Crocs hopes new ads kick its clogs back into style

NIWOT — Crocs Inc. hopes Americans will once again fall in love with its once-fashionable brand of brightly colored, form-fitting clogs.

The Niwot-based company (Nasdaq: CROX) is launching a new global marketing campaign, complete with its first television commercials in five years. Built around the theme “Find Your Fin,” the company is encouraging fans to send in photos of fun things they do while wearing the hole-punched footwear.

A falloff in U.S. sales led to job cuts and store closures in 2014, leading the new campaign to be greeted this week with snarky headlines such as “Return of the Ugly Shoe” in the Chicago Tribune and “A Chip Off the Old Croc” in Bloomberg News. Still, consumers purchased 56  million pairs in 2014, mostly in Europe and Japan. Because of the global reach, that total was more than Crocs’ annual sales during any year in its stateside heyday in the middle of the last decade.

“We want to re-energize our core clog silhouette,” Crocs president Andrew Rees told the Wall Street Journal. “It’s what we stood for in the marketplace. It’s lightweight, it’s fun, it’s entertaining.

“It’s not a hot fashion trend as it was in one point of time, but it is a very practical, versatile, comfortable, effective silhouette that works with a lot of people who continue to wear it and continue to like it.”

Crocs in February reported a larger quarterly net loss than analysts had expected – $56.9 million, or 70 cents per share, for the period ending Dec. 31, compared with a loss of $66.9 million or 76 cents per share for the same period a year earlier.

For 2014 as a whole, the company’s net loss was $19 million, or 22 cents per share, on revenue of $1.2 billion. That’s after a profit of $10.4 million, or 12 cents per share in 2013.

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