VF Corp. returned to growth last year.

And Bracken Darrell, president and chief executive officer, is feeling pretty good about taking the company’s turnaround fully out of the fix-it phase and into the growth phase. He’s also feeling that the ground is finally solid enough under his Vans brand to offer an outlook for the year ahead.  

For the fiscal year ended March 28, VF’s revenues inched up to $9.6 billion from $9.5 billion. Net profits totaled $254 million while the operating margin expanded 280 basis points to 6 percent.

“We just made it above the waterline,” Darrell told WWD of the company’s return to annual sales growth. “We’re up at 1 percent. We’re guiding 1 to 2 percent this year. Remember that’s with a couple of wars going on and a bunch of noisy macros. So that’s solid.”

Analysts were expecting revenues to slip 1.7 percent fiscal year just ended and then grow by 2.2 percent in the current fiscal year, according to Yahoo Finance.

Last year’s result and the forecast for this fiscal year put VF ahead of the game. But Darrell is looking to start moving even faster.

“I want to get this back to where we’re then growing mid-single digits and then growing high-single digits or even touching double digits sometimes in a sustainable way,” the CEO said. “That’s a ways off.”

It’s been nearly three years since Darrell took the helm of VF, which had been spiraling after the Supreme acquisition fell flat, debt piled up and the powerhouse Vans business sputtered as it relied too much on its greatest hits. 

Now Darrell, who came to VF after a decade as CEO at Logitech International, is settling in for what he said is the “most exciting” part of the turnaround process. 

“It’s building those building blocks of what categories, what products, what marketing initiatives, what expansion and distribution — what are we going to do to reliably lay the bricks in place [to grow]?” he said. “We’re doing that now.”

VF’s fourth-quarter revenues were also up 1 percent, to $2.2 billion, while net losses totaled $119.3 million. On an adjusted per share basis, the company broke even on the bottom line, better than the 1 cent loss analysts anticipated. 

Constant currency sales by division saw The North Face up 7 percent to $935 million for the fourth quarter, while Vans was down 5 percent to $486.6 million and Timberland was up 2 percent to $404.8 million.

On a medium term basis, the company said it is still on track to end fiscal 2028 with operating margins at a run rate of 10 percent and the leverage ratio at 2.5-times or lower. 

Vans remains a particular area of focus. Sales were down 11 percent in constant currencies to $2.1 billion last year, but the trendline is getting better. 

“The number I’m really focused on is Vans direct to consumer in the Americas,” Darrell said. “We’re growing again. That’s great. And we started growing in e-com last quarter. Now we’re growing all of our direct consumer business. And we expect that to continue right through the year. What’s driving that is really just good product, good marketing and good execution. So we’ve got the products getting better and better and newer and newer. 

“Our marketing’s getting better and better,” he said. “We’re getting top funnel, mid-funnel and lower funnel. We’re just doing a better job of getting the story out to people. There’s just a lot of good green shoots in there right now” in Vans. 

The North Face — under the watch of global president Chris Goble now that Caroline Brown has moved on — continues to be a source of strength. The brand’s revenues increased by 5 percent in constant currencies to $4 billion last year. 

“As we look forward to the next year, we expect to continue to be a single-digit grower into next year for The North Face,” Darrell said. “And that’s as we really build a path to stronger growth. We think there’s much stronger growth there over time and we ought to be able to double that business over some timeframe.” 

Timberland’s sales were up 5 percent in constant currencies to $1.7 billion last year. 

Darrell said: “Timberland has such a powerful brand. It’s much more than a boot and we need to show that it can sell much more than a boot. And it does. I think only about 20 percent of the total business is actually in the premium boot business, but a lot of the growth has been there. So we need to deliver growth into the other parts. There has always been some Timberland apparel, but we’re redoing it. We’re going to have better stuff. That’s the easiest way to say it.”

Darrell is a CEO who not only wears Vans, but seems like the kind of guy who would wear Vans even if he weren’t CEO. 

That comes through in the laid back vibe that can belie the many tough business decisions he’s had to make to get VF to turn direction. 

But Darrell is clearly comfortable making decisions, so much so that things that he has no power over — like war in the Middle East or the economy in general — don’t capture his mind.

“I really don’t worry too much about that because we have so many things in our control that we can do something about that I think we can manage our performance in spite of whatever the consumer backdrop is driven by a macro environment,” he said. 

“I sort of feel like the consumer is defying the laws of gravity with as much uncertainty as we all seem to have out there and yet people are living. They’re buying. They’re expressing themselves through what they wear. Thank god, because how boring would life be if we got rattled and stopped all that. 

“There’s stuff out there, there’s inflation, there’s the AI question mark and then there’s this overall GDP, is it going to keep going?” he said. 

But amid it all, Darrell feels good about where VF is, with brands that can easily collaborate with designer names when luxury is hot and then also appeal to consumers who are feeling “a little more conservative.”

“One of the coolest things about being in the price band where we are is [that the brands] almost have a luxury feel, but a main street cost,” he said.