Så byggdes ett imperium värt miljarder på grymt fula skor

Pappa-sandaler, regnbågsfärgade sandaler och ulliga tofflor som påminner om bebisskor. Amerikanska Deckers Outdoor, med rötter i 1970-talet, har lyckats bygga ett imperium värt 2,5 miljarder dollar på den omisskännliga och oväntade trenden ”uglycore” – som i sin tur inspirerat modevärldens grindvaktare i Milano och Paris, skriver Bloomberg Businessweek.

The Rise of the $2.5 Billion Ugly-Shoe Empire

From shearling Uggs to Hoka dad sneakers and rainbow Tevas, Deckers Outdoor Corp. keeps selling us the most hideous uglycore footwear.

Kim Bhasin/Bloomberg Businessweek, 3 February 2022

Underneath the barstools at Doris is evidence of an unsavory fashion trend that refuses to disappear. A mustachioed man in a neon ’80s jacket sits on the patio of the candlelit Brooklyn cocktail bar with his toes exposed, bare feet strapped into sandals. Another guy adjusts his clogs as he waits for a friend to arrive. The bartender, a 24-year-old tattoo apprentice with fringed dark hair and platinum-bleached bangs who goes by “Shivs,” says her patrons love ugly shoes. In the summer, they walk in with multicolored Tevas, Birkenstock slides, and platformed Crocs. As the winter chill sets upon the city, they have their cold-season counterparts, shearling-lined and fur-coated. “I feel like ugly things always come back to be cool in the end,” Shivs says.

While uglycore—fashion that scorns beauty in favor of self-affirmation—isn’t new, the collective hangover of two years of barely squeezing a foot into a heel, pump, loafer, wingtip, oxford, or even a pair of ballet flats has intensified an unapologetic love affair with pragmatic footwear. Odd styles once aimed at surfers, casual errand-runners, and the podiatry-prone are now flaunted on Zoom work calls, couture runways, and pretty much anywhere the cool kids hang.

There’s almost a sense of one-upmanship to be the most hideous. Adidas’s $80 Yeezy Foam Runners, which look like perforated marshmallows, are selling out. There are poofy Koolaburra slippers that tuck your feet inside itty-bitty fake-fur blankets. Converse’s hybrid sneaker-rainboots look like someone dipped Chuck Taylors in rubber. Balenciaga put high heels on Crocs, for some reason. “Fashion, like art, likes to question beauty rather than simply aiming for aesthetically pleasing designs,” says Carolyn Mair, author of The Psychology of Fashion. “So if fashion is art, then ‘ugly’ is also fine.”

The uglycore stalwarts have reaped the benefits of this cultural moment. Shares of Crocs Inc. reached record highs last year, and the company projects revenue will double, to $5 billion, over the next four years. Last April, Birkenstock was acquired by L Catterton, a private equity firm backed by LVMH, the world’s largest luxury company, in a deal said to value the business at about $4.9 billion.

But a lesser-known third player has navigated these waters just as nimbly. Over the past 49 years, Deckers Outdoor Corp. has quietly built a multibillion-dollar ugly shoe empire. Its workhorse is Ugg, the ubiquitous stumpy sheepskin boots worn by everyone from Long Island moms to seven-time Super Bowl champ Tom Brady. Deckers has helped stage a retro comeback for Teva by seducing bougie retailers such as Nordstrom and Anthropologie into pushing the brand’s Velcro sandals with 1980s middle school science teacher vibes. More recently the company’s Koolaburra brand unleashed the thick, fuzzy open-toed sandal trend, while Sanuk offers “superFUNKtional” Deadhead-compliant hemp moccasins.

None of these is to be outdone by Deckers’ most recent breakout hit, Hoka, the engorged running sneakers that look like dad shoes but perform like Nikes. The brand is now Deckers’ fastest-growing business, with revenue rising 47% last quarter from the same quarter a year ago.

Deckers, which expects to break $3 billion in net sales this fiscal year with revenue up across all its brands, now has a shoe line dominating every corner of the ugly universe. In the capricious world of trends, Deckers’ approach to designing comfortwear is less Easy Spirit and more luxury fashion house. The way the company sees it, you need to be either inoffensive or irreverent, and it’s picked its lane. Anything short of that leaves you in a brand’s most dreaded no man’s land: indifference.

Inside the Deckers headquarters in the quiet Southern California beach town of Goleta, there are more shoes than people: bizarre calf-high suede Uggs, faux-leather Teva sneakers with collapsible backs, a wall of color-saturated Hokas that looks like psychedelic art. Dave Powers, the company’s chief executive officer for the past six years, guides me through Deckers’ design studio and spots an Ugg wedge, its bottom wrapped in brown jute. He pulls it off the shelf and inspects it disapprovingly, soon to become one of the countless models that will never make it to market. They look too much like normal shoes, he says. The subtext: They’re too pretty.

Powers’s executive team doesn’t seem quite as comfortable with the “u” word as he does. Hoka President Wendy Yang—who doesn’t bite when I describe the company’s body of products as “ugly”—sticks with “beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” Ugg executive Andrea O’Donnell says her designers don’t intentionally make an unattractive shoe. “We would build out from simplicity and purity of purpose,” says O’Donnell, who recently left the company to become the CEO of apparel company Everlane Inc.

