customers
As I said previously, VF has an absolutely insane amount of customers all over the world. They seriously cater to almost everyone and anyone interested in the outdoor life, beach life, footwear, etc.. You name it, they have it. Knowing this, I’ll focus on the Jeanswear coalition because that is what they talked most about today. And even under the Jeanswear coalition, they have different customers they are selling to including actual Cowboys, New Cowboys and Retro Cowboys just to name a few. They market their products by portraying the products being used by well known celebrities such as country legend George Straight, Brett Favre and Jason Aldean. Each were chosen to represent the different markets for the jeans. In Wrangler’s case, they had a detailed profile on who their customer was. Some of the characteristics were that they like sports, cars, they are handymen, medium salary, 40% of them didn’t graduate college and that they enjoy Nascar. Knowing this, VF markets to this audience.
What do VF’s customers value?
Customers of VF value the way in which they can foresee trends that will be popular in the following year and also the quality in which the products are made. Rich told us that he relies heavily upon trends to outline what his next line will be in the coming year. But, he also said that when he produces his products, he admits that the quality isn’t that high because the kids will only wear it for six months. On the other hand, with Wrangler, the product’s quality is more important. So much marketing was put into telling the audience that the product is durable and will last a long time, and if the product does last it will create loyal customers that will come back time and time again.
VF’s Results
There are a few results that were meaningful to me during the info session and they mostly had to do with how the profits were split up in the company. I thought that it was very interesting how VF’s revenues have hovered around 5-6 billion for a very long up until five years ago when the revenues started to sky rocket. Today, VF’s revenues are 10.9 billion and are expected to grow to 17 billion in 2019. Numbers like these show how profitable VF is and will continue to be in the future. Also, I thought that it was interesting that the Jeanswear coalition consists of 20% of VF and contributes to 16% of all the profits for VF. I would think that the two numbers would be equal (size of the coalition equals to its total profits) but I may be wrong. Need to do more research on this.
VF’s Plan
The plan for VF, as with any company that we have visited, it to just keep on improving and becoming more profitable. By continuing to follow their business model and striving to improve what they have already put in place, VF will be profitable. But, if they decide to invest and buy more companies I think that VF will keep exceeding their profitability numbers. Also, they mentioned that they wanted to decrease their presence in China because of the price inflation and rather focus their efforts on Mexico and other spots. What VF has going for them though is that they already have an incredibly large range of products in the same markets. For instance, VF has competing jean companies, most notably Lee and Wrangler. Sometimes they compete for the same consumer, but in the long run they are all on the same team which means the money will all be going to VF Corporation. They almost have a Monopoly of sorts in some markets.
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