Croc On

Consumed: Crocs: A trendy shoe marches on despite detractors — or maybe because of them.

In the summer of 2006, Crocs wearers ranged from children to senior citizens, from the image-indifferent to the celebrity chef Mario Batali. The suggestion of ubiquity was probably magnified by the fact that seeing one pair of the oversize and often brightly colored footwear felt like seeing five. The Washington Post noted the “goofy” shoes were spreading “like vermin,” and Radar Magazine anointed the “hideous” items “summer’s most unfortunate fad.” The good news for critics was that fads fade and that the Croc thing seemed to be at a peak. But a year later Crocs still have traction; in fact, the company’s sales through the first quarter of 2007 are roughly triple what they were for the same period in 2006, and imitations and knockoffs abound. The shoes might still end up as props at the kitschy ’00s-themed parties of future college students (worn with trucker hats for the guys and huge sunglasses for the ladies). But it may be that Crocs have a foothold not just despite critics of the shoes’ appearance but because of them….

Crocs are made of something called Croslite, which is ”NOT plastic NOR rubber,” a company statement explains, but rather ”a proprietary closed-cell resin,” which it says results in a particularly comfortable and easy-to-clean shoe. First sold under the Crocs name in 2002, they were, the story goes, aimed at boating enthusiasts. There was just one model — the big, $30 clown shoe with lots of holes, which remains the brand’s iconic product — in six colors. The company now makes an array of models in scores of colors and most recently announced a line of high-end, style-focused shoes that incorporate Croslite, under the name YOU by Crocs. Crocs is ”building a lifestyle brand,” explains Tia Mattson, a company spokeswoman.

Aspiring lifestyle brands are a dime a dozen, but Crocs have trod an unusual path. The shoes caught on first in Middle America, then migrated toward the more trend-centric coasts, possibly aided by the most significant marketing campaign in the company’s brief history: ads in Vanity Fair and other magazines carried the theme ”Ugly can be beautiful.” (Mattson says that Batali, previously much-photographed in Chuck Taylor sneakers, discovered Crocs on his own somewhere around 2005; he has his own Crocs line now.) Comfort is the consistent theme in testimonials on the company’s site — despite the presence nearby of, say, a woman wearing Crocs with her wedding dress.

David Chidester, a computer-products marketer in Dallas, started a site called CrocFans.com in 2005, shortly after his wife discovered the shoes. He posts Crocs-related items like a recent photograph of President Bush wearing a pair — black, with what appear to be presidential-seal socks — and his traffic has grown steadily, hitting its latest high last month. Chidester says he has no affiliation with and has never heard from the company, but he sticks to the official comfort line just the same: he wears his green pair to work on his lawn and a more understated khaki pair to the mall, purely for functional reasons.

After a while, all the comfort talk starts to sound a little bit like a guy with a Mohawk saying he simply wants to spend less time washing his hair. Perhaps it is the Crocs fans’ refusal to admit that the shoes are an aesthetic statement that really motivates people like Kate Leth and Vincenzo Ravina, two college students in Halifax, Nova Scotia, who operate a Web site called ihatecrocs.com. ”We don’t understand why people can’t freely admit that they’re hideous,” says Leth, who describes herself as ”stunned” at the persistence of the shoes and the e-mail she gets from around the world as Crocs enter new markets ”like a disease spreading.” In addition to anti-Croc rants, the site includes videos of the shoes being burned with firecrackers or shredded with scissors; Leth says they have sold ”a few hundred” anti-Croc T-shirts, many to members of one of the larger Croc-hating Facebook groups.

This, of course, is precisely what gives Crocs a dash of maverick cachet far beyond anything an ad campaign or celebrity endorsement could provide. Leth’s site also shares the anti-anti-Croc e-mail it receives, the tone of which is often defiant. ”I liken it to Apple computers,” the Croc fan Chidester suggests. ”It’s something different, people get behind it and if you say something bad about it — well, by gosh you’re wrong.” He hastens to add that he’s more open-minded and amused by the criticisms and that he’ll be sticking with Crocs even if the vogue for wearing them passes. Which will probably happen right around the time the vogue for hating them does.Additional Links: Croc Fans (includes rebuttal to this column); I Hate Crocs Dot Com.