The brand’s international marketer tells Tim Healey how Crocs moved from meme to must-have by embracing self-expression, cultural collaboration and a fan-first strategy.
Your career has spanned Richemont, Chaloub, Tommy Hilfiger, Calvin Klein and, since 2021, Crocs, where you are now group vice-president. Tell us about your journey to get there.
I started my career in the luxury industry, working with LVMH, Gucci Group, and Richemont in different roles that helped me understand how those luxury brands are building strong foundations through their connections with consumers and how they work with their legacies. For me, that was one of the best ways to learn the core principles of marketing.
Having learned so much from the luxury sector about brand DNA I wanted to work with brands that had more flexibility to connect with the consumer through social and digital. At the time, Tommy Hilfiger was one of the pioneers investing in celebrity ambassadors and creating capsule collections.
I had the chance to work with Gigi Hadid and Zendaya, among many others. It was fast-paced, and once launched these capsule collections had to be immediately available, with a full commercial rollout that coincided with the ads. We learned how to connect with consumer through social first and then integrate the commerce side.
I moved to Crocs around five years ago, just before the Covid lockdown. I was working on EMEA then Latin America, and on top of that we launched Croc’s sister brand, Heydude, for the international market.
I led the international marketing team for HEYDUDE for a year-and-a-half and we launched in the UK, Western Europe and India. I’m now the group vice-president for Crocs, for all the national markets other than the US and Canada.
You’d have to be hiding under a rock not to know what Crocs are, but how do you describe the product offering?
Crocs is a world leader in innovative footwear. Our approach combines comfort and style with value. Everybody knows the shape of the Croc shoe – it is one of the most iconic product silhouettes – the Classic Clog.
Our mission is to continue to innovate by adding further personalization and also expanding into new categories. These include sandals and most recently sneakers. Our key point of differentiation is around personalization. The Classic Clog offers a blank canvas for self-expression. Each individual Crocs Classic Clog has 13 holes that you can customize with charm s that we call Jibbitz. Thus we offer an immediate way for the consumer to personalize their shoes based on their mood, taste and passion.
What’s coming up for Crocs in 2026?
My focus is to continue to build on our consumer loyalty, but also adjust our strategy to meet the needs of all the different consumers around the world. In each territory and country, our main principle is to be where the consumers are spending time. That is mostly on social and on gaming platforms.
We will also continue to surprise and delight our fans by dropping unexpected collaborations. And from a product standpoint, we have a key focus on innovation. We will diversify our product offer, with sandals and sneakers. At the same time, we also want to stay true to our iconic Crocs shoes and deliver new iterations of our Classic Clog.
How is your marketing team structured?
We have our global and international teams that are executing the brand playbook – our brand that is universally understood across the world. We then have our country teams who are applying and then adapting, based on the needs of the [local] consumer. Being globally consistent and locally relevant is key to our success at Crocs.
Drawing on your leadership expertise, what has your career taught you that helps to make a great marketing team?
I believe there are three key pillars. First: diversity of point of view and experience. Thanks to simple tools like Team Chat, our teams across the globe are able to share experience. We have also observed that there are more similarit ies than differences – price may vary, for example, but the core objectives remain the same. Sharing expertise and experiences is definitely something that makes our team stronger and more efficient.
Second: we gather around common values. At Crocs, we have a brand that is consumer-facing and based on our Crocs anthem of ‘Come As You Are’. Our team is very diverse, but as I mentioned, you can just be yourself and that is hugely important in the way we’re conducting our different operations as a marketing team.
Third: our work should be fun. Crocs shows up as ‘a fun brand’ for consumers. So we must be having fun internally for this to manifest for our customers. We’re super-busy, with lots of initiatives and projects, but at the same time, we need to be having fun.
If you can maintain those three pillars in your marketing team, you can drive more success.
How do you manage to surf the tidal wave of marketing tech?
We are investing in social channels and gaming platforms. We are also developing our TikTok shop featuring ‘snackable content’ – initiatives that are not always immediately linked to social commerce. And then gaming is also a key element of our strategy, and there we are working with Roblox, Fortnite and we show up in the most authentic way possible.
If you had said to me five years ago that part of my role would be to understand how these gaming platforms work, I would have been surprised. It has made me the ‘cool Uncle’ at Christmas as I can talk to my nephews and cousins about these platforms. But today we are really pushing our team to stay up to date with the latest trends, but also enjoy how things work.
Not so long ago, Crocs were objects of slight ridicule in some quarters. Whizz forward a few years, and I am in Galleries Lafayette, Paris, and there’s the Balenciaga Croc collaboration on the shelf. To go from the subject of comedy memes to a highly sought-after fashion item and world leader in molded footwear is an astonishing journey. How has that happened?
