The senior management of Weifu Group continues to reshuffle.
In early June, VF Corporation, the parent company of trendy sports brand Vans and outdoor sports brand The North Face, announced that Caroline Brown would serve as the President of the North brand, and the appointment would take effect on June 10th.
According to public information, Caroline Brown has served as the CEO of fashion company Donna Karan International and the Board Manager of New York investment firm Closed Loop Partners.
Vans, another major brand of the company, also changed its appearance at the end of May. At the end of May, Weifu Group announced that Sun Choe, former Chief Product Officer of Lululemon, had become the Global Brand President of Vans, a position that had been vacant for over half a year.
Both of its two major brands have boldly replaced their leaders, indicating Weifu's strong desire for reform.
This clothing group's revenue for the fiscal year 2024 was $10.455 billion (approximately RMB 75.69 billion), a decrease of 10% year-on-year. Meanwhile, Weifu reported its first loss in five years: a loss of $969 million in the 2024 fiscal year. Among the four major brands, except for the slightly increased 2% in the north, Vans, Timberland, and Dickies all experienced varying degrees of revenue decline, with revenue declining by 24%, 13%, and 15%, respectively.
Vans' problem is more prominent.
Vans have been severely impacted by the cold wave of the sports trend market in the past two years. A research report by the well-known market research company NPD shows that compared to the significant increase in sales in previous years, the global trend footwear market has slowed down significantly. Both the overseas trend oriented platform StockX and the well-known domestic trend trading platform Dewu have undergone multiple rounds of layoffs since 2020. This is undoubtedly a fatal blow to Vans, who started with trendy skateboarding shoes.
Kevin Bailey, President of the Vans brand, and Marissa Pardini, Chief Product Officer and Chief Sales Officer, announced their departure from their respective positions in this context. Interestingly, Vans still decided to make skateboard products their core.
During the Vans AVE 2.0 Global Skateboarding Tour held in Shanghai in May, Vans told Interface News that the brand will still consider skateboarding as its core category, and the Chinese market will play an important role in it. This year, the brand will also participate in the activities of Tiktok Member Day to further strengthen the connection with the Chinese market.
This is related to the Paris Olympics that opened in July. Skateboarding will become an official event at the 2024 Paris Olympics. This niche movement, once seen as street culture, is highly likely to break through and enter the mainstream view through this international sports event.
Obviously, in the face of the growth opportunities brought by the "Olympic fever" to the skateboard category, Vans currently has no intention of stepping out of the comfort zone.
Although the development situation in the north is not as challenging as Vans, the problem of declining growth rate is also facing this outdoor brand: the revenue growth in the 2024 fiscal year in the north is 2%, which is significantly lower than the 11% growth rate in the 2023 fiscal year. At the same time, the north also needs to face more intense outdoor market competition.
In the past, the main competitors in the north were brands such as Colombia, Mammoth, and Wolf Claw. But today, brands such as the more high-end Archaeopteryx and the affordable Camel have formed a siege on the north. According to the outdoor brand sales chart of Tmall's 2023 Double 11 Shopping Festival, the North, which ranked first in 2022, has fallen to second place, replaced by Camel. At the same time, Berkshire ranked fourth and Kellogg Stone entered the top ten. Domestic brands have attracted the attention of most young customers with their cost-effectiveness.
For Archaeopteryx, which opened big stores and held big shows in Shanghai this year, the brand is no longer limited to the professional outdoor field and has begun to move towards outdoor trends. Under the pressure of upward and downward pressure, the business space left for the north is getting smaller and smaller.
It is worth mentioning that the two major brands that have been busy shuffling their management recently have high hopes for the Chinese market. In the 2024 fiscal year, despite the lack of growth in both the US market and EMEA (Europe, Middle East, Africa) market, the 13% business growth data in Greater China is very impressive. In multiple quarters of the 2024 fiscal year, Greater China has been a valuable growth powerhouse for Vans and the North.
In May, Weifu announced an increase in the Chinese market: its Weifu China Operations Center in Kunshan launched the first phase of ACE automation capability upgrade project to carry out digital transformation and upgrading. After the project upgrade, the operation center's own cargo storage capacity will increase by 15% on the original basis, and the maximum daily shipping capacity will also increase by 49%.