VF Corp’s Venture Foundry Selects Isaiah Steinfeld As Entrepreneur-In-Residence

VF Corporation, the fashion and retail powerhouse behind Vans, Supreme, and The North Face has picked ex-Nike exec Isaiah Steinfeld as its new Entrepreneur-in-Residence.

Steinfeld’s role is situated within the company’s VF Venture Foundry and allows him to leverage his tech experience to build a product that will help encourage families to experience nature and outdoor adventures.

While at the VF Venture Foundry, Steinfeld is working on his platform, called Wild Scout. The startup is a discovery engine designed to help parents find, plan, and schedule outdoor activities. It also allows them to demystify the outdoors by accessing expert advice, travel guides, and destination information.

“What I'm looking at doing is essentially helping the outdoors catch up with technology. To be able to take in information like how much time you have, what's your budget, what your level of experience, what's the level of intensity, what's the age group that you're also going with,” Steinfeld elaborated in an interview with The Org.

“All of those variables come to life to help discover activities folks can do nearby while also making it equitable in such a way that we're not just making it outdoorsy for the sake of outdoorsy, where it's solely hiking or camping, that we're also listing city parks and playgrounds where people can just get outside.”

The idea for the venture sprung into Steinfeld’s mind largely due to the COVID-19 pandemic and one sad statistic; 90% of kids aged 11-17 scored moderate to severe depression between January and September 2020. This is something Steinfeld hopes to help address by reconnecting families to nature — in the US around 28 million children don’t have access to a park within a 10-minute walk of home. He aims for Wild Scout to help bridge that gap.

To build his product he is leaning on a deeper tech background that stretches from his time at Lyft, where he helped launch the ride-sharing service in 24 cities in 24 hours, to his stint as Nike’s Global Senior Director of Advanced Innovation. In between he has also spent time at Intuit and helped advise Verizon on climate issues.

“We're in the development phase, hacking some of it together because we don't want to take on too much tech debt by going in the wrong direction,” Steinfeld added. “So we're just being really mindful in the build phase right now, listening, creating more tailored experiences to make sure we get all of the different feature sets and pieces done.”

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