Crocs bets on feeling over function as comfort footwear enters its confidence era

Comfort footwear is no longer having a moment, it is the moment. Recent earnings from Birkenstock and Deckers underline what many retailers already see on the shop floor: consumers are investing in shoes that prioritise wearability, and they are doing so without waiting for discounts. Against that backdrop, Crocs’ newly unveiled global brand platform, Wonderfully Unordinary, reads less like a reinvention and more like a recalibration.

The move comes at a telling time. Birkenstock has reported wholesale growth of 24 percent in constant currency, with minimal markdowns, while Deckers, parent to Hoka, Ugg and Teva, posted six percent wholesale growth year on year, according to Linesheet’s Sarah Shapiro. The message from the market is clear: brands that get wholesale right do not need to lean excessively on direct-to-consumer theatrics. Comfort, when paired with clarity of positioning, is selling just fine.

Emotion vs economics

Crocs, however, is choosing to lead with emotion rather than economics. Wonderfully Unordinary replaces the long-running Come As You Are platform with something more inward-looking and experiential, aimed squarely at a younger generation for whom self-expression is fluid and identity is perpetually in progress. The 90-second hero film, directed by Adam Berg and shot in São Paulo, leans heavily into movement, visual effects and metaphor, with dancers cast as mannequins awakening into life.

It is beautifully made, but also very much of its time. In a cultural landscape saturated with talk of “authenticity,” Crocs’ language around instinct, real expression and rejecting algorithmic sameness risks sounding familiar—if not generic. This is the tightrope the brand now walks: how to champion un-ordinariness without dissolving into the same visual and emotional cues used by countless other lifestyle brands courting Gen Z.

Where the strategy may quietly succeed is not in the film itself, but in its timing. As retailers rediscover the value of wholesale partnerships that deliver full-price sell-through, Crocs’ pivot towards a more elevated, culture-led narrative helps justify floor space beyond novelty appeal. The brand is no longer selling irony or lockdown comfort; it is selling permanence. In that sense, Wonderfully Unordinary functions as a signal to the market that Crocs sees itself as part of the same long-term comfort economy as Birkenstock and Hoka, rather than an outlier powered by collaborations and hype cycles.