Vera Bradley’s CEO & CMO on revamping the early-aughts brand

Vera Bradley’s refresh — formally unveiled this week — comes after 18 months spent researching the brand’s history, speaking with customers and surveying the competitive landscape, CEO Jacqueline Ardrey told Modern Retail in an interview. “This isn’t just, ‘We change our product and everything else stays the same,'” she said. “This is really a brand transformation. It really needed to be 360 degrees.”

Vera Bradley’s brand transformation is officially dubbed “Project Restoration” and is key to driving long-term, profitable growth, Ardrey said. Vera Bradley’s parent company — which owns the brand Vera Bradley, as well as the jewelry brand Pura Vida — reported net revenue of $80.6 million this past quarter, down from $94.4 million a year prior. For its last complete fiscal year of 2024, the company reported $470.8 million, a nearly 6% drop from 2023.

Ardrey, who joined Vera Bradley in 2022, and Alison Hiatt, who became chief marketing officer in 2023, sat down with Modern Retail to talk Vera Bradley 2.0 and what customers can expect from the brand. Here’s what they had to say about the major undertaking.

Making sizes and colors ‘more customizable’

Ardrey: We went to our design team and said, “How do we create products that allow women to be more expressive and to personalize?” When we were talking to women in our target age range, what everybody’s doing [is] you have a bag in a bag. Before, [with] our product… we would create all these very specific uses. Like, “This bag had a phone pouch, but it was inside, and it was a specific size.” That just doesn’t work for everyone. So, how do you allow people to customize it for what they need?

Hiatt: I think Vera Bradley has always had a unique sense of putting things together that you might not otherwise. And that’s one of the things about this new product line is [it is] less one singular-pattern-specific in terms of, “Oh, I relate to that pattern, and that’s what I’m gonna buy.” It’s more, “We’ve got some solids and some patterns, and they all connect and flow together.”

Changing the store layout & web design

Ardrey: Our stores have a lot of merchandise in them now, and… over the past couple of years, we’ve been testing SKU reduction. Season after season, we’ve taken more product out of the store and have not seen any consequence for that. So, we have taken another cut as we go into [the rebrand]. There are even fewer things in the store, but it’s eminently much more shoppable… I think the experience in our stores [before] was a little more like, “Here’s a bunch of tote bags.” And now, it’s carefully thought through. We’re mixing different fabrics and we’re suggesting different things and highlighting some of the things that people never knew we had because they were hard to find in the store.

Hiatt: The website will be very similar to the store. It’s rethinking how people are thinking about the discovery of these products… It’s much more simplified, but I actually feel like you’re going to see more, if that makes sense. So, simplified more, but then also having tools integrated so that people can understand what can fit into each size of the bag, how this bag will look on my particular height. There’s just very thoughtful intentions that are built into this… We also included more videos from some of our design team that talk about what we like or what is new.

Picking Zooey Deschanel as a brand ambassador

Hiatt: When you sit back and you think about Vera Bradley and the brand, it’s evergreen, multi-generational. It has very much a bright and joyful personality, if you will, but very real. A sense of fashion and style that is very unique. And when you pull those all together, it very quickly led us to Zooey. Again, beloved, great sense of style, joyful. But she’s also very representative. She’s a mom. She has multiple careers as an actor, musician, entrepreneur… I came to find out, too, that she is a seamstress. And when we originally were talking to her, she was very curious about the fabrics that we were using. So, it already was a fit, and then the more that we’ve been able to spend time [with her] has been just wonderful.