Hey, good morning, everybody. Thanks for joining us for day two of the Wells Conference. It's my pleasure, Ike Boruchow, Softlines Analyst at Wells. It's my pleasure to have VFC with us on stage. We have CEO Bracken Darrell, Paul Vogel, CFO. Thank you guys for being here. I think, Bracken, I'll start off with what's most topical. There was a press release that hit this week. Dickies, I mean, I guess the simple question is kind of why now? I did kind of think the portfolio review was complete and you had kind of committed to certain brands within VFC. I guess why selling the brand? What kind of what came about? You know, first of all, in terms of portfolio review, we do it every year. It's kind of a continuous thing. We're always doing that. We didn't have any plans to sell Dickies. I love the brand. I'm wearing it today. I wear it all the time. Honestly, we just, we got an inbound from Bluestar and it was just really attractive. From our standpoint, you know, we look at our portfolio and we feel we've got a lot of different brands to play with. Dickies was always on the edge of where strategically the brand would fit. It did fit, but we just felt like, okay, if we've got our priorities, you know, and I'll name them roughly in order: it's Vans, The North Face, Timberland, Altra, Dickies. You know, when you look at where you're really going to distort your attention and your investment, Dickies was fifth in there. I think it probably wasn't going to get the level of investment that it could have gotten over time. All those things put together, it just made sense. It lowers our, it'll improve our leverage ratios. It'll enable us to pay down debt. It's just a good story. I guess maybe to Paul or Bracken, back to you, any chance could you provide reassurances that there were no performance reasons behind the transaction? You're on track to achieve the fiscal year free cash guidance, meet your commitment to pay down debt. Just any commentary you can add there? Yeah, I mean, I'm happy. Why don't you go ahead? Yeah, I mean, look, there's no change in anything. I would say at a very high level, I mean, hopefully you guys are starting to get to know us at this point. We would never do anything for a quarter or two. It's just not how we think. It's not how we operate. Anything we do is going to be the right strategic long-term decision for the company. It has nothing to do with anything going on this quarter, next quarter, or currently at all. It was really, as Bracken said, if somebody gives you an inbound call, you have to listen. In this case, we thought it was something that made a lot of sense for us in terms of the eventual price we settled on, as well as the focus on other areas of the business. Yeah, if I could add to that, I mean, we certainly weren't planning this. I mean, if you look at it, we wouldn't have moved the headquarters to California. We wouldn't have changed our reporting. We certainly had, even at that point, we hadn't had any discussions about this. It really came in and went so fast. We're looking forward to restating the model again. You guys keep us on our toes there. I guess, given the sale proceeds can fully fund the next tranche of debt, what will you guys do with the funds that were previously planned to pay down the maturity with? Yeah, I just want to have to draw down on the asset-based lending facility. If you kind of take a step back and said, why do we do the asset-based lending facility? It was really done just for security reasons, right? It was my view in my role is I need to sort of always plan, you know, expect, hope for the best and plan for the worst. In my case was if things went sideways, if the economy, if tariffs, if happened, I wanted to make sure I had access to capital. I felt an asset-based lending facility was, it is more secure than the former credit facility that we had. That's why we went down that path, knowing we would never need to draw down on the $1.5 billion that we actually had, but it gave us the flexibility if we ever needed it. In this case, we'll have all the proceeds from Dickies, which means we won't have to draw down, you know, really at all on the asset-based lending facility. It just saves us, you know, that incremental debt. It saves us that interest expense, those types of things. Got it. Moving away from Dickies, maybe back to Bracken, just more broadly, VFC as a whole, like the macro changes every day. How are we feeling about the U.S. consumer, the global consumer, you know, relative to the medium-term targets you guys have spoken about? How should we be, you know, how are you kind of perceiving that to be playing out? I n our medium-term targets, you know, we said from the beginning, we're not going to be too dependent on whether it's a great economy, a good economy, or an average economy, or slightly below. We have so many things in our wheelhouse really we can work on. I would say so far, you know, especially the American consumer has been stubbornly positive. I mean, I think it's hard not to say that, you know, if you just look at what's going on. Is the concept of tariffs, anything else to kind of share with us today? Mitigation, impacts, anything new that's worth kind of discussing? No, we've been, we said from the beginning, and we feel really strongly about it. We're going to offset all the tariffs between cost reductions, very strategic pricing, and a little bit on the plant relocations. Overall, we feel very good about that. We're going to have probably a little do it short term that we've got to manage, but by the time you get somewhere into