Dickies, one of the best-known workwear brands in the country, will move its headquarters from Fort Worth to Costa Mesa to be with streetwear icon Vans, its sister brand.
The move represents a real estate consolidation by VF Corp., which owns Dickies and Vans as well as outdoorsy brands the North Face, Timberland and JanSport.
The decision marks a rare reversal of a string of business headquarters moves from California to Texas. High-profile departures include Chevron, one of the world’s largest oil companies, which said in August that it would relocate its headquarters from San Ramon to Houston. Elon Musk has said he will move his companies SpaceX and X from California to Texas.
By contrast in scale, Dickies’ jump from a city known as Cowtown to one once nicknamed Goat Hill will affect about 120 employees, said Ashley McCormack, director of external communications at VF.
“This move allows VF to further consolidate its U.S. real estate portfolio as part of its stated business turnaround strategy,” McCormack said in a statement.
Putting the people who work at Dickies and Vans together is also intended to “create an even more vibrant campus where creativity and best practice sharing can thrive through greater collaboration and connections,” she said.
The move, perhaps including the relocation of employees to California, is expected to be complete by May. Vans’ offices, which are ringed at the top with Vans’ famous checkers, are at 1588 S. Coast Drive in Costa Mesa near the 405 Freeway.
Retail industry observer Dominick Miserandino didn’t see the Dickies move as part of a larger trend, calling it instead a decision to optimize the use of property VF owns in Costa Mesa instead of keeping Dickies’ rented headquarters in Fort Worth.
“People are ascribing other things to it,” Miserandino said, when real estate ownership “might be the bigger factor than the angle of how strange it is” to see a company going from Texas to California.
“Clearly you’re making a decision like this for operational efficiency,” said Miserandino, chief executive of industry trade publication RetailWire.
Denver-based VF has faced financial headwinds in recent years with the company’s net revenue declining annually since its 2022 fiscal year.
The company has a revitalization strategy centered on its Vans brand, whose revenue was down 11% in the company’s second fiscal quarter that ended Sept. 28, a marked improvement from the prior quarter when the brand was down 22%, executives told investors during an earnings call last month, real estate data provider CoStar reported. The Dickies brand was also down 11% in the company’s second fiscal quarter, compared with a 14% revenue decline in the prior quarter.
“We have a map back to growth for Vans,” VF President Bracken P. Darrell said on the call. He didn’t offer details but did acknowledge mistakes that occurred after a boom period from 2015 to 2020, when the brand became popular with cultural tastemakers and celebrities, leading to sales among a larger customer base.
“We actually took our eye off … the core youth audience that had been the lifeblood of Vans,” Darrell said. “The brand had to evolve, but rather than continue to respect and serve the youth audience that had built the brand, we only fed the trend that grew it rapidly. We largely withdrew marketing to the core youth, and instead focused on everyone else.”
News of Dickies’ move shook some people in Fort Worth, where the company was co-founded in 1922 by E.E. “Colonel” Dickie and has a high profile as a local business. Dickies Arena is one of the city’s premier entertainment venues for concerts, community events and the annual Forth Worth Stock Show & Rodeo.
“The announcement last week that Dickies is leaving its home base in Fort Worth for a new headquarters in California shocked city leaders and left the brand’s most loyal fans in Texas dumbfounded,” the Fort Worth Star-Telegram reported.
