What a Croc!

What a Croc