Being ugly and getting yelled at is a core weapon for crocs

Have you ever worn holey shoes?
They're the kind of shoes that are great to wear, but make your feet look like spotted dogs after being outside in the sun.
The originator of the holey shoe is Crocs.
Crocs was born from the story of an unlucky middle-aged man who suddenly went bankrupt.
In 2001, Hanson (Lyndon "Duke" Hanson) had just turned 40 years old, and he was a middle-aged man with a successful career, a big house in the suburbs, and a beautiful family.
And his own little hobby, boating.
But in middle age, all those things you already have are extremely fragile.
Almost overnight, my oldest brother experienced what it means to have a midlife collapse.
First, the job is gone, then the house is gone, followed by the death of mom.
His wife ran away, and then she ran away, and took the kids with her.
He had to live on a friend's couch.
It's like an American movie.
It's either that or art comes from life.

People's hobbies often help bring them back from the dead.
Hansen's oldest brother had two good friends who also loved boating, one named Scott (Scott Seamans) and the other George Boedecker.
You ponder this last name of the first baseman, seamans, literally, seafarers, sailors.
Maybe it's the blood suppression in his ancestral bones, this is a man who was born to make waves on the sea.
These two saw that their buddy was having too much of a decadent time, so they called him to come paddle in Mexico.
Once, while soaking in a hot spring, Scott noticed that the waterproof shoes provided by the bathhouse were pretty awesome.
He found that the shoes used a resin material called croslite, which makes shoes that are non-slip and float on water, and are anti-fungal and don't stink feet.
After many inquiries, they learned that this material are located in Canada, called foam creation shoes company out.
Since it can be used in the bathhouse, it is inevitable that it can be used in the sea.
So, the three of them found this shoe company, designed a rowing shoes by themselves, and then handed over to the shoe company responsible for the production.
Starting a business is tough, and in order to save money, the trio slept directly on the boat.
Eventually, when the shoes first appeared at the boat show, the seafarers and boating enthusiasts' eyes were green.
The shoe is really damn ugly.
But also really suitable for waves on the sea.
200 pairs of shoes, all sold out.
A real vote with your feet, in the physical sense.
In November 2002, the trio officially launched this ugly shoe, named Crocs.
The name is a nickname for the crocodile (Crocodile).
So the best translation should not be Crocs, but Crocodiles.
After just one year, Crocs had already sold 1.2 million dollars in sales.
The three middle-aged old men raised their eyebrows and started their open life from then on.
This story tells us that bankruptcy is fine, the house is no longer fine, more to make friends, more to find a hobby.
Even if it is just to go to the hot springs, go to the health care?
Maybe there will be unexpected gains.
Of course, it is also possible to be happy with 15 days.

A successful consumer product is often one that is made by not many people and seems to be a small market but actually tapped into and consumed by most people.
In addition to seafarers and people who make waves on the sea, many people in special professions also need these shoes.
For example, chefs, athletes.
Another example is the hospital medical staff.
Doctors do surgery will inevitably have all kinds of blood huffing and puffing when the shoes will be splattered with all kinds of strange things, they need a pair of shoes that are easy to wash, can be put in the washing machine directly wash shoes.
Nurses also need shoes that don't need to be tied, and preferably without laces, which you don't have time to do when you're scrambling to do surgery.
So, either you wear rain boots or you wear holey shoes.
Obviously, although they're ugly, cavernous shoes are much nicer and more convenient than rain boots.
A functional thing that is easy to accomplish a rollout for a rigid group of people.
As long as one person wears them, soon the whole unit will be popular.
Seafarers won't have access to too many people, but medics will.
They are the best advertisement when they show up at a high traffic hospital wearing these shoes every day.
When patients see these shoes, they will want to ask where they got them.
North American cities are sparsely populated, and many Americans have houses with yards, and the man of the house often has to be the gardener in his own home and deal with the plants in the house, so he also needs to wear this kind of non-slip, waterproof, and sockless shoes.
People who live in city apartments can also wear these shoes to go downstairs to take out the trash. The market is huge.
A lot of people suspected that wearing these shoes directly would be infected by some of the chemicals in the plastic, and once they saw that healthcare workers wore them, there was no reason to be skeptical.
Doctors are wearing this, people must know better.
The three founders initially thought that this is a very vertical product, only a small part of the people will wear, but did not realize that this is a broad market, all wear Nike people need to have a pair of hole shoes.
In 2004, just two years after the debut of Crocs has completed 13.5 million dollars in operating income.
If we take $15 per pair (assuming the distributor takes half), 900,000 pairs of shoes are sold in a year.
With over 4 million registered nurses and 1 million doctors in the U.S., that group alone is enough to eat for a while.
Crocs was able to rise quickly not only because it was a real and immediate need, but also from its singularity of style.
Because it was so homogenous, it created a distribution model that had never been seen before.
Generally speaking, retailers need to go to the brand six months in advance to buy goods, so sometimes distributors tend to be more than the brand rich, because it must be advanced, and this advance cycle is also very long.
But because Crocs only sells cavernous shoes, the number of SKUs compared to regular shoes that is not a quantum leap.
For retailers the pressure is very low.
Crocs in order to quickly roll out the goods, but also give the dealers a better policy, you a few weeks to place an order.
And the starting threshold is very low, you can order 24 pairs, so there will be more people to help sell.
It's like microbusiness in the olden days.
The head nurse in a small hospital can become a Crocs dealer, how easy it is to sell 24 pairs of shoes.
If you can't sell you don't need to discount, because the hole shoes change very little, hole shoes main original is practical, there is no out of season out of season.
So, retailers love Crocs too much.
Inventory pressure on all brands to share.
Those old shoes and clothing brands are confused, ah this, can still do so?
In June 2004, Crocs, which had been making a lot of money, bought out its own foundry and supplier, FOAM Creation, in reverse.
From a purse company into a real brand company.
No more waterproof shoes for the bathhouse, I've got it covered.
This move ensures that they own the patent for the croslite material.

