Crocs' Cringe Mountain

Hey Climbers, today —

• How Crocs went from cringe to iconic in <5 years

• Getting caught up on content aesthetics

Crocs’ Cringe Mountain

It’s 2016. You’re browsing the internet. You see an article:

You log onto Instagram. You see a meme:

You chuckle.

“I’d never be caught dead in those”

you think to yourself.

Snap forward. It’s 2024.

You look down.

What’s that on your feet? Your white platform Crush Crocs with limited edition jibitz. (Shoutout mine)

So what happened?

Crocs are cool now!

How did this lumpy footware go from a global cringe to global icon in less than 5 years?

It’s one of the most masterful brand turnarounds of the decade, and they did it in 3 steps:

Step 1. They identified their weakness

By 2016, Crocs were tanking. As the head of marketing at Crocs himself put it: “We were on the wrong side of culture… the world thought that we were a joke.”

The discourse around them was that they were just plain ugly. Crocs were self aware enough to pinpoint this weakness.

Step 2: They re-positioned their weakness as a strength

Crocs hatched an ingenious plan. To reposition “ugly” as… self expression.

They told people: being different is something you should be proud of - and how can you be different? Crocs. Ugly is good. Ugly is one of a kind. YOU are one of a kind.

They stopped hiding from it and owned it. Being polarising was a good thing - it created an in group and an out group. And that’s how communities are made.

Their new brand platform, Come As You Are was born. Oooo. Individuality.

Step 3: They ruthlessly collaborated

Now they knew they were a brand for the outsiders, the brave, the bold, the unafraid to be different, their final task was to align themselves with people in pop culture who also represented these values.

We got Post Malone Crocs, Nikki Minaj Crocs, Balenciaga Crocs. As these strategic collaborations continued, Crocs burrowed into online culture and lodged themselves in the supple skin of the zeitgeist.

When you get the early adopters, at some point, you snowball into the mainstream. And tada!

I’ve excluded some nuance for brevity but in essence, that’s how you turn a brand around. Pretty masterful, right?

What do you think of them? Do you own a pair?

CLIMBER QUESTION
THE AESTHETICS BLOCK

An excellent question just hit my inbox from Shradha:

Hii!! Can you talk a little bit about how to get over being stuck on the aesthetics of your feeds/videos? It'll be a huge help! Thank you 🙂 - Shradha

My biggest piece of advice is: do not let striving for perfect aesthetics stop you from creating content.

We obviously want your content to look good. But the IG of today is not the IG of 5 years ago when we got hyper-produced grid layouts and curated shots. And TikTok is relaxed AF on aesthetics.

These days you really only need the three things below:

1. Lighting - Use either a key light or a big window (this is the light I use but there are many cheaper)

2. Font & cover photo consistency - choose the same font & cover photo style each time. I do my cover photos super simply for IG in Canva.

3. Consistency of location - somewhere quiet-ish and clean-ish. You might choose to film in the same room/against the same wall/ in the same chair each time. I often film at my desk. But not always.

The golden rule with aesthetics is always: KISS! (Keep It Simple, Stupid!)

If you’re looking for more guidance on setup & aesthetics, I go deep on technical stuff like lighting setup & audio in my 90 day program Cringe Mountain Academy, where I transform stuck creatives into confident creators with X-Factor. Click below to find out more.

Ok that’s all for now,

Til next time,

Keep Climbin’

Erica x