next year, we'll have offset it all. Remind us the mitigation strategies, and what% of that or however you can kind of comment on, like, how much is just kind of like for like pricing to offset versus other. We've dodged that question effectively so far. We'll keep it up today. I would say we won't even, I won't even try to size it. There is a pretty fair amount of cost in there, but we are taking strategic price actions. We've taken some of it. It takes so long for a lot of the pricing to make its way through this industry because of the long supply chain. I think you haven't seen some of the pricing that's coming through from us and others, but it's very strategic. It's not like we're going to whipsaw pricing all over the place. When it's maybe more of a broad question, not just for you, but when you think about the entire industry, how should we be thinking about pricing in the context of elasticity and the consumer? It feels like we're about to go through a period of some rising inflation within the soft line space. How do you guys test that? How do you think about units versus price? I'm just curious if you could, how is that sausage made? Yeah, we've certainly looked back at our sensitivity to price reduction and price increases and tried to gauge, tried to give ourselves a little bit of a sense of guardrails on what pricing impacts could be. We also have done some select work on that beyond that. We've really tried the best that we can to gauge, you know, what is the sensitivity pricing. Then we've taken a fairly conservative view, I think. I mean, our general view is, you know, it's kind of one-to-one. If you took average, you know, pricing in the world, you know, when prices go up 1% and volume goes down 1%, you know, if you just said, okay, that's normally in an environment where not everybody's raising price. I think we're in an industry where we're in a situation which is very unusual, a little bit like, a little bit like currency swings in, you know, with the euro about 10 years ago, where it just affects everybody the same way. It's a very, very equal hit. I think that probably will mute the price sensitivity a little bit, but we're not planning for that. That said, you never know. You could also have a recession on top of that. As I said, we've got so many things to work on internally ourselves that we really feel like we can improve the business that I'm not even too worried about that. Got it. Last tariff question. Do you guys have any exposure to de minimis? No. Okay. It's de minimis. Yeah, I have to. I had to ask what it meant this morning at breakfast. Now I know what it means. I feel like that's the only thing I'd be asking all my clients. So minimal, de minimis. There you go. Okay. Let's turn to Vans. You've emphasized the focus returning to growth. Sun is there. I know you're not going to provide brand level guidance, but the impact from strategic actions rolling off by the end of the fiscal year, all the work being done. Can you kind of walk us through the progression? I know you're not going to give us a specific timeline on inflection, but just remind us how you're viewing the brands, you know, from where it is today versus what the opportunity is. Yeah, I mean, those kind of really aggressive actions that we took throughout our distribution really finish up in Q3, and by Q4, you're pretty clear of that. That's really our view of where we're going. I was with Sun and her team yesterday, going through kind of long-range plans, kind of long-range product plans, and it's coming together the way I expect it to. She's really a super, super product person, and she's got super product people working for her. You'll just see more and more new product roll in as the quarters roll by, more in the holiday period, more in the spring. It's going to be fun. It'll be really fun. You can already see her fingerprints here and there if you look at the decision we made with SZA, and you'll see more on the marketing side as we go forward. She's in the middle of the action now. Yeah, I was going to ask, can you remind us just the influence that she's able to bring on the current product for the just hit for back to school, anything in the upcoming season? I think you just alluded to some, you know, some, just kind of curious. Yeah, this is a long development chain, but she, Super Lowp ro, for example, she believed in that from the beginning. We went into, when we really sold really well back in the early spring, we just chased like crazy to get more for back to school. We have it. That's not a huge product, but it's going to be a good one. I think she's, that's kind of her hallmark. She has good intuition, but she also really trusts the data. She's really using both. I think the longer she's here, the more she's trusting her intuition, which is great. Can you speak to some of the just the top-down fact, you know, impacts to Vans that seem to be taking place? On one hand, I think that there's been editorial about skate having a bit of a resurgence. On the other hand, we're going through a bottom cycle. We're going skinny to baggy, which I believe is more of a benefit to the Vans brand. Like, can you kind of unpack that a little bit and how you think about Vans underneath that? Yeah, you know, that could be a long discussion and Sun would probably have more fun talking about it than I will. I think the Super Lowp ro is the opposite of the baggy. It's really flat. We just didn't have a real play there. I think when we came in there, it's a really good product. It's very comfortable too, by the way. Anybody shopping