(Note: According to the earnings report, 2007 revenue actually reached $840 million, nearly double the $450 million projected in the chart, scary as hell)
Between 2003 and 2005, Crocs basically doubled 10 times per year.
You read that number correctly.
That rate is like going for a urine test and not getting a single drop of urine in the stimulant.
By 2005, Crocs revenue had exceeded $100 million, and in 2006 it was listed on the NASDAQ.
To this revenue volume, even for the sake of the shareholders to deliver, it must be crazy advertising, the sales costs to pull full.
But Crocs cattle X is that there are two groups of people free and active to bring traffic to themselves.
One group is positive.
People on a hundred, in all shapes and sizes.
People over ten million, then there is a loyal fanbase.
In 2006, New York chef and foodie star Mario Batali became a Crocs fanatic, promoting the shoes in his own circles.
Hollywood tough guys like Matt Damon and Al Pacino have also become missionaries of the Crocs religion.
Ah, cavemen bless.
The second group to push the envelope was the fashion press, which, of course, scolded.
The fashion editors were completely unable to look at such ugly things.
"You try to ignore them, but they spread like vermin."
The fashion section of the Washington Post was extremely cynical in an August 1, 2006 article.
The fashion magazine Maxim classified wearing holey shoes as.
"The worst thing that happened to men in 2007 (ranked sixth)."

In a 2008 interview with Time Magazine, fashion consultant Tim Gunn said there's a difference between this treadmill and a plastic hoof.
Actually, there is a difference. Donkey hooves are cheaper.
Beauty and ugliness are subjective concepts.
It doesn't matter if a fashion editor says it's ugly.
For a shoe, the real crisis is to be said that the glue is broken, the quality is not good, and the feet stink.
Being told it's ugly, ahahahaha, you go on.
Black and red, also red.
Since you have scolded, can't let you scold for nothing.
Have to turn your scolding into sales.
Crocs ran an ad in Vanity Fair with the tagline.
"Ugly can be beautiful."
The media needs traffic, it needs buzz.
Brands need it too.
If you're not afraid that people won't know you're ugly, you're afraid that people won't know you exist.
Because so many people called it ugly, some people who had no need for it became aware of Crocs and cavernous shoes as a result, and passed by the store to see how ugly it really was.
Ah, ugly indeed.
Those who find it ugly have joined the army of people who create free traffic for Crocs.
Two Canadian students started a blog called "I hate holey shoes".
The blog was a daily scolding of Crocs and the people who wore them.
Facebook even had a group at the time that was. "I Don't Care How Comfortable Crocs Are, You Look Like a Dumbass".
The popularity of cavernous shoes hit fast and quickly out of the loop, and North America was divided into two types of people: those who wore cavernous shoes and those who cursed cavernous shoes. No longer just a shoe category, cavernous shoes became a unique subculture.
Just like tofu brain eat salty or sweet, dumplings eat meat dumplings or eat sweet dumplings.
By 2007, even then-President George W. Bush had joined this subculture.
When the president appeared in front of the public wearing black socks and Crocs shoes with holes, many people looked dumbfounded.
Big brother, you are already wearing hole shoes, you still wear a fart socks ah.
Since then, the world has been divided into three kinds of people:
Those who wear holey shoes, those who curse holey shoes, and George Bush Jr.
Before Bush Jr. was photographed in this picture, he was hosting a fundraiser for the Republican Party at the estate of tycoon Rick Sharp.
And Rick Sharp is a board member of Crocs, Inc.
The business world is not about fighting and killing, it's about people.
With the media, celebrities, and the President adding to the mix, Crocs' fame skyrocketed.
It became the top stream of the shoe world, the object of constant flirtation in the fashion world, and a tool to quickly tell if the other person is a friend or not.
There are no perfect consumer products in this world.
Even as strong as Coca-Cola, addictive, high consumption frequency, no seasonal restrictions, own only produce concentrate, and almost no competitors, still encountered many times crisis.
Not to mention consumer goods such as holey shoes, which are durable and characterized by strong seasonality.
It is full of faults.
Ugly, scene-limited, and too cold to wear in winter.
If you wear this with thick socks in winter, it's not cold, but it's even uglier.
Frankly speaking, my personal experience is that it is not as comfortable as slippers indoors, and not as convenient as other shoes outdoors.
Bean shoes, ah, lazy shoes, also do not need to tie shoelaces.
The real need for cavernous shoes is still the occasions when you frequently touch water.
Moreover, because of the aesthetic differences, many people even want to wear, but also because of the fear of friends dislike, and do not go to buy crocs.
What's even sadder is that with the '08 storm, consumers won't go for non-essentials.

