Crocs lawsuit claims competitor Joybees built business on stolen trade secrets

BROOMFIELD — Crocs Inc. (Nasdaq: CROX) last week filed a lawsuit against Joybees LLC that alleges that the Denver-based casual-shoe competitor and its CEO, a former Crocs employee, have built the business over the last three years on the back of stolen trade secrets. 

The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Denver, claims that Joybees is a “knockoff brand,” and that CEO Kellen McCarvel was a former merchandising manager who in 2018 “joined Joybees just months after he left a mid-level management position at Crocs with a tranche of several thousand documents containing Crocs’s highly confidential and proprietary business information,…