Levi's, The North Face, and Columbia just cracked the code. Women exist. They wear pants. They buy jackets. This revelation apparently required board meetings.
VF Corp and its legacy apparel subsidiaries are now "investing more heavily" in women's products and marketing. The phrasing suggests they weren't doing this before. They were just making clothes for men and hoping women would show up anyway wearing grocery bags.
The North Face has been selling outdoor gear for fifty years. Fifty years. And they're now turning to women for their "next phase of growth" like they just discovered a new continent. Edmund Hillary summited Everest in 1953. Women have been climbing mountains the entire time. But sure, 2025 is when we finally make them a jacket that fits.
Levi's invented blue jeans in 1873. It took them 152 years to figure out that marketing to half the population might boost revenue. Somebody got a promotion for that insight. Somebody walked into a conference room and said "guys, what if we sold to women" and the CFO wept.
Columbia Sportswear is in the same boat. They've been around since 1938. Eighty-seven years of making fleece vests for dads who grill. Now they're pivoting to women because some consultant showed them a pie chart and they realized half of it was missing.
The technical setup here is irrelevant. None of this matters. The stock will do what it does regardless of whether VF Corp finally acknowledges that women have torsos. Your retail trader is reading this headline and thinking it's a signal. It's not. It's just three companies admitting they've been leaving money on the table since the Coolidge administration.
Next quarter they'll discover children.
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