(Operating income has been declining since 2008)
What Crocs used to have going for them has become a disadvantage at this point.
There is no need for many people to get new ones because the quality is too good.
Adults have one pair of cavernous shoes and there is no need to buy an extra pair.
Cave shoes usually don't require strict sizing, so many children don't have the need to buy a new pair even if they grow up fast.
Because they are not anti-static and interfere with medical equipment, cavernous shoes have been banned from being worn in many hospitals.
(Crocs later had to develop anti-static styles for hospitals)

Meanwhile, many cottage holey shoes brands use cheaper prices to attract consumers.
All human beings are honest when it comes to bargains.
What is the most terrible thing?
Because distributors do not need to book six months in advance, so Crocs has no idea how many pairs of shoes the market needs, or how much inventory there is at the distributors, and it just produces wildly there with its eyes closed.
In the past, this strategy to help their own rapid expansion, in the downside of this strategy will quickly consume their own cash.
Products pile up and don't sell for years.
Crocs distribution strategy is flexible, inventory is their own to digest, dealers in the past did not die with you, and now even more will not help you.

Crocs market capitalization in July 2009 fell to $49 million.
It got to the point where people were sick of it.
If a retail investor had taken the plunge at the time, earnings would now be 135 times, with an average annualization of 967%.
In order to give shareholders an explanation, Crocs had to go to other types of shoes, flat shoes, sloping heels, fur boots, golf shoes, and even developed high-heeled shoes. At the same time adjusted the channel strategy.
Those old shoes and clothing brands are probably gloating at this time, give you before you can, in the end it is not the same as us. Starting in 2010, Crocs began layoffs, store closures and downsizing of product lines.
But the effect is general.
In October 17, 2011 when the results were announced, Crocs shares fell 35% directly.
In 2013, the famous pickup king Blackstone became the role of this bottom-feeding.
But the plunge was late.
Blackstone invested $200 million to become a Crocs shareholder and own two board seats.
In the black stone to promote, crocs closed 75% of the stores, cut off in addition to hole shoes, almost all product lines, closed the factory, all outsourcing.
I mentioned this before in another article, the United States mature PE funds are good at doing things, is to reduce staff, close stores, close factories.
This combination of punches down, Blackstone really did not work for nothing.
The floating loss was half.
Revenue didn't change and profits continued to be negative.

(Revenues remained essentially the same from 2013 through 2016, and net income continued to be negative)
When Blackstone got in in December 2013, Crocs stock was at 12-14 bucks, and in May 2017 it dropped to 6 bucks. (Of course Blackstone ended up making a profit, but not much)

The real turnaround came in 2017.
From that year, Crocs stopped losing money and made a profit.

Crocs is starting to go wild.
The first reason is that from 2017, Crocs shifted all of its marketing budget to online.
Online traffic is expensive, but online will precipitate more data and can make more accurate production forecasts.
And it's already 2017, everyone is already living online, and the hole shoes would have had innate traffic, would have been a controversial species, and wouldn't even have to spend much money.
When the ugly shoes are on display, the traffic will come from the bottom.
The second reason is that Crocs finally came to its senses and put more energy into jibbitz (decorations for holey shoes).
This jibbitz is all sorts of fancy accessories in the holes of the cavernous shoes.
You can understand this as a kind of refrigerator sticker.
Although jibbitz have been acquired by crocs since 2006, the business has never been as important as it is today.

During the Q2 2021 earnings call, Crocs' CEO said that sales of this gadget tripled from the same period last year.

