Andrew Rees

Rees is not a founder. Crocs was started in 2002 by three friends from Boulder — Scott Seamans, Lyndon Hanson and George Boedecker — around a foam boat shoe licensed from a Canadian company, and by the time Rees arrived it had already lived a whole life: the largest footwear IPO to date in 2006, $847 million of revenue in 2007, a $185 million loss in 2008 and a share price that went from around $75 to around $1. He came in June 2014 as president, alongside a $200 million investment from Blackstone, from L.E.K. Consulting, where he had run the retail and consumer practice. He became chief executive in June 2017.

His turnaround has three parts and the order matters. First he took things away: hundreds of products cut, stores closed, and in 2018 the last two owned factories in Mexico and Italy shut so the company would make nothing itself. Second he stopped spending to make the clog look like a normal shoe — the years of wedges and loafers and lace-ups were over — and leaned into the joke, with the Come As You Are campaign and then a run of collaborations that treated ugliness as the point. Third he built the money machine on top: Jibbitz charms as a personalisation layer, limited drops, and a direct channel that now takes half of sales at a gross margin near 59%. The pandemic helped, and Rees has never pretended otherwise.

The contested part is HEYDUDE. In December 2021, coming off a record year, Rees paid $2.5 billion — $2.05 billion in cash and $450 million in stock — for a canvas slip-on brand with about $570 million of revenue, on the argument that Crocs needed a second engine. It reached a billion, then fell 13% in 2024 and 13% again in 2025, and the company wrote off $737 million of the purchase. Rees' defence is that the deal was paid from cash flow, the debt is coming down on schedule and the brand still makes money, all of which is true. The harder criticism is the theory: a man who had just proved that cultural equity was the asset bought the one brand in the deal universe with the least of it. His answer, in April 2024, was to bring Terence Reilly back from Stanley to run it. Rees is, on the evidence, an excellent operator and an ordinary acquirer, and the two are being graded together.