VF Corp. president and chief executive officer Bracken Darrell is bullish on the return of Vans.

Despite the California-based skate shoe brand reporting a 14 percent decline in sales in the first quarter of fiscal 2026 to $498 million, the CEO noted that “things are really coming together” for Vans in the company’s earnings call with analysts on Wednesday.

“If you didn’t notice, there was a strong reaction to the sheer number of skate-inspired silhouettes featured by many luxury brands in Paris this year,” Darrell told analysts on the call. “These are the style centers and the tastemakers. Trends start in the luxury market, as we saw in fashion week for Timberland with Louis Vuitton last June. I’m not suggesting that Vans will be growing 9 percent a year from now, but I am excited to see the tide turning on skate style shoes and luxury where trends start.”

The CEO added that retailers are also starting to show more interest in Vans. He cited a 50 percent increase in appointment bookings at Paris Fashion Week in June, including new accounts and retailers who walked away from Vans in recent years.

In terms of new product, Darrell credited Vans brand president Sun Choe, who joined last year from Lululemon, for increasing supply and variety in the brand’s latest products that already have strong interest, like the Super Lowpro, the Curren Caples Skate and the latest from OTW, the Pinnacle offering.

“We’re also seeing encouraging signs in one of our classics, the Authentic,” Darrell added. “Plus, we have an exciting collaboration with Valentino, which is hitting the market this fall.”

Turning to stores, the CEO noted that over the last two years, Vans has closed about 140 stores, or about 20 percent of its global network, which has “improved profitability,” he said. The brand is also now reorienting about 90 percent of its full-price Americas stores to “provide greater gender clarity” and to focus on newness.

“In the pilot store on Fifth Avenue [in New York], we delivered positive coms in Q1, significantly outperforming the rest of the fleet,” Darrell noted. “Over in Europe, the elevated London store generated a 15 percent better revenue performance than the rest of the EMEA fleet, driven by a significantly higher average selling price, 35 percent higher through a more premium product offering. Based on these early successes, we’ll be rolling out our new retail playbook to improve assortment, curation and navigation to other regions.”

And as for marketing, the CEO was most excited to highlight the relaunch of The Warped Tour, a rock music festival sponsored by Vans that started in 1995 and went dormant around 2018.

“We planned 3 locations, and we intended to sell 50,000 tickets in each location, which would be about twice any single work tour event in history,” Darrell said. “Then we sold out of all 3 events in hours. We added a lot more tickets and sold those out immediately, too.”

The Tour, which has already kicked off, was only expected to have a “modest impact” for the brand, the CEO added, but he noted that social media is “a magical thing.”

“This is a super powerful event for us,” Darrell added. “It’s a fan fest. It’s a flat out, all out, huge fan fest. And I wish we could have had every investor standing in the middle of that monstrous crowd that I was in on Sunday, and you would have felt it. Come to Orlando in November.”