More and more young people are using crocs as a graffiti board, using accessories to make personal expression.
This is not an accessory, it is clearly a tattoo that can be replaced at any time.
Third, fashion is a circle.
What was ugly in the past becomes trendy now.
When cavernous shoes first appeared, they were mocked by all kinds of groups.
But in 2021, Crocs have become the eighth most popular item among American teens.
This is easy to understand, just like the most trendy in the current national trend is the six god flower water, is back to force sneakers, people will have aesthetic fatigue of the existing thousand and one design, but instead, they will have a sudden interest in this kind of classic, retro things, think it is good to see ah.
Justin Bieber, Bad Bunny, Boz Malone, these stars who have a strong appeal in the hearts of teenagers, as well as a cool image have also started to wear Crocs.
These celebrities tend to be post-90s, or even post-95s, and they grew up wearing Crocs, so it's easier for them to embrace it as opposed to celebrities from twenty years ago.
In the past, although there are many celebrities wearing holey shoes, but they are all Matt Damon and "hip" completely unrelated to the straight man tough guy, and now wear this is the most trendy rap star.
Who dares to say Crocs is dirt?
It was in 2017 that Crocs started a path of constant co-branding.
Everything can be co-branded.
Disney, Pokémon, Harry Potter, Star Wars, these classic IPs are no longer enough.
711, KFC, Belle Reve, Vera Bradley, Bubble Mart, even a popular songwriter can't escape Crocs' co-branding.

(Crocs' numbers have been growing all the way since the start of 2017)
Over the past three years, more and more people are getting used to telecommuting and working from home, and are starting to understand that cavernous shoes aren't just trendy, but they're actually practical.
After 20 years, Crocs has gone from a purely utilitarian piece of athletic gear to a shoe that is both fashionable and practical.
And it's not just a shoe category, it's also a graffiti drawing board where consumers can buy decorative items for personal expression.
The core competitiveness of holey shoes is comfortable, ugly, and holey itself.
Everyone questions cavemen, everyone understands cavemen, and everyone joins cavemen.
Remember the story told at the beginning?
A middle-aged man lost his relatives, house, assets, and stable job overnight.
His life was like a dozen holes in his shoes, leaking everywhere.
But so what?
Life is like a bubble and holes.
Living is the answer to everything.

We're taking a look at this year's new crocs accessories: croc lights

• Super Bright: Annbest headlights for crocs shoes has built-in upgraded dual led lamp beads. It can provide super high lumens lights and it's irradiation distances up to 66ft, Triple brighter than ordinary shoes lights. Suitable for camping, fishing, biking, hunting, hiking and dog walking at night, ideal choice for camping accessories
• Fast Charging: Our crock headlights is built-in 350 mAh battery, the cycle life of the battery can reach up to 1000 times, supports 5V 1-2A fast charging, charging time is about 45 minutes, and running time is up to 5-20 hours. Package include a dual-ended charging cable that supports both lights charging at the same time.
• Designed for Croc Shoes: The size of this flashlight for croc is 2.90 x 1.0 x 2.90 inches, weighting only 0.81 Oz. Using an upgraded elastic silicone tape design, it can flexibly pass through the shoe holes and securely bind to the shoes without causing friction on your feet. The head is 90° adjustable, you can adjust the angle of the light as you like.
• Waterproof Design: The lights for crocs shoes are made of high quality abs materials, wear-resistant, high temperature resistant. It adopts ipx6 waterproof technology, built-in multiple sealing rings, suitable for all heavy rain and extreme high temperature weather.
• Great Gifts: The head lights for crocs is unique and cute. When you turn on blinking mode, it looks like a mischievous robot winking at you. They make a great gag gift for mum, dad, husband, wife, grandpa, grandma, daughter, son, brother, boyfriend or girlfriend on birthdays, Father's Day, Valentine's Day, Thanksgiving and Christmas Day.

Feature:

Size: 2.90 x 1.0 x 2.90 inches.

0.81 Oz Weight.

The lights for croc has built-in upgraded dual led lamp beads.

66 feet lighting distance.

The head is 90° adjustable, you can adjust the angle of the light as you like.

Triple brighter than ordinary shoes lights.

Supports 5V 1-2A fast charging.

About 45 minutes charging time

5-20 hours running time.

Ipx6 waterproof.

4 light modes to choose.

Great product and gift idea.

Take these Camping Lights home now.

Please note, when the green light is flashing, it indicates the start of charging and stops flashing when it is full.

Lightweight and Fun Accessories for Crocs

Headlights for crocs Suitable for camping, fishing, biking, hunting, hiking and dog walking at night, ideal choice for camping accessories and emergency flashlights for the home.