GoKawiilVF Corporation started as Vanity Fair Mills. Bras and underwear. They paid $762 million for a company called Blue Bell and picked up JanSport in the deal. That acquisition made them the largest publicly traded clothing company in the world.
Then they went shopping.
In 2000, they bought The North Face. Same year, they bought Eastpak. In 2004, Kipling. In 2007, Eagle Creek. By the time they were done, VF Corporation controlled an estimated 55% of the US backpack market.
More than half. One company.
Every time you stood in a store in the 2010s and compared a JanSport to a North Face to an Eastpak, you were comparing three labels owned by the same parent corporation. Same earnings call. Same margin targets. Same quarterly pressure. The sense that you were choosing between competitors was a fiction that VF Corp had no incentive to correct.
Competition is what kept these brands honest when they were independent. If JanSport built a shitty bag in 1985, you walked across the aisle and bought an Eastpak instead. That threat disciplined every material choice, every stitch count, every zipper spec. Once they all report to the same parent, the discipline evaporates. Nobody needs to outbuild anybody. The only pressure left is the one coming from above: hit the margin target.
The easiest way to hit a margin target is to make everything a little worse, across the board, all at once.
What they changed
Denier count is the most measurable indicator of fabric durability. It measures fiber thickness. A bag made with 1000-denier Cordura nylon can survive years of daily use. Drop that to 600-denier polyester and you have a bag that looks identical on the shelf and lasts half as long.
Denier counts dropped across VF Corp's backpack lines.
... continue reading