Back as recently as 2016, we were still shying away from embracing that tension. The shape of our shoe, even as a silhouette, has some of the highest customer awareness. That presents an incredible opportunity.
We changed our tactics and reset our strategy with a new goal of connecting authentically with consumers. First, we reignited interest in the Classic Clog. That’s our icon. We reclaimed our position as leader in the molded footwear space and the clog space.
We also created a new platform based around the concept of ‘Come As You Are’ and, as I mentioned, made that our brand anthem. We recognize that choosing to wear Crocs shoes, or clogs, may at times be a surprising choice but it’s a way for you also to express your personality and a way to show your passion through personalization.
Once all of those pieces were aligned, the next step was collaboration: we wanted to make sure that we were getting credibility in the cultural space. We began our work with third-party partners that were able to connect with culture, from fashion through to pop culture in general. Our goal was to be culturally relevant for consumers.
That work continues to this day. We know we have ‘haters’, but we also have more and more lovers. We shifted from a ‘consumer-first’ strategy to a ‘fan-first’ strategy. I’ll give you an example: around 2017, I think it was October 23, we found that Crocs were trending on X (formerly Twitter). We had no campaign or initiative launching that day, so at first this was puzzling. We quickly realized that the fans were talking about Crocs on N ational Crocodile Day! We have now decided to use that day to celebrate our Crocs every year. We’ve actually extended the idea beyond one day to the whole month: We have renamed it ‘Croctober’.
Every October 23, Croc Day, we drop limited-edition products. Two years ago, we released Crocs Cowboy Boots – it was the most-requested silhouette by the fans online. Last year, we did two things first. We launched a Crocs costume so you could dress up as Crocs shoes, and if you wanted you could decide to be ‘the left’ or ‘the right’, or go dress up with a friend as a pair. Another fan request we delivered was Crocs shoes for dogs. These are both examples of our ‘fan-first approach’.
I love the fact that Crocs are happy to straddle both comedy and high fashion. What myth about marketing would you most like to bust?
I think the traditional perception of marketing as the department ‘that builds shiny objects, spending the hard-earned money of the business’ is kind of dying out. Technology is helping us to prove the value of marketing activities.
In many organizations, there is still tension between performance marketing and brand marketing and this can still be an obstacle not only when optimizing investment, but also when connecting properly with consumers.
Marketers need to think differently when connecting those teams, so that they are able to leverage the full catalog of brand assets and content and bring them together and consider the entire customer journey. Fusing the two pieces of brand and performance marketing within the broader ‘go to market approach’ is a way to capture people’s attention.
Could you describe a moment when your instincts and the data pointed in different directions? How did you respond and what was your take-home from the experience?
Well, this wasn’t exactly a conflict, but it was a lack of connection between data points.
We recently launched a campaign that combined science and art. We wanted to launch an international campaign that addressed a key concern moment for our product – the monsoon season.
The monsoon, or rainy season, spans India, China, Japan, South East Asia. In my new international role, we were exploring how to connect these territories using the available data and it was proving tricky.
We decided to look at the most engaged fan base within the entire region. And we found out that there were two areas that were responding extremely well to our content: India and Korea. We decided to combine them and created a campaign that mashed-up two cultural phenomena in those territories: K-drama and Bollywood.
We recruited one of the leading K-drama actresses and we paired her with one of the most promising Bollywood actors and created a narrative that addressed the wet season moment. The result was the single most popular Instagram post in the history of Crocs: 410m views.
What question would you like me to ask the next senior marketer that I interview?
I’m curious to understand how their marketing team is staying culturally relevant in an ever-changing market?
Your question from the last senior marketer that I interviewed: how do you show that creativity is a real driver of business growth?
Creative agility and emotional connections with consumers help us to achieve clear objective s. At the most successful businesses, marketing is becoming more and more integrated and is part of the strategic decision-making process and also recognized as a driver for business success. Increasingly, we are seeing a mix of science and art. We have the data now to report back on the decisions we make. We can also make adjustments along the way.
Having the right mix of data-driven decisions, but at the same time empowering creativity, and taking innovative risks is a healthy mix to help make your brand stand out in a very busy environment and go on to create commercial success.
If there’s one thing you know about marketing, it is…?
Marketing is an ever-changing field that requires identity and creativity.
You might die tomorrow so make it worth your while. Worth Your While is an independent creative agency helping brands do spectacular stuff people like to talk about. wyw.agency.
This interview has already appeared in The Drum. Discover the best campaigns, industry insights and interviews from world-leading marketers, creatives and more.
