As part of its ongoing recovery efforts, VF Corporation, the parent company of Vans, The North Face and Timberland, announced on Monday that it will sell the Dickies workwear brand to Bluestar Alliance LLC for US $ 600 million in cash.
It is anticipated that the deal would close by the end of 2025. After recent difficulties with a number of important brands, VF Corp., which paid US $ 820 million to acquire Dickies in 2017, has been attempting to stabilise its operations. Over the past few years, Dickies, the renowned workwear brand that was established in Fort Worth, Texas, in 1922, has reported dwindling sales and operational difficulties. Its revenue rose by 19% to US $ 837.7 million in the year ending 2nd April 2022, the last time the brand reported full-year growth.
Since then, Dickies’ revenue has been falling by double digits. The most recent fiscal year, which ended on 29th March 2025, saw a 12% decline in revenue to US $ 542.1 million when compared to fiscal 2024. Dickies’ revenue decline in the first quarter of the current fiscal year had ‘moderated significantly’, according to VF executives during the company’s July results call.
VF Corp. CEO Bracken Darrell stressed the company’s commitment to Dickies in spite of the brand’s difficulties during that July earnings call. At the time, Darrell declared, “We are still enthusiastic about and dedicated to expanding the Dickies brand.” He further added, “Since coming in October of last year, our new Brand President Chris Goble has done a fantastic job of redefining the brand. He is already putting the strategy he unveiled at Investor Day in March into action, and he has reconstructed the leadership team. We think that under Chris’s direction, the brand has a lot of room to expand.”
Darrell said that the Dickies sale will strengthen VF’s balance sheet in a statement announcing the sale to Bluestar.
“Dickies is an iconic American workwear brand with a bright future, and I am confident that under Bluestar Alliance’s ownership, it will continue to improve and realise its significant growth potential,” he said. “As I’ve said before, we continuously evaluate our portfolio and this transaction will enable us to bring our net debt level down and will be accretive to our growth on a pro-forma basis.”
