The fall of the ugliest shoes in the world…maybe

Crocs.

All I have to do is type that one word and most people have an image in their mind of some brightly colored monstrosity that some people call shoes. Where I live, some even think they are fashionable. I personally think they belong in a landfill right next to last year’s Uggs.

The Crocs company is in a lot of trouble though.

The shoes, which were once marketed toward those who had to spend hours on their feet, have expanded so quickly and so far that it is unable to contract the company quick enough to help with damage control and it looks like it will likely go out of business in September when a large debt will be maturing.

The future also looks particularly harsh because it lost $185 million last year and had to lay off 2,000 people, eliminating those jobs forever. The revenues for the first quarter in 2009 also declined by 32%.

It was only three years ago that the company went public and raised just over $200 million. Today you can get a share of stock for around $3, the same share would have cost you $70 in October 2007.

From Salon.Com:

“But three years ago, they somehow just caught fire, spreading from the heartland to the coasts in a reversal of the usual trend path. New York chef/erstwhile Food Network star Mario Batali endorsed them without reservations, buying dozens of pairs; he would go on to be such an effective evangelist that the company launched a special Batali line. Polk’s store started selling as many as 5,000 a month, between the bricks-and-mortar locations and the Web site. By the summer of 2006, Crocs were everywhere. “You’ve tried to ignore them, but they’ve spread like vermin,” the Washington Post’s Style section sneered in an Aug. 1, 2006, piece on the trend. Crocs didn’t just roll with the boom, it pushed it along — the company took out ads in Vanity Fair, with the tag line “Ugly can be beautiful.”

That ad campaign gets to the heart of why the rise, let alone the fall, of Crocs was such a mystery. The shoes are ugly. You know they’re ugly. People knew they were ugly even as they flocked to buy them; they celebrated, they reveled in their ugliness. They created a whole tacky subculture around them, sticking little plastic charms — known as “Jibbitz” — in the holes that dot the tops of the shoes. You could decorate your shoes with hamburgers or sharks, and for some strange reason, people actually did. The shoes sold by the millions. By 2007, even George W. Bush was tromping around in the things.”

So it looks like the end of the Croc might be near. That would honestly be fine with me, but it is more likely that the company will go on with a lot of downsizing. I believe that it will go back to its base audience and shrink the product lineup back to something a bit more manageable.