Timberland

First is Kenneth Pucker.

He's a professor of practice at Tufts University and the former chief operating officer at Timberland.

He's a prominent commentator on ESG investing and sustainability reporting.

Ken, thanks for joining us.

Andy, nice to hear from you again.

Great to be here.

Ken, you used to be the COO of Timberland, and you had some other roles there before that.

That's a company that is widely seen as a leader in sustainability.

Let's go look at Timb, T-I-M-B.

Makes me think of Timberlands.

Not quite got that.

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So Baird downgraded Nike and Dick's Sporting Goods to Hold.

They also moved VF Corporation, the owner of North Face Vans in Timberland, to Hold.

The analyst this morning cited rising consumer risks heading into the fourth quarter and flagged Under Armour and Canada Goose as bearish picks.

Interesting.

So I've got a potentially unique perspective on this because my last role, so I think I said at the beginning, the majority of my career of the past two decades has been spent working at large multi-billion dollar retailers.

So I spent, The better part of the last decade at Nike before that was at VF who owns Vans, Timberland, North Face before that Quicksilver.

And so my last role before coming to Route was working for Nike and for Nike.com. And this is literally what I focused on.

So it's part of this team that was focused on that post-purchase experience.

Once worth about $100 billion, the company went public with a value closer to $27 billion.

For more on this, we're joined by Ken Pucker, former chief operating officer at shoe and apparel retailer Timberland.

He now teaches business at Dartmouth and Tufts University.

Ken, welcome.

They are not winning the AI revolution.

It's execution, discipline, margin expansion, cost-cutting, a little bit of luck with some product rollouts, and he's doing the exact same playbook at VF Corp with now Timberland, North Face, Vans, Altra, JanSport.

If you had kids go back to school this week, JanSport, Eastpak, they own all of those brands.

So, uh, first thing he did is he came out, he sold-- he cleaned up the balance sheet, sold off Supreme, sold off Dickies, de-levered-- takes existential risk off the table, takes solvency risk off the table so he, he has the runway to run the turnaround plan for his shareholders, like Turnaround Tom, uh, and his clients, and that's exactly what he's doing.

It will come back in favor when? Probably right after the election, and you want to have exposure to these type of stocks.

You can see the biggest weight- North Face is hitting on all cylinders.

Timberland is hitting on all cylinders.

Altra is growing like a weed.

Reebok, eh.

Timberland.

Timberland, Reebok.

Timberland days, Reebok days, you know.

What do you say? Wo she bia na te se wo na wo nim design? Eh, forget it.

Eh, wo she bia.