for the back to school still. That's just a really great product. I think that in both from a comfort standpoint and an appearance standpoint, it's very on trend with one part of those trends, that really sleek look. The baggy look, as you said, is still here. The cool thing about right now is it's not like it used to be. When we were growing up, when I was growing up, you'd have bell-bottom jeans and literally every single person would be wearing bell-bottom jeans, and then that drove, so the style was the style. Today there are cross currents going on. You do have big trends, but you have counter trends. I think those two trends are kind of operating at the same time right now. That's why new schools now, I think our second biggest, our biggest, and on the other hand, slip-ons are also big. A lot of people don't realize, I think slip-on is either our second, it's either our first or second largest in volume. It's priced lower, but it's another big segment. All three of those are kind of operating at the same time. Just back to the strategic actions, again, Bracken or Paul, can you remind us what you've said about the headwinds and the rolling and the timing of it? I forget what you specifically told us, but can you share? In terms of the tariffs? Sorry. The strategic actions at Vans weighing on. Yeah, we said it will impact Q2 pretty similar to Q1. It'll be impacted again in Q3, maybe a little bit less, and then hopefully by Q4, you've kind of anniversaried the actions we've taken. Got it. We talked about marketing briefly, Bracken, just update with respect to those, the initiatives on the marketing side to drive traffic. You mentioned, you know, in July, I think it was you announced that SZA is the new Artistic Director. How do we kind of align all of this to the vision? Sun is there, you know, it's been, you know, a year or so time frame. Just a little bit more background on that partnership and how you think about the marketing spend for the brand. Yeah, I think, you know, the brand has a historical strength with guys, you know. It grew up in skateboarding. There were more guys, people were more boys skateboarding in the beginning, and it's kind of hung onto that for a very long time. It had a period where it kept that, but then it added a lot of women. That was during the real peak. Sun's strategy is she wants to fuel the guys and bring back the girls. SZA is part of that. SZA is now in. We had a meeting with her this week, and I hope I'm not supposed to, maybe I'm not supposed to say this, but I wasn't there, but we had a great meeting with her this week where she's really excited about what we're doing, and she's helping us really think through how to define off the wall and then what that means both from a marketing standpoint and also from a product standpoint, especially for girls, but not just for girls, for a new generation. She's going to be really, really helpful and powerful, I think. To add to that, because Bracken and I were talking about this at breakfast today, she's someone who was wearing Vans before. This is not someone who just, hey, we found someone who'd want to work with us. This is someone who was passionate in wearing the products before we worked with her. Our marketing will be more than SZA. SZA is just, she's the Artistic Director, but we're doing more. You'll see more, and as we get into the holiday, you'll see some interesting stuff. Within marketing for the brand, is this, are we thinking about an increase in dollars as a% of the Vans revenue? Is this just the mix of those dollars? We think we're at the right level. The industry spending levels are pretty, you can kind of open up everybody's annual reports. You'll see the rates that need to be spent, and those are pretty healthy levels. We wouldn't hesitate to distort if we felt like, okay, this is a place where we really should spend more. We don't really feel like that's really needed right now. We're going to, but we're always keeping an eye on it. We're unafraid to push money into one direction or another. By the way, I think the Dickies sale also helps us do that even better. We're really in a position where we can distort where we need to, but we feel like we're at about the right rate. I would just add that too. One of the things we've worked on over the last year or two on the marketing side is being more efficient with our marketing spend, right? We used to spend probably more than we should on sort of non-working media, right? The cost to go into producing media, the cost to go into all the things, and not enough of the marketing spend was actually spent on working media to actually drive action and conversion and awareness and those types of things. We spent a lot of time over the last year or two to sort of work across all of our brands, not just Vans, but across all of our brands in terms of having a process that is sort of standardized across VF, but allows them independence in each one of their brands on how to work it. It's a way to actually, to Bracken point, spend even more money on marketing that's actually going to add value without actually increasing the percentage you're spending, but the actual dollars and the usage of that and the efficiency of that has gone up a lot. Let me double down on that point because it's an important one. I think, you know, the working non-working, which is the industry term for that, working means, you know, like you see it because you spent money to have it seen. Non-working would be what you pay the agency, what you pay to produce something, all that stuff. That mix was out of