Fashion’s quick love of the following latest thing — from the newest brand to the buzziest tech — comes with an enormous blindspot. 

The tried and true is commonly forgotten or left behind. 

For Lee and Wrangler, it wasn’t a lot a case of being left behind, as a substitute they were dislodged from their longtime home at VF Corp. in a spin-off just over 4 years ago. 

To hearken to Scott Baxter, who navigated the 2 jeans businesses and their parent company Kontoor Brands Inc. through the spin-off and the pandemic, the split proved to be just what Lee and Wrangler needed. 

“The brands had lost their ability to ring a bell with their consumer,” said Baxter, Kontoor’s chairman and chief executive officer, in an interview. “Everybody thought that we were being spun off due to that. And I feel what we did, as a complete company is, we surprised everybody. We breathed latest life into these brands globally. We brought these brands to latest channels. We’ve brought in latest categories — T-shirts, outdoor, workwear, women’s — and we’ve grown those categories under the Wrangler and Lee umbrellas.”

Baxter, who had overseen the companies at VF, said that under the previous corporate structure, Lee and Wrangler were set as much as be “money cows” while newer additions Vans and The North Face were built up with investments. 

“We were really far behind after we spun off,” Baxter said. “We hadn’t invested any money really in our e-commerce or DTC platforms.” 

So the brands got here into the pandemic in catch up mode and Baxter & Co. set about modernizing them — keeping the brands’ “authentic” Western vibes and heritage, but adding in snappier marketing, higher-end “halo” product and more digital savvy.

Those efforts are clear at Wrangler, the larger of the 2 brands with global revenues of $1.8 billion in 2022. 

The Western-focused brand, which has skewed more male, has been reaching out in latest ways. Last month, Wrangler signed on Lainey Wilson, the “Yellowstone” actress and Country Music Awards Female Vocalist of the Yr, who will turn into the face of the brand for fall as a part of a multiyear collaboration. 

“Culturally, she may be the most popular artist on this planet straight away,” Baxter said. “Male, female, music, entertainment, it doesn’t matter. She’s on ‘Yellowstone,’ the number-one cable TV show. She’s got the number-one album.”

While Kontoor’s revenues between 2019 and 2022 rose just 3.2 percent to $2.6 billion, profitability has taken a turn for the higher with the brand new approach. Adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization jumped 17.9 percent to $402 million because the debt load from the spin-off was also paid down. 

Most of Kontoor’s business is wholesale through firms like Walmart, Kohl’s and Amazon, where customers are responding to latest looks, equivalent to jeans product of breathable stretch fabrics. 

“We made the identical product for therefore a few years and put it into the identical channel,” Baxter said. “We weren’t innovating. We were just making the identical thing. We didn’t have budgets on the old company to innovate. We didn’t have budgets to advertise, but now we’ve got an innovation team that’s really performing some interesting things.

“Now we have a broader base of consumers. We’re in additional channels. Now we have a broader selection from a category standpoint. Now we have a more mature workforce. We’re expanding in digital and d-to-c,” he said. 

It’s a change that Baxter said has created a type of virtuous cycle.

“This takes money,” the CEO said. “You may have to have the option to create and generate money. You then’ve got to begin making those investments. So that you’ve got to have a extremely solid plan and you then’ve got to rent the appropriate those who can spend your money and your shareholders’ money in a extremely elegant way.”