The Value Creation Engine Is What Keeps a Heritage Brand Alive
Bracken Darrell, CEO, VF Corporation · recorded at the World Retail Congress, Berlin 2026.
In a world where you no longer know what is real, the thing you can prove really happened becomes the thing worth owning. That was the idea Bracken Darrell kept circling back to. Not nostalgia. Proof.
Darrell is the Chief Executive of VF Corporation, the group behind The North Face and Vans, both, he pointed out, turning 60 this year. He came to the job to rebuild the business, and he talks about it in the language of gardens and jazz bands rather than turnarounds.
He made three arguments worth holding onto. First, on heritage: VF keeps a physical archive for every major brand, pulls old products into new seasons, sends people to thrift shops to buy back the past, because “you’ve got 21-year-old kids who are nostalgic for time frames they never lived in.” Second, on reality: as AI floods the feed with things that may not be true, he is betting on live events, the climbing tour in London, the Vans Warp Tour, experiences people know were real because someone they know was there. Third, on the money. He refuses to treat short term and long term as a trade off. He is here for the long term, and the short term is simply the road sign that tells him he is driving the right way.
The sharpest thing he said was about brands and investors, who so often talk past each other. A brand, he argued, cannot live on vision. It needs an engine that makes money, or the plant fades. That is the sentence to sit with. Love of a brand is not a strategy. Cash flow is what fertilises the culture.
The Roth Read. If your brand story cannot be proven real, AI will soon out-manufacture it, so invest in experiences people physically attend. And stop pretending heritage pays the bills: it is the value creation engine that keeps the heritage alive, not the other way round.
David Roth In Conversation is a series of conversations with the leaders shaping the future of retail, recorded at the World Retail Congress, Berlin 2026 in association with the World Retail Congress. A new conversation is published every Friday.