Q&A with Vivian Rivetti, Vice President of Design, Wrangler®
For the past year, iconic Jeanswear brand Wrangler® has made changes to elevate the brand for existing consumers and win favor among new consumers. It’s a case study of VF’s 2021 Global Business Strategy – and the brand is just getting started.
listening to live/acoustic music, riding her motorcycle
with her boyfriend and traveling. She is fluent in Italian
and conversational in Spanish.
13-21.
that she brought 10 years ago and The North Face®
Rolling Thunder suitcase.
At the center of it all is Wrangler’s Vice President of Design Vivian Rivetti, the creative mind who is taking the brand’s product design to new heights.
Fashion has been a part of Vivian’s life for as long as she can remember. As a student at the Pratt Institute, where she majored in fashion design and minored in art history, she developed a passion for American brands. She’s stayed true to that passion throughout her career, leading design, merchandising and product development for a number of brands across the industry.
She joined Wrangler in March 2017, and took over responsibility for setting and executing the product vision for the 70-year-old brand’s three consumer lifestyles – Western, Traditional and Modern.
Here, she shares the inspiration behind her journey into fashion, as well as what consumers can expect next from Wrangler.
What inspired you to work in fashion?
My parents sent me to stay with my grandparents in Italy every summer as a kid. There, going to church was like going to a fashion show. People dressed with the highest standards; their attention to detail and aesthetic was unmatched, like it was part of their DNA.
My grandfather was a tailor, so I would watch him craft pieces for his customers – everyone from the local barber to luxury Italian designers. He gave 100 percent to everything he did. He had such passion for his work and an insane attention to detail. I think that’s how I became fanatical about crafting beautiful products.
What drew you to your role at Wrangler?
There are only a handful of great American denim brands and I thought it was amazing to have the opportunity to play a role in reviving Wrangler’s heritage and brand integrity, elevating our products in consumers’ minds through beautiful design and innovation.
There’s also something so special about being based in Wrangler’s hometown of Greensboro, North Carolina. You really can see and feel its 70 years of heritage here. It makes growing the brand that much more inspiring.
What does design mean for Wrangler?
As a team, our first step was to develop the vision and visual concepts for each of our lifestyles – Western, Traditional and Modern. It was extremely important for us all to explore the consumers each lifestyle represents to find out what moves them. This helps us determine what the products should look and feel like. Now it’s about creating product and stories, being disciplined and staying focused on what’s right for those consumers through the Wrangler lens.
What can we expect to see from the Wrangler Design team?
You can already see an outcome of our work in the market. In November, we launched our 27406 collection, named after the Greensboro area code where the products were designed, developed and manufactured. The collection, created right here in Greensboro using local denim, celebrates our roots and honors the dedicated people behind our products, who craft, cut and sew our products by hand. It has shown our ability to be agile and quickly craft forward thinking, higher end, brand building stories that elevate our products and have a halo effect on each of our consumer lifestyles.
You will see the true kickoff for this Design team’s work later this year. That’s when the new product designs across our consumer lifestyles will go to market. From a creative standpoint, we want to give our consumers something new and unique that they never knew they wanted.
