One Sunday night, Bracken Darrell decided to fire himself. Logitech was doing well. He had been chief executive for about five years, and the decisions that had helped change the company were, inconveniently, his own. That was the problem. He knew the history of every arrangement. He could explain why everything was there. An outsider would have had fewer explanations and perhaps better questions.
“Am I the right person for the next five years?” he asked himself. He kept the exercise private. By morning, he had decided to rehire himself, with permission to reconsider what he had built. The imaginary dismissal came with unusually agreeable severance terms: the same job, a different perspective.
It is a revealing episode in a career spent around familiar objects. Deodorant. Appliances. Computer mice. Now, as president and CEO of VF Corporation, sneakers, boots and outdoor clothing. Darrell keeps returning to businesses that people already recognize, then asking whether recognition has become a substitute for paying attention.
An English major with an accountant’s toolkit
Darrell grew up in Owensboro, Kentucky. When he talks about the place, he remembers the ease with which people start conversations in supermarket lines. He has connected that everyday openness to his own approach to leadership. Before the corporate titles, he was student body president at Daviess County High School.
At Hendrix College in Arkansas, he studied English, graduating in 1985. He also took accounting and economics courses, enough to qualify to sit for the CPA exam. The combination resists a neat career label. There was literature, and there were ledgers. Both require noticing when something does not add up.
Public accounting came first, followed by international auditing at PepsiCo and an MBA at Harvard Business School. The PepsiCo work took him abroad for weeks at a time. Consumer brands followed. His early P&G career included helping revive Old Spice; later roles took him through General Electric, Braun and Whirlpool.
This was an education in products that had to earn a place in ordinary life. A brand manager can explain a purchase in considerable detail. The person making it may have only a few seconds to spare.
A design education, courtesy of Braun
Braun gave Darrell a lasting reference point. The German company’s design tradition, associated with Dieter Rams, treated restraint and usefulness as serious disciplines. Darrell became interested in how that philosophy could extend beyond the object to the organization making it.
Design, in this account, reaches into engineering, selling and the way decisions get made. A company that thinks of it only at the end of development has left much of the work untouched. The casing can improve while the experience remains awkward.
Speaking at a technology conference in 2018, he argued that young children already possess the urge to make and remake things. There is a certain cheek in a chief executive suggesting that a toddler has something the boardroom has misplaced.
“Our education system does a great job of coaching us out of design.”
Bracken Darrell · 2018
His ambition was to recover that habit inside a large company: continual experiments, attention to experience, and less reverence for the approved way of doing things. That would require colleagues who could turn a philosophy into products.
The tree needed some neighbors
Darrell joined Logitech as president in April 2012 and became CEO in January 2013. He brought in Alastair Curtis, previously Nokia’s chief designer, to build an internal design team. Their partnership put design closer to the center of a business long associated with keyboards and mice.
He explained the commercial problem with a drawing. The established peripherals business was a large tree. Logitech could keep tending it while planting other things around it. Research money could support opportunities such as speakers and video conferencing, rather than overwhelmingly returning to the familiar trunk.
The metaphor was friendly. The budget decisions behind it were less decorative. Moving resources asks people to accept that a business they understand may no longer deserve the same share of tomorrow’s investment.
Existing expertise. More places to use it.
Over Darrell’s decade as CEO, Logitech expanded into more than 20 additional product categories. Revenue more than doubled. The result made a case for giving a familiar company a wider field of activity. It also gave him an approach he could carry into another industry.
When engineers heard “decoration”
The change was not greeted with universal delight. Darrell later recalled that Logitech’s engineering culture initially heard the new design emphasis as a threat. Some colleagues feared the company would become preoccupied with decoration. He acknowledged that he had not explained the intention well enough.
His concern was the experience of the person using the product. More features could make an engineering specification longer without making an object more useful. The practical challenge was to help technical expertise answer a human problem.
That distinction matters in understanding his career. He has moved between industries, but the user remains the point of reference. A person holding a mouse and a person choosing a boot have different needs. Each can tell when a company has made the product easier to understand, use or want.
The work earned recognition beyond the balance sheet. In 2022, Darrell received the Edison Achievement Award. The following year, Hendrix welcomed its former English student back to the commencement stage.
An expensive lesson in asking
His stories about judgment include an investment he wishes he had handled differently. Early at Logitech, he had lunch with board member Neil Hunt, then a Netflix executive. Hunt described work on recommendations. Darrell liked the care being taken over the customer experience and bought Netflix shares.
As the investment rose, he worried about how the board connection might look and eventually sold. Recounting the episode years later, he said he should have asked for advice about his concern. He described the missed opportunity as a lesson in communication.
It is an unusually useful anecdote for a corporate leader to keep in circulation. The troublesome decision was his. So was the assumption that made it seem necessary. Even someone who advocates fresh questions can forget to ask one.
The next draft wears Vans
Darrell became VF’s president and CEO on July 17, 2023. The company brought together brands with histories that could fill several wardrobes: The North Face, Vans and Timberland among them. It also presented a new test of how much a design philosophy can accomplish when the surrounding business needs repair.
His stated ambition extends beyond a financial recovery. He wants a company in which multiple brands can grow through creativity and learning, supported by shared capabilities. The difficult word in that proposition is “shared.” A common process can save time and money. A common personality would make a rather dull shoe cupboard.
VF’s approach has combined changes to its organization with cost reduction and debt repayment. Its fiscal 2025 shareholder letter described standardized processes intended to give brands more room to concentrate on products and demand. That is where Darrell’s design argument meets the less photogenic work of running a company.
A compelling product needs an organization that can deliver it. An efficient organization still needs something compelling to deliver. At VF, both jobs have to move forward together.
A recovery with uneven footing
By May 2026, VF had reported its first full year of revenue growth in three years. Fiscal 2026 reported revenue rose 1%, and its reported operating margin reached 6%. Those figures marked progress. They also left plenty of distance between improvement and a completed recovery.
The July update made the differences between brands visible. For the quarter ended June 27, The North Face grew 4% in constant currency and Timberland grew 3%. Vans fell 9% on the same basis. Growth in Vans’ Americas direct-to-consumer business was outweighed by declines in global wholesale.
Across VF, reported quarterly revenue fell 5%. Excluding the sold Dickies business, revenue was flat in constant currency. The company raised its full-year growth outlook, but that remained an expectation. The next results were scheduled for October 28, 2026.
For Darrell, the figures keep the story open. A turnaround can advance at the corporate level while a brand takes longer to find its footing. The useful question remains specific: what is making someone choose the product again?
Still a student
At Hendrix’s 2023 commencement, Darrell received an honorary doctorate and talked about mistakes. He encouraged the graduates to keep learning. “You never stop learning. You will always be students.” It was an appropriate message from someone whose career has repeatedly required him to become a beginner in a new category.
There is a pleasing tension here. He advocates design and imagination, yet has described using a spreadsheet to plan his own goals. The English major never quite dismissed the accountant. Creativity can have a calendar. It can even have columns.
At VF, his next decisions will be tested by people who owe no loyalty to a management philosophy. They want a jacket, a shoe, a reason to return. Darrell has another opportunity to make an established business feel newly relevant. And, if his own arrangements get in the way, he has some experience with dismissing the fellow responsible.