By Katie Deighton
Terence Reilly has been heralded as the executive who turned Crocs from grandpa shoes into a hip streetwear staple, and the Stanley Quencher from just another utilitarian drinking cup into a must-have accessory for the TikTok crowd.
Marketers want to know how a publicity-shy 57-year-old Bruce Springsteen devotee from New Jersey does it. Investors just want him to do it again, and fast, with his new role: brand president of Crocs's flagging casual footwear brand HeyDude.
"At Crocs we had a relevance problem, and we changed that, and Stanley had an awareness opportunity," Reilly told The Wall Street Journal in a rare interview. HeyDude, he said, needs help with both.
Reilly in April surprised the marketing industry by leaving Stanley -- a brand that was annually making more than 10 times what it was before he joined -- for HeyDude, a purveyor of squishy loafers that Crocs Inc. acquired in 2022 for around $2.5 billion.
HeyDude, known to some consumers for comfort but not much else, had at first performed well for Crocs, with particular popularity among shoppers in the South and Midwest. But retailers around six months in found they weren't selling all the shoes HeyDude was sending them. Its marketing was falling flat, and Reilly was called back to help.
Since joining he's overseen a conveyor belt of brand collaborations, revitalized HeyDude's social-media strategy to become "less vanilla" and embarked on a mission to make the brand covetable for young women. He said he tracks the youth culture that he considers essential for HeyDude marketing by listening to his younger employees, and fastidiously updating his Spotify playlists with new artists.
"I don't like to lose in anything," Reilly said. "I turn the Peloton on in the morning, and I turn the instructors off. I just look at the leaderboard of who I'm going to beat."
But the miracle marketer has a long way to go. Crocs's stock fell around 18% in October on the day the company reported a 17% decline in HeyDude sales for the quarter, while sales of the flagship Crocs brand increased 8%.
Reilly is directing his team to do a better job at showing how to style HeyDudes with the latest trends, but the brand -- like Crocs, even despite their current popularity -- still has to contend with the fact that many simply deem its shoe designs too ugly to wear. And retailers that couldn't sell enough HeyDudes during the past few seasons of oversupply are now hesitant to stock as many pairs, according to Sam Poser, analyst at Williams Trading. Its shoes are priced around $50 to $80, a middling range that doesn't tend to make or break shoe sellers' businesses, he said.
"So they can do very well with a Jelly Roll shoe," Poser said, "but that doesn't mean they're going to do great with it, and it doesn't mean that the whole brand works yet."
Sydney Sweeney, SpongeBob SquarePants
That "Jelly Roll shoe" in October was one of Reilly's biggest moves at HeyDude so far -- a skull-embossed, limited-edition, now-sold-out $80 design from the hip-hop-country singer that marked the beginning of a broader partnership. But it's just one of many tie-ups: In 2024 HeyDudes have been cross-branded with the likes of Paramount's "Mean Girls, " SpongeBob SquarePants and Coca-Cola.
Reilly also persuaded "White Lotus" star Sydney Sweeney to reveal the casual, girl-in-the-lakehouse side to her personality in a whimsical summer ad campaign, because Reilly's biggest priority at HeyDude is capturing the attention of young women, he said.
"Youth culture has driven culture for time immemorial, but more than ever before, female youth culture drives culture," he said.
Sweeney will continue to work with the company as a long-term brand ambassador, and introduce new styles throughout next year, the company said.
The partnerships closely mimic Reilly's breakout strategy at the Crocs brand.
After a young member of his marketing team at Crocs in 2018 introduced him to the work of Post Malone, he arranged the first of five eventual brand collaborations with the face-tattooed musician that first began steering the brand from dorky toward cool. Reilly in 2020 introduced the world to Kentucky Fried Chicken Crocs, a pair of $60 shoes printed with photorealistic fried chicken and adorned with detachable, chicken-scented charms. Justin Bieber Crocs, Simone Rocha Crocs and Hidden Valley Ranch Crocs followed.
