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COSTA MESA, Calif. (KABC) -- The workwear apparel brand Dickies is moving its headquarters from Texas to California.

The brand was founded in Fort Worth in 1922.

After 102 years its parent company VF Corporation announced it's relocating to an existing brand campus in Costa Mesa.

Dickies parent company, VF Corporation, also manages Costa Mesa-based Vans.

"Headquarter jobs are high-paying jobs," said David Neumark, professor of economics at UC Irvine.

He said the move to California doesn't establish a trend.

"There's 40 million people in California. There's over 20 million employed people. There's hundreds of thousands of companies and we often don't hear anything about them because they're doing fine," Neumark said.

The Dickies move will impact about 120 Fort Worth employees.

In a statement VF Corporation said, "These kinds of decisions are never made lightly. We are deeply grateful for our Dickies associates' dedication and hard work and want to recognize the camaraderie and commitment they have shown to the brand."

"While this was a tough call, we are confident this change will help us revitalize Dickies so we can carry on the brand's heritage for years to come."

Right now it is not known how many jobs it would create in Southern California.

Gov. Gavin Newsom praised the company's move.

"We are pleased to welcome Dickies to the Golden State - the fifth largest economy in the world and a welcoming place to grow and support their ongoing success," Newsom said.

Professor Neumark commented: "The thing you would certainly expect a politician to make the most of is a company coming and maybe try to ignore a company leaving. Take credit for the former and pretend the latter had nothing to do with them."

Neumark said other high profile companies like SpaceX and Chevron have made headlines by announcing they're moving out of California - but that shouldn't have a huge impact.

"There's lots and lots of company headquarters that have neither come here recently nor left recently and there's way more of them than the ones that have left," he said.

Neumark said people should focus on the companies dedicated to calling California home.

"The health of existing businesses and what's going to make a business grow a little faster or stay open or what's going to maybe lead somebody to start a business is so much more important than whether a business comes or goes," Neumark said.

Dickies relocation to California is expected to be completed by May of next year.

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Dickies, one of the best-known workwear brands in the country, will move its headquarters from Fort Worth to Costa Mesa to be with streetwear icon Vans, its sister brand.

The move represents a real estate consolidation by VF Corp., which owns Dickies and Vans as well as outdoorsy brands the North Face, Timberland and JanSport.

The decision marks a rare reversal of a string of business headquarters moves from California to Texas. High-profile departures include Chevron, one of the world’s largest oil companies, which said in August that it would relocate its headquarters from San Ramon to Houston. Elon Musk has said he will move his companies SpaceX and X from California to Texas.

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By contrast in scale, Dickies’ jump from a city known as Cowtown to one once nicknamed Goat Hill will affect about 120 employees, said Ashley McCormack, director of external communications at VF.

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Sept. 18, 2024

“This move allows VF to further consolidate its U.S. real estate portfolio as part of its stated business turnaround strategy,” McCormack said in a statement.

Putting the people who work at Dickies and Vans together is also intended to “create an even more vibrant campus where creativity and best practice sharing can thrive through greater collaboration and connections,” she said.

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The move, perhaps including the relocation of employees to California, is expected to be complete by May. Vans’ offices, which are ringed at the top with Vans’ famous checkers, are at 1588 S. Coast Drive in Costa Mesa near the 405 Freeway.

Retail industry observer Dominick Miserandino didn’t see the Dickies move as part of a larger trend, calling it instead a decision to optimize the use of property VF owns in Costa Mesa instead of keeping Dickies’ rented headquarters in Fort Worth.

“People are ascribing other things to it,” Miserandino said, when real estate ownership “might be the bigger factor than the angle of how strange it is” to see a company going from Texas to California.

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“Clearly you’re making a decision like this for operational efficiency,” said Miserandino, chief executive of industry trade publication RetailWire.

Denver-based VF has faced financial headwinds in recent years with the company’s net revenue declining annually since its 2022 fiscal year.