whack for us, and it's much better now. It's still not quite where we want it to be. We still have fuel in the tank for that. The other piece is, you know, social media-centric versus everything else today. We've moved aggressively more and more social media. We're still not as aggressive as I think we will be over the next six to twelve months. We've got more fuel in that tank. I think we've got a couple of ways to keep driving increased investment in what people see, even without raising the absolute dollars. On the direct-to-consumer network, just to stick with Vans a few more, on the direct-to-consumer network, I think you've closed about 20% of the door count over the last two years. Where are we in terms of that action? Are there more closures that we need to see? Is the consolidation kind of complete? I think we're pretty close to where we need to be. I mean, it'll probably drift a little bit down over time. We probably have a few more that economically don't make sense to stay open where they are, and those will drift away as the leases come up. It just doesn't make economic sense to close those. Generally speaking, I'd say we're about in the right place. We'll be opening stores too. Would you wait for the Vans business to stabilize and inflect before you started to accelerate door growth there again? Yeah, you're not going to see us aggressively open stores in the U.S. We've got plenty. The net number would be, the net number still probably drifts slightly down. Okay. Last one on Vans. Of the overall gross margin, I believe 55% is the goal. How much of that is tied to the improvement that you guys need to see or that you're outlining in Vans? I can answer that. You want to answer it? Yeah, I'll try. I mean, it's not specifically tied to Vans. It's really across all the businesses. For us, it's really about kind of the big picture, gross margin, things we're working on from a process standpoint, right? Markdown management, integrative business planning, which will help not just Vans, but help all of our brands in terms of, from a promotional standpoint, having a better promotional cadence, knowing when to mark down, knowing how to mark down, knowing what's the right way to do that. Hopefully that sort of gives way to integrative business planning, which is sort of this kind of our new holistic way of planning out over a longer period of time, which should help us have the right product and the right stores at the right time as well. That will all work. Vans is obviously a big part of that, along with Timberland and North Face. The profitability of Vans is, you know, relative to sort of the declines that people see in the revenues, has held up. Okay, we've done a pretty good job of managing that. Yeah, if I could add, because I was literally just looking at this last night, don't ask me why. I think the impact of Vans is a little bit more profitable, and from a gross margin standpoint, the other business has got bigger direct-to-consumer business in the U.S. The impact of that is not very significant. I mean, it's on the overall business, not a big number. Got it. Let's switch over to The North Face. I guess, how do you think about the key drivers of the brand today? Within that, how is the competitive landscape evolving for outdoor in general, in your eyes, over the near term or near to medium term? I think we have had good competitors. We have really good competitors. I think that's a good thing. Generally speaking, that's what drives, when you have good competition. One of the most painful things I had in my last job was I just didn't really have people investing in growing the category. It was kind of frustrating because we had to do all the heavy lifting to get the category growth. Here, you do have a couple of competitors who are really spending into it, which is great. On the other hand, it also keeps you on your toes. You got to be better. Believe me, we're looking carefully at what everybody's doing from a retail standpoint, from an online standpoint, from a product standpoint. It is absolutely making us better. I was with Caroline yesterday, our President of The North Face, looking at product for future seasons and then future seasons beyond that. It's going to get better and better. I'm really excited about it. I think you asked what are we up to there. We're doing a lot of different things that we've got. On the one end, The North Face has a very, very strong performance heritage where we kind of win consistently. On the other end, I think we have an opportunity to be more culturally relevant, more fashion, more style, more beautiful and stylish, more consistently. That's really one of the areas where I see a lot of growth. Women in general, we can do better there. Spring and summer, we will do better there. We've got a lot of areas of growth for The North Face. I think in general, our Americas business is not nearly as strong as it has historically been in Europe and APAC. I kind of love that situation because, boy, we ought to be able to fix this because most of us are sitting here. I wanted to kind of go into that. The brand in itself, but then if you kind of like dig in geographically, there's a little bit of a different story. It looks like the Americas is a little bit different than the rest of the world. Why do you see the challenges in the U.S. versus Europe or Asia? I think it's actually because we really did really smart things in EMEA and APAC, where we went after a little more elevation. If we have a good, better, best line globally, the Europeans and the APAC region tended to focus on