After years of declines, the brand's revenue grew 36% to $1.39 billion in 2020 from $1.02 billion in 2017.
Reilly in person is open, informal and self-effacing to the point of pondering out loud why anybody would want to hear what he has to say. But if he has one secret to success, it's the ability to think in opposites, he said.
"Crocs went from what most perceived as an older person's gardening shoe to a guy with ink on his face," Reilly said. "With HeyDude, our first move was Sydney Sweeney -- for a brand called HeyDude. And at Stanley we went from male, green and hot to female, colorful and cold."
The origins of Stanley's turnaround have already been written into marketing lore. Lauren Solomon, a sales director at the company, told Reilly during an April 2020 meeting about a group of women in Utah buying and reselling its 40-ounce Quencher cups, and Reilly, who had joined the company just days earlier, saw an opportunity.
He greenlighted the creation of colorful cups in different finishes. His marketing department began zealously working with female social-media influencers who spread the religion of the Stanley cup throughout Utah and quickly beyond. In 2023, when TikTok user Danielle Lettering posted a video of a Stanley cup that she said survived her car's fire, Reilly picked up the forward-facing camera himself to inform her that the company would buy her a new vehicle.
It was around then that things began to get weird.
Shoppers caused frenzies trying to get their hands on limited-edition flasks. "Saturday Night Live" parodied the trend of the "big dumb cup." It seemed as though every publication in America wanted an interview with Reilly and, when they couldn't get one, wrote about him anyway. The inbox of his LinkedIn profile overflowed. He began getting recognized at airports.
"That was when I knew it was time to go," Reilly said. "It was actually starting to become about me."
Backward down the career ladder
Reilly's first job out of college was in public relations, with clients including the indoor amusement park SportsWorld in Paramus, N.J. (One big story was a surprise visit in the '90s by Michael Jackson.) He moved into marketing financial products at companies like Ameriprise and Prudential, finding himself a vice president of marketing at the age of 32.
"And I hated it," he said. "It just wasn't for me. So I quit, and went backward down the career ladder."
He was hired as director of marketing at Footaction, the sneaker retailer, where he got to grips with the worlds of footwear, streetwear and entertainment before taking over marketing at Famous Footwear. He joined Crocs as senior director of Americas marketing in 2013 and was promoted to chief marketing officer in 2015.
Part of Reilly's appeal is the velocity at which he can devise and execute ideas, said Crocs Chief Executive Andrew Rees.
"He obsesses and is constantly prowling social media," Rees said. "He'll send me stuff all weekend long."
"Can you feel it"
Some green shoots are appearing for HeyDude. A slipper the brand introduced in October, a faux-shearling slip-on for men and women, sold out within a week. HeyDude started selling shoes through TikTok Shop and, on some days, it is the biggest-selling global account on the social-media commerce platform. Its social-media channels are growing as the brand leans away from product shots and further towards online trends.
"Our investment community and some of our wholesale partners are, right now, a little skeptical," Rees said. "That skepticism is not shared by those of us that work here."
Reilly earlier this year moved back east after just over a decade in Colorado to be near HeyDude's headquarters in Massachusetts. In the fall he gave himself some rousing walk-on music before speaking at a company meeting, holding his phone up to a microphone and playing an oldie this time: "Can You Feel It" by the Jacksons. "It," in this case, was the sales momentum HeyDude was starting to build, he explained to the crowd.
It was a typically earnest, unabashed moment for Reilly, who also marked his first day at HeyDude by reciting to staff a poem he had written. ("To be the leading casual footwear brand in the world is what we should aspire to be," one verse went. "What we're about to do together, we'll make footwear history.")
"When I see a lot of folks they're lost in the data," Reilly said, referring to other marketers. "And the data is one thing, but man -- this is all about feel. It's all about emotion."
Write to Katie Deighton at katie.deighton@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
December 03, 2024 06:00 ET (11:00 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2024 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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