Medium Happiness

Last July, Meghan O’Rourke wrote a great piece about Crocs, the foam-rubber clog shoe, for Slate.com. The piece was aptly entitled: “The Croc Epidemic: How a heinous synthetic shoe conquered the world.” O’Rourke is not a fashion or design writer, but even she knew how unsustainably ugly Crocs were. The gist of her article was that all signs pointed to Crocs being nothing more than a fad, not a paradigm shifting new category of footwear. It so happened, that while her article was running on Slate.com, the Crocs, Inc. stock price was getting higher and higher. So was she right and Crocs were ephemeral, or was there actually something lasting to Crocs?

The line graph of Crocs, Inc.’s stock price looks something like the profile of the mountain K2. In October of 2007, after a meteoric rise, the share price peaked someplace north of $70/share. And now, less than six months later, the stock is languishing at base camp, trading below $10/share.

Crocs are on their way out. Soon, if not already, Crocs will be relegated to beach vacation or lazy Sunday only footwear categories. And for good reason, too. They are ugly, clumsy, and devoid of any design acumen. Wearing them garners about as much self-respect as going out in public in turd and piss stained, pilled, gray sweat pants.

But here is the funny thing, instead of retrenching and salvaging whatever equity in the Crocs’ name that remains, Crocs, Inc. is going full-steam ahead with a new clothing line and all the hideous, bastard-offspring, reincarnations of the Croc disguised as something else but still obviously a Croc that you can imagine (we will get to this later). Why?

Say that you are in some decision-making position at Crocs, Inc. and you know your brand is pretty much fucked; there is no way you will ever regain those sales numbers you enjoyed for one blissful summer. What do you do? Take your medicine and focus on your core brand (original Croc) and market it as best you can to a much smaller group of people, eg beach goers, campers, gardeners, etc.? Or, do you say to hell with the medicine, and take a long hard cannon ball pull off the Cool-Aid jug and expand your product offerings 100 fold and launch a hugely bad ad campaign? Apparently, according to the myopic, foam shoe heads, at Croc, Inc. you choose option #2: Say no to the yeasty whims of the consumer and give them more. More of a very bad, now very unpopular thing—the Croc.

Here is a new ad that sums up how screwed the Croc brand is.

No, it’s not hard to believe that the “parents were ugly,” these are ugly—uglier, in fact. This ad susinctly demonstrates why you do not make high heels out of foam: it’s not rigid and requires strange, unpleasant proportions. High heels are supposed to be elegant and lofted. If I were naming this shoe I would call it the “Apres-shift stripper pump.” Again, it begs the question, why would you build on a design that’s inherently bad? No one would ever make a Titanic 2.0, would they?

You have to admire that they had the guts to conceded that the original Croc is ugly. Isn’t that like, not a very good strategy to disparage your own product…sort of desperate? Any how, this is a debacle, and I am glad I do not own shares in Croc, Inc., it’s one gator that ain’t gonna survive.