Kevin Bailey oversaw Vans Inc.’s upward trajectory to $2.2 billion in sales during a 7-year stint as president of the footwear and apparel brand—a performance that earned him a recent promotion and honors this week as the Business Journal’s Business Person of the Year in the marketing category.
Bailey is on to the president’s role for the Asia-Pacific region of Vans’ parent company, Greensboro, N.C.-based VF Corp.
He’s left behind plenty of room to grow for his successor, Doug Palladini, at Vans’ headquarters in Cypress.
“I could be at Vans for the rest of my life,” Bailey said. “This is a brand that I love very deeply, and there’s so much still to do here, so much more that this brand can stand for and be a part of.”
VF Corp. acquired Vans in 2004 for $396 million. The OC-born brand was using a somewhat scattered strategy at the time—it owned 156 stores and produced five events.
The store count these days is close to 600 spread around the world, and the lineup of events has boiled down to two big annual productions—the Vans Warped Tour music festival and Vans Triple Crown of Surfing competition. The brand has also gone from operating 11 skate parks across the U.S. to two in its backyard—one in Orange and one in Huntington Beach.
Bailey, a New Jersey native, has a before-and-after perspective on Vans. He joined the company in 2002 as vice president of retail and left in 2007 for the executive vice president position at Lucky Brand Jeans. He returned as president in 2009 to build on practices set up by then-Chief Executive Steve Murray, which helped “resolidify Vans as an action sports leader and really get back to our roots.”
“We got rid of a lot of the things that were distractions to the business and [refocused] on our heritage.” Bailey, for his part, saw that “there was a bigger opportunity than just the action sports space.”
“We’ve seen some of the struggles of the action sports brand here in Orange County over the last couple of years, and I think what I saw at Vans was a brand that was much bigger—while skateboarding was our heritage, and it’s where we came from, it wasn’t all this brand stood for,” he said.
Bailey’s team first repositioned Vans as “a youthful brand that was really about creative expression” inspired by music, art, action sports and street culture.
Vans recrafted its approach as a small part of VF Corp., which has a market value of about $22.6 billion and a roster of 30 brands that includes the North Face, Timberland, JanSport, Wrangler, Reef and Nautica. The parent company’s heft and experience proved crucial as Vans relied on VF’s financial wherewithal to foot the bill for several experiential marketing ventures, including House of Vans in London and Brooklyn, and pop-up versions of music and arts venues in Seoul, Hong Kong and Austin.
VF also supported Vans Custom Culture competition, which invites some 2,000 high schools to create custom designs using Vans’ blank slip-ons as their canvases.
Bailey said he followed the parent company’s “disciplined business practices,” which gave Vans a boost on distribution, finance, forecasting, logistics, and consumer insights. All of that enabled the brand to measure itself “against the best companies, not just action sports companies.”
“VF has one of the best supply chains in the world, arguably, and the ability to tap into the power of that machine when it comes to sourcing, production…. helped us accelerate international expansion,” Bailey said. “Asia has been the fastest growing region for Vans, and given its size today, we still believe there’s so much potential there. [They] really did a great job of positioning the brand in the marketplace along the lines of our brand goal of creative expression, because skateboarding is so small in places like China, that if we only focused on skateboarding we would never be meaningful to consumers. But when you [introduce] creative expression and enabling the youth of China, and providing workshops on music and art—it’s really helped the brand have a strong footing there and grow quickly.”
Bailey also expanded Vans’ product lines in China and everywhere else to include “weatherized” offerings— products that look like regular Vans footwear and apparel but that have weather-proofing, heat-retention and traction features.
The brand reached $1 billion revenue in 2011, and VF Corp. set a goal of doubling that within five years.
Vans hit the $2 billion mark in 2014, well ahead of time. This year it’s on pace for about $2.3 billion, and the brand is now distributed in more than 100 countries and has about 7,000 employees, including an estimated 500 in Cypress.
Future
Palladini said Bailey was “an outstanding mentor” who groomed him for the succession since 2013, when he was appointed general manager of Vans’ North America region. His job now is “to make sure that we maintain our success and keep that positive trajectory that we’ve had for the past 12 years continuing forward.”
“I’m telling people this is evolution, not a revolution,” Palladini said. “I think that the newness that you’re going to see is going to come from things like new shoes and new apparel that we create, new marketing ideas that we bring to the table, newness in terms of our digital leadership in places like customization of our product online and social media. But newness is not going to come from changing who we are as a brand.”
Bailey’s duties also included oversight of VF’s operations in Central and South America, as well as outdoor and action sports businesses in Canada and Mexico. Those will be handled by Scott Baxter, president of VF Corp.’s Outdoor & Action Sports division in the Americas region.
Bailey will keep his home in Orange County and move to the central business district of Hong Kong. He said he plans to stay the course that’s been set for VF’s business in Asia.
“Aidan O’Meara has really done a phenomenal job—he’s really built a really strong team and a really strong business plan,” Bailey said. “He shared with me his multi year strategy [and] there’s no need to leave the battle plan at this point. I’ll just add my unique approach to it and my style to the team.”
