Sometimes you’ve got to give the people what they want, and what they want—at least, millennials and Gen Z—is more hot-selling Post Malone special-edition Crocs.
In one of the most compelling brand turnarounds in recent history, Crocs has somehow emerged from its pedestrian roots as the utilitarian family-friendly footwear brand favored for theme park outings, to now producing sell-out collaborations with the likes of face-tattooed chart-topper Post Malone, thanks to a newfound popularity with impressionable, trend-conscious teens.
Just in time for holiday gifting, the Post Malone X Crocs Barbed Wire Clog features the same blindingly banana-yellow hue as the inaugural collaboration but with a design seemingly inspired by the hitmaker’s April tweet, “I have a fetish for barbed wire.” The shoe includes six Jibbitz—the signature shoe charms designed to jazz up the Crocs’s trademark holes—in designs like a skull or the PM abbreviation for Post Malone.
Retailing for $59.99, the limited-offer footwear is being sold starting Tuesday via e-commerce at Crocs.com and at five brand stores in California, Florida and Texas.
Crocs’s resurgence plays into the “ugly shoe” narrative that’s influenced fashion over the past several years, ushering in trends like normcore and the “Dad” shoe that buck the conventional industry mandates of beauty and fantasy.
Influencers can be powerful brand partners—especially when the tie-up smacks more of authenticity and less of a shoddily assembled money grab. Post Malone’s influence is hard to ignore; many of his 4.5 million Twitter followers and 14.5 million Instagram fans are likely to snap up anything their idol endorses or sells. In fact, Crocs’s first go-around with the “Rockstar” rapper undoubtedly contributed to the $261.1 million in revenue the brand reported in Q3, a notable 7.3 percent jump from the prior-year period.
According to Piper Jaffray’s latest Taking Stock With Teens Survey, Crocs jumped from 38th place in spring 2017, to 27th place in fall 2017, to 13th place on a list of Gen Z’s favorite footwear brands.