Crocs (footwear brand, not the animal) had a really good year. The brand with a distinctive style, known for their foam clogs and sandals, sold just under $1.4bn of shoes last year. That marks Crocs third straight year of revenue growth, revitalising a company that looked like it was in trouble in 2017.
Forget Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Facebook or Apple — if you'd correctly predicted Crocs would make a comeback and bought shares in them at the start of 2017 you'd have made more than 10x on your money, more than what you would have made from owning shares in any of those 5 tech companies over the same time frame.
Make Crocs cool... again(?)
Uncool can become cool, and vice versa, very quickly in the fashion world. No better example is in 2017 when luxury fashion brand Balenciaga sent a model down the runway in huge platform Crocs, fully embracing the clunky ugliness — and selling out of $850 pairs of similar platform Crocs by Feb 2018.
It's probably a stretch to say that a few fashion shows are entirely responsible for turning the brand around but they underpin a strategy at Crocs that has been in motion since new CEO Andrew Rees took the reins halfway through 2017. Collaborations with celebrities, influencers and limited edition "drops" of custom Crocs have all helped the company engage with younger buyers and turned the clunky design of the main clog into an asset.
The new marketing effort came with ancillary benefits for Crocs as well. Back in 2006 the company had acquired Jibbitz, which make little charms that you can stick onto your Crocs (through all those holes they have on them) to let you customize them. It's easier just to show you rather than explain what they look like at this point — but buyers absolutely loved them. As Crocs got more popular with younger customers, they wanted to stamp their own style onto them — and search interest for Jibbitz has exploded accordingly.
A year to be comfy
Of course, it's easy to forget amidst all of this marketing hype that Crocs main feature remains the fact that they are just insanely comfy. Indeed, there's certainly a strong argument to be made that if any shoe was going to thrive in a global pandemic it was going to be one that was really comfortable, even if you didn't love the look. No-one is looking at your shoes on Zoom.