The company has a revitalization strategy centered on its Vans brand, whose revenue was down 11% in the company’s second fiscal quarter that ended Sept. 28, a marked improvement from the prior quarter when the brand was down 22%, executives told investors during an earnings call last month, real estate data provider CoStar reported. The Dickies brand was also down 11% in the company’s second fiscal quarter, compared with a 14% revenue decline in the prior quarter.

“We have a map back to growth for Vans,” VF President Bracken P. Darrell said on the call. He didn’t offer details but did acknowledge mistakes that occurred after a boom period from 2015 to 2020, when the brand became popular with cultural tastemakers and celebrities, leading to sales among a larger customer base.

“We actually took our eye off ... the core youth audience that had been the lifeblood of Vans,” Darrell said. “The brand had to evolve, but rather than continue to respect and serve the youth audience that had built the brand, we only fed the trend that grew it rapidly. We largely withdrew marketing to the core youth, and instead focused on everyone else.”

News of Dickies’ move shook some people in Fort Worth, where the company was co-founded in 1922 by E.E. “Colonel” Dickie and has a high profile as a local business. Dickies Arena is one of the city’s premier entertainment venues for concerts, community events and the annual Forth Worth Stock Show & Rodeo.

“The announcement last week that Dickies is leaving its home base in Fort Worth for a new headquarters in California shocked city leaders and left the brand’s most loyal fans in Texas dumbfounded,” the Fort Worth Star-Telegram reported.

Williamson-Dickie, a storied 102-year-old Fort Worth-based clothing company specializing in tough workwear, is leaving Cowtown for the West Coast.

A company representative confirmed to NBC 5 on Thursday that VF Corporation, the branded apparel company that bought Dickies in October 2017 for $820 million, was moving the headquarters to Costa Mesa, California so that they could share space with other brands.

"By co-locating Dickies with our Vans team in Costa Mesa, we will create an even more vibrant campus where creativity and best practice sharing can thrive through greater collaboration and connections – creating a dynamic and innovative environment similar to our other VF co-branded offices," the Dickies representative said in a statement.

Dickies said about 120 employees who work at the headquarters in Fort Worth will lose their jobs as a result of the consolidation move.

"These kinds of decisions are never made lightly. We are deeply grateful for our Dickies associates’ dedication and hard work and want to recognize the camaraderie and commitment they have shown to the brand," the representative said. "Our priority is to ensure that everyone is treated with respect and care throughout this process. We will provide resources and assistance to help them navigate the next steps in their careers."

Dickies said the move does not impact employees working at a local distribution facility, local warehouses, and stores in the Metroplex.

City officials said they were aware of the proposed move and said Dickies is a true Texas original and an example of the kind of success stories that businesses can find in Fort Worth.

“Great success stories have their roots in Fort Worth and Dickies is just one example," said Fort Worth Mayor Mattie Parker. "While we understand companies are sometimes forced to make difficult budget decisions under new leadership, we think VFC will find – as others have – that Fort Worth, Texas is ultimately a more competitive place to do business.”

The company said the move to California will be carefully managed over an "extended transition period" and is expected to be completed by May 2025.

"We remain proud of Dickies storied Fort Worth roots," the company said. "While this was a tough call, we are confident this change will help us revitalize Dickies so we can carry on the brand’s heritage for years to come."

In 1980, the company moved its headquarters to a historic two-story brick building on Lipscomb Street. Before Dickies moved in, the Romanesque-style building served as Stephen F. Austin Elementary School from 1892 until 1977. Dickies remained at the building until 2020, when they moved to their current headquarters on West Vickery Boulevard. The Lipscomb Street headquarters, the oldest standing school building in Tarrant County, has been rebranded as The Schoolhouse on Lipscomb and is named in the U.S. National Register of Historic Places.

Six months before the company was sold to VF Corp., Dickies secured the naming rights to a new 14,000-seat arena being built in the Fort Worth Cultural District. The area opened in 2019 and has since been known as Dickies Arena.

Along with Dickies and Vans, VF Corp. owns lifestyle brands The North Face, Timberland, Jansport and Eastpak.

Editor's Note: A previous version of this article said VF Corp owned the Wrangler and Lee brands. In 2018, VF Corp spun off its denim business into a new company, Kontoor Brands. We regret the error.