But Powers, wearing a baseball cap and white-and-blue Hokas, says boring is the one thing the company can’t afford to be. Each Deckers brand has its core hits, but every season its designers are given permission to go wild, a portion of each collection reserved for riskier attempts in search of the next big breakout. The company uses one of its 145 stores to test items so they don’t have to persuade retailers to get on board without proving that some new zany shoe has staying power. “I don’t mind the ugly moniker,” Powers says. “It basically says you’re different. You’re owning something distinct. It’s a little off, but there’s something interesting about it.”

The first shoes ever sold by Deckers couldn’t have been less interesting: a pair of striped flip-flops. Co-founders Doug Otto and Karl Lopker began selling them out of Santa Barbara, Calif., in the early 1970s, mostly to surfers who wanted flashier sandals for the beach. But even then the company noticed the first signals of uglycore. Across the country, hippies were swooning over clunky, cork-lined sandals called Birkenstocks, a company that dates back to a German shoemaker in 1774. Almost 200 years later, its first sandal—apparently, an exercise shoe intended to tone calf muscles by forcing wearers to clutch the insole with their toes so it didn’t fall off—had somehow found its spiritual home among American stoners.

By the early 1980s, Deckers executives caught wind of Teva, a newfangled sandal created by a Grand Canyon river guide who attached a watch strap to a flip-flop. Within a few years, Deckers licensed the Teva brand, producing and selling the sandals, which took off. In 1995, after the U.S. Olympic team showed up to the Winter Games in Lillehammer, Norway, wearing Uggs, Deckers acquired the brand for less than $15 million. Ugg limped along until it made Oprah Winfrey’s Favorite Things list in 2000, then quickly ascended to become the off-hours boot of Hollywood types. In 2002, with the Teva licensing deal expiring, Deckers decided to go all in on the sandal brand, purchasing it from its founder for $62 million.

The timing coincided with what would become a critical new entrant in this oddly fast-growing sector: Crocs, the foam resin clogs that made their inaugural appearance at a Florida boat show. Suddenly, it seemed, what used to be frumpy was turning into I-don’t-give-a-damn cool. By 2012, British fashion designer Phoebe Philo created her own mink-lined Birkenstock-style sandals for her Celine show, followed by Italian designer Giambattista Valli’s studded Birks and Givenchy’s double-strapped sandals. Marc Jacobs and Prada both unveiled Teva-esque styles in 2014. It was couture meets crude.

During this period, Deckers went on an ugly shoe binge, acquiring half a dozen brands. While Sanuk, Hoka, and Koolaburra were promising bets, it quickly became clear the company had overswung. “We had a number of brands that were carrying their weight,” says Powers, “and others that were never going to.”

When Powers arrived as CEO, Deckers was in trouble. It had opened too many stores, acquired too many brands, misallocated inventory, and struggled to find new customers. Its executives had gotten lazy about pushing Uggs, its former cash cow, and sales had plateaued. By 2017, Deckers was spending more than it was bringing in. “It was brutal,” says Powers, who’d previously worked at Converse, Timberland, and Gap.

Activist investors demanded a sale or merger, along with an overhaul of the board of directors, accusing management of “chronic underperformance.” Powers put together a fairly typical three-year turnaround strategy: consolidate operations, sell off weaker brands, close underperforming stores.

Then, in what was both a desperate ploy for attention and a brilliant marketing stunt, Deckers would out-ugly itself. It created its most hideous affronts to footwear yet: two pairs of crossbred Ugg boots and Teva sandals. One was a boot with open sides and an open toe, the other a sandal with a sheepskin pad across the top. Nobody could figure out what they were for. They have holes, so they can’t be for the cold. But they’re shearling, so they’re useless in the summer. Why do these even exist? That was on purpose, Powers admits. “It was uglier than I thought, but I was like, look, we just need to get noticed,” he says. “That was like trying to shake ourselves up.” A deluge of media coverage ensued, including the affirming Cosmopolitan headline: “Teva and Ugg May Have Made the Ugliest Shoes of All Time.”

Since then, the Ugg brand in particular has benefited from the company’s strategic experimentation. Its designers take its core look, then find ways to flex it in infinite directions. In 2018, Ugg designers presented execs with the Fluff Yeah, a pillowy open-toed sandal encased in fur and with a thick elastic heel strap. After a successful small-batch test run in LA, Deckers blew out the line, which now sells at Nordstrom and Bloomingdale’s alongside high-end labels such as Stuart Weitzman and Tory Burch. Last year, when clogs were trending, Ugg designers came up with a new spin on their existing clog, exaggerating all its proportions. But the first design—a platform clog with an enormous braid around the ankle and a comical amount of foam (“a monster,” Ugg designer Helene Frain calls it)—went too far, even for them. After the dialed-back Tazz made its debut last fall, it sold out at upscale retailers such as Saks, went viral on TikTok, and was spotted on celebrities like Gigi Hadid.

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