the better and the best, and the U.S. tended to focus on the good and the better. The good news, not to overuse the three terms, is that we have opportunity to push that up, and there's pull from the rest of the world because they really want that better and best product. We have the product. We just have to make it available and make sure that we can bring it to market and get it sold into the right place to buy, and we'll develop more and more good product over time. Is the biggest issue in the U.S. just the pricing strategy that you guys had relative to other regions? Wasn't as, wasn't. I wouldn't call it pricing. I'd call it the emphasis. We really emphasized the lower mix than we did in the other regions. They were focused more on kind of that better and best, and we were focused here more on the good area. How does that conversation go with your U.S. wholesale partners? How does that conversation develop in terms of discussing it that way? I think everybody would like us to sell more in that better and best, including our wholesale partners. I think we've got to prove it. We've got to prove that we can sell at those price points, that those higher priced products will sell. We're not at all going to walk away from what we got. We love it. We love where we are in this good range. It's a really good, healthy, profitable business too. What's the timeline? In In terms of that, it seems simple, but I'm sure it's not. What's the timeline to execute, you know, get where you need to be? I think it's like everything in this business, it kind of rolls through quarter after quarter. You keep making improvements, but you can't, especially when it comes to something like that, you can't just flip a switch and say, okay, we're selling to be better and best. We'll drop all that other stuff. We're not going to do that. We're going to add more product into the better and the best. We're aligning with the rest of the world on what their offerings look like. We'll have more overlap, probably in the next few seasons. We'll have more overlap between what the three regions of the world are buying than we've ever had. It'll keep going up for a while. Understood. The last one on The North Face, just you guys have talked about opportunity to kind of create this as a four-season brand. What's the progress there? Moving the brand in that direction, timeline to kind of get there. Like, how are you guys thinking about it? You know, it's such a big opportunity and we're so close to the starting line. I think we have made really good products, but we haven't had the courage to buy it, you know? When you look back in our history, I think we're going to change that. It really comes back to not gambling with hundreds of millions of dollars of inventory, really believing we can do it and then marketing behind it. Obviously, now we're in the fall. You're in a period, but as you go into the spring of next year and the summer of next year, you'll see us do better. We'll do this, and we'll do it. It will be even better the following year. Got it. I do want to touch on Timberland. I feel like the boot's been a very pleasant surprise, a strong growth in the last several quarters. I guess what is, I mean, what is the driver there? Is that predominantly driven by the Yellow Boot? It seems like I see that a lot on social media and in a media outlet. How would you talk about what's going on at Timberland right now? I think the 60th anniversary of the Yellow Boot and the 60th anniversary of hip hop coincided the year that I got here. We had, I think it was 10 different collaborations that were really creative. We put a movie out that nobody saw. I'd encourage you to try to find it on the internet if you can. It's a really good movie, by the way. If we can rebuy all the rights, we'll put it back out, at least for all of our investors and analysts so you can see it. It's really, really good. That sparked something at the very top of the, call it tier zero, at the really premium end of the industry where the cultural things move. It probably touched a lot of the key players in the industry that affect us, like people like Louis Vuitton and Pharrell, and so that generated another wave of interest at that level. That combination of things that we believe, and then probably also just a fundamental trend line that goes through every industry, has driven a resurgence in the interest in the Yellow Boot. Now that we're starting to see it in some other things too, our boat shoe has also done well. Our Euro hiker is doing well. We're seeing it start to cascade into other things. I don't want to overstate that yet. We're really trying to drive that. We want to keep parlaying this and bring Timberland to a new level. That is our fixation, to make sure that it's bigger while we continue to fuel the Yellow Boot. We've got things growing more beyond the Yellow Boot and the boots in general, but we're really trying to make sure we've got the fundamentals in place to drive that in a sustainable way. That is the preoccupation of Nina Flood and our team at Timberland now. Is it fair to say that of the three big brands that Timberland in the near term is where you have the most confidence? I have lots of confidence in all three of them. Now, if you ask where are they in their growth curve, you know, I'd say, yeah, Timberland's growing strongest right now. I have total confidence in all three of them. We didn't talk about Altra, which I wore just for you. We're going to get there. The last thing on Timberland, just anything of what you guys have done to be so successful there of late that can be applied elsewhere in the portfolio, the learnings that you can kind of attach to other brands, especially on the smaller side? Yeah, I think you look at this whole, you know, kind of spark, you know, sparking the interest at the top of the market. We started that in Vans about a year, a little over a year ago with OTW, which was kind of this tier zero kind of product. It's an amazing product. It sells out immediately. Every time we do anything, whether it's a collaboration or our own product, we never make enough. I'm always complaining about that. You know, we really are trying to create a strong interest in, and now you're starting to see, you know, whether that's us or the cycle, I don't know, but you are seeing like in the June Fashion Week, you saw a lot of skate shoes coming in from various competitors. We just announced the Valentino, a set of products that are going to, they're going to sell out super fast. I think that same dynamic that Timberland before is happening here. Now, I'm not going to promise it's going to happen in the same timeframe. We'll see. Certainly I do see some of the same things. You know, I also think really getting back and defining really who you are is so important. I think we did that in Timberland that first few months I got here. It took us a little longer on Vans, but I think we're about there now. I think you'll see it start to flow through. I would say one other thing I would add too is Timberland's really done a really good job on the marketing side too. Bracken mentioned it before, leading into social, leading into sort of where the young people are these days. They've done a really, really good job of amplifying all the things Bracken talked about through marketing, which I think the other brands are getting there, but Timberland's probably been the forefront of that. I'm at my Altra question now. Oh, I'm ready. Can you talk? I feel like I've heard you guys talk a little bit more about the brand of late on calls. You even mentioned it early in our conversation. Can you give us some more detail? The growth rate of Altra, like how big can this brand be over time? How are you thinking about that? I think it was 20% last quarter. I mean, I think it's got, I don't want to create a big expectation out there. I want to deliver a big expectation, but I don't want to create one. I'm really excited about Altra. I think they're very, you know, we're the number one trail running shoe. We're tied for number one, I think. We're one of the fastest growing, one of the two fastest growing road running shoes. You know, and we're, I think we're in the top 10 to maybe even number eight or something. Yet the awareness is 8%, I believe. It's 8% or 10%, which means nobody knows about it. I mean, most people in this room, if you've ever heard of Altra, it's probably from us. If you know, you know. If you're a trail runner, you do know. It really impressed me when I came to the company that some of the first calls I got were from friends of mine who said, "Oh my gosh, you've got such a great brand." I said, "Which one are you talking about?" I thought they were talking about Timberland or The North Face or Vans. Altra. I said, "What? What is it? I've never heard of it." Now I do wear Altras and I'm a, I am a big fan. I share it left, right, and center. I think Altra really does have a lot of potential, but we're going to walk, I should say we're going to walk before we run. We're going to run before we get too crazy and keep growing this brand systematically. I do think it has strong potential. Yeah, I know trail runners, especially overseas, if you get the brand over in Asia, there seems like there's a lot of tailwind there. Yeah. I guess my last question is just, we were talking about PAX a year ago. We still, I mean, is that brand going to stay in the portfolio? Do you need all three of the brands to have a meaningful presence in the category? How should we think about that? I mean, I don't think you would need all three brands to have a presence in the category. They're quite different. Two of them are really backpack brands and the other one is really centered on backpack. The third one is really centered on luggage and travel. They work well together and they deliver a really nice business. When I first came here, we were really marketing the, trying to sell the PAX business. I didn't stop that when I got here, but I was like, "Whoa, why are we doing that?" because it looks like such a nice business. I mean, it's relatively small, but it's got very consistent growth, very profitable, nice cash generator. It doesn't interrupt all the other businesses. It operates very independently in its own way. Unlike some of the other brands, it really does operate in a way that we can kind of fuel it by itself. It's in a category that seems like it's got a lot of potential, a lot of elastic potential. I mean, you think about it, so few people carry a, I don't know, I can't remember the last time I saw anybody carry a briefcase. Even purses look a lot like backpacks to me. A lot of women are carrying backpacks instead of purses or backpacks and purses. It just feels like there's a lot of potential there to elevate. There's a lot of potential there to expand the number. It's a cool, fashionable item if you do it right. I think we do it right some of the time. We can do it right more of the time. I think it's a great category. I have no interest in leaving that one. Great. I think we did the whole portfolio in 30 minutes. I think we did a good job. Thank you, Bracken. Thank you all. Thank you.