Crocs Wants You To Forget About Its Signature Product

September 17, 2013 Leave a comment

Crocs Wants You To Forget About Its Signature Product

ASHLEY LUTZ SEP. 16, 2013, 1:46 PM 2,617 2

Crocs, maker of the notoriously unstylish rubber clog, is trying to break into high fashion. The shoe line will release “high-heeled pumps, sleek flats, and ankle-strap thongs,” early next year, reports Kyle Stock at Bloomberg Businessweek. The fancy new shoes will be manufactured in Italy — not the brand’s Colorado headquarters. Prices will range from $80 to $120. The line is part of Crocs’ push to distance itself from the clogs that made it famous. Businessweek, reported earlier this years that the company is trying to double sales in the next five years and doesn’t feel it can do it with the polarizing clogs. A visit to Crocs’ homepage shows that the brand is promoting ballet flats and wedges alongside its signature product:

screen shot 2013-09-16 at 11.56.54 am“Search online for ‘hate crocs’ and you’ll quickly see why Crocs is eager to downplay the clunky clogs it unleashed on an unsuspecting world 11 years ago,”  Matt Townsend at Businessweek wrote earlier this year. “Bloggers have denounced the rubbery footwear as ugly and an escalator tripping hazard. On YouTube, a woman cuts a yellow pair into pieces and then feeds them to a blender.”

But shoe designer Aaron Smith told Businessweek that Crocs’ brand name could keep it from finding success in the luxury market.

“Americans, in particular, really, really buy brands,” Smith said. “You just got to ask yourself, are people going to spend $120 on fancy Crocs? If they get the girls from Duck Dynasty to endorse them, maybe.”

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Kee Koon Boon (“KB”) is the co-founder and director of HERO Investment Management which provides specialized fund management and investment advisory services to the ARCHEA Asia HERO Innovators Fund (www.heroinnovator.com), the only Asian SMID-cap tech-focused fund in the industry. KB is an internationally featured investor rooted in the principles of value investing for over a decade as a fund manager and analyst in the Asian capital markets who started his career at a boutique hedge fund in Singapore where he was with the firm since 2002 and was also part of the core investment committee in significantly outperforming the index in the 10-year-plus-old flagship Asian fund. He was also the portfolio manager for Asia-Pacific equities at Korea’s largest mutual fund company. Prior to setting up the H.E.R.O. Innovators Fund, KB was the Chief Investment Officer & CEO of a Singapore Registered Fund Management Company (RFMC) where he is responsible for listed Asian equity investments. KB had taught accounting at the Singapore Management University (SMU) as a faculty member and also pioneered the 15-week course on Accounting Fraud in Asia as an official module at SMU. KB remains grateful and honored to be invited by Singapore’s financial regulator Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to present to their top management team about implementing a world’s first fact-based forward-looking fraud detection framework to bring about benefits for the capital markets in Singapore and for the public and investment community. KB also served the community in sharing his insights in writing articles about value investing and corporate governance in the media that include Business Times, Straits Times, Jakarta Post, Manual of Ideas, Investopedia, TedXWallStreet. He had also presented in top investment, banking and finance conferences in America, Italy, Sydney, Cape Town, HK, China. He has trained CEOs, entrepreneurs, CFOs, management executives in business strategy & business model innovation in Singapore, HK and China.

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