Elevating Consumer Experience at Vans Stores

The brief

Vans has one of the strongest identities in footwear: skateboarding, street culture, the checkerboard. The question Vans APAC put to our team was plainer than that. What makes someone walk out of a Vans store happier, and what should the stores change? We had one semester, three stores in Shanghai, and a campus full of the people Vans wants: students in their late teens and early twenties, half from China and half from everywhere else.

Three stores, two hours each

Each of us walked the same three stores on our own: the flagship, the concept store and a mid-size store. Two hours of watching without engaging, notes by hand, then interviews with the store managers and assistants. One moment stuck. When one of us mentioned that he skates, the staff in one store out of three picked up the thread and talked skate culture. In the other two it went nowhere. The concept store on Huaihai Road had art on its walls; the smaller stores had none of that, and could carry the collaborations' decorations too.

220 students

The survey ran on Google Forms between February 6 and March 13, 2024, and reached 220 NYU Shanghai students, 106 Chinese nationals and 114 international students. Everyone answered four questions: nationality, whether they skateboard, which brands they associate with skateboarding (ranking up to three of Nike SB, Supreme, Adidas, Vans, Converse and Other), and whether they wear Vans. The last answer branched the form: people who wear Vans were asked who pays and what draws them; people who used to wear Vans were asked who paid and why they stopped; people who never did were asked why not. Everyone was asked how Vans is priced.

What the survey said

I recounted everything from the raw responses for this page, so a few numbers differ from the report by one or two. The picture holds.

• The two groups skate the same amount. In both, 62% have never skated, 28% used to and 10% still do. The report read international students as more into skateboarding; the raw responses don't.
• They wear Vans differently. International students are the lapsed market: 53% used to wear Vans and stopped, 19% still do, 28% never have. Chinese nationals are the untouched one: 43% have never worn the brand, 34% used to, 23% do now.
• Skating travels with the shoe. Of the students who skate now, 36% wear Vans and 82% have at some point. Of those who never skated, 16% and 58%.
• The brand that says skateboarding depends on who you ask. For international students it's Vans: 53% rank it first and 80% put it in their top three. For Chinese nationals it's Nike SB (31% first), then Supreme (21%). Vans is first for 18% of them, though 56% still place it in the top three.
• Price isn't the problem. Four in five say Vans sits in the middle, 300 to 700 RMB; among former wearers it's 81%.
• Who pays tells the story of lapsing. 83% of current wearers buy their own. Among former wearers, 38% had their Vans bought for them, mostly by parents, and the shoes went when the pocket money and the school years did.
• The reasons. Wearers talk about design first (25 of 46) and comfort second. Former wearers talk about a trend that passed (31 of 96), then design, comfort, a gift that stopped, and price. The people who never wore Vans mostly don't know the brand (28 of 78); the rest cite the look or the trend.

The regression, re-read

In 2024 we fitted an ordinal logistic regression in R (MASS::polr) of wearing Vans on the six brand rankings, to test whether seeing Vans as a skate brand goes with wearing it: the hypothesis that Vans' identity was shifting from skate to lifestyle. The coefficient for Vans came out negative, and the report read it as "seen as a skate brand, worn less".

Coming back to it two years later, three things needed fixing before the question could be answered:

• The order of the outcome. The 2024 code ranked the answers as "I used to" below "No" below "Yes", so the model measured distance from having lapsed, not how far someone is into the brand. The re-read orders them never, used to, wears them now.
• Who skates, and which group. Both drive wearing and both were left out. They're in now as controls.
• The international fit. The report's third figure was fitted on an earlier extract of 67 international responses. It's refitted on all 114.

With those changes the sign flips and the picture clears. Each rank point for Vans as a skate brand goes with 1.3 times the odds of being further into the brand (95% CI 1.02 to 1.70). The other five brands' rankings do nothing the data can separate from noise. Skating is the strong signal: twice the odds for people who used to skate, more than three times for people who skate now. And once skating and the rankings are in, being an international student rather than a Chinese national adds nothing (1.10, CI 0.63 to 1.92): the raw gap between the two groups is their different view of what Vans stands for.

So the brand's skate identity was never the liability the first reading suggested. Where people recognise it, it travels with wearing. The problem on the Chinese side isn't that Vans means skateboarding; it's that for most of them it doesn't mean skateboarding at all, Nike SB does, and 43% have never worn the brand. That points the same way our recommendations did: give the identity a place to be seen rather than dilute it.

220 students on one campus, 22 of whom skate now. The rankings measure association, not preference. A multinomial fit gives the same signs step by step, so the single-slope assumption holds well enough for a sample this size. It's a reading of a survey, not a forecast.

What we recommended

We put the consumer at the centre and the store's three ways of reaching them at the tips of a triangle: the Store, the Human and the Brand. Each tip got one move.

• Store: give the community a room. Vans Shanghai Citywalkers, a walk from the People's Square store to the Nanjing Road flagship with a wristband and a map, a photo booth, live music and event-only pieces at the end. And a skate gathering at an indoor park, with local shops at booths and contests for every level. The point is to make the stores the place where the culture happens, not only where the shoes are.
• Human: review managers on the right things. Staff training varied store by store and the manager's effect on it wasn't measured. We proposed restructuring store managers' performance reviews around customer satisfaction and employee engagement, not sales alone, leaning on Gallup's finding that the manager accounts for 70% of the variance in a team's engagement.
• Brand: the Intention to Result model. A sub-label with a deliberately narrow audience (one place, one age range, one style), its own creative direction, and access kept scarce on purpose: where it's sold, how much is made, what it's made of, how much is said. The intended result is a core base that buys again and a brand that feels authentic. The welcome side effect is that the niche label pulls the main one along and the audience grows on its own.

What I'd do differently now

• Ask about preference as well as association, and when they last bought a pair. "Which brand says skateboarding" is not "which brand would you buy".
• Code the open answers with two people and a written codebook before anyone sees the counts.
• Report every number by group. Vans means something different to the two halves of this campus, and a pooled average hides it.
• Keep the outcome's order honest in the code from the first fit, and publish the data with the report. Both are here now.

Where it comes from

Team VF was six M.S. students at NYU Stern, working from NYU Shanghai in spring 2024. I co-led the team and ran the survey's regression; the report and the presentation were written together and presented to Vans APAC's VP and General Manager. The downloads are the final report, the presentation (one slide with internal store notes left out), the R script that produces everything above, and the anonymized responses it runs on.

• Final reportPDF · 20 pages · Team VF, 2024
• PresentationPDF · 23 slides · the deck shown to Vans APAC, one slide of internal store notes left out
• vans-survey-analysis.RR · the recount, the 2024 regression reproduced, and the re-read
• vans-survey-2024.csv220 responses, anonymized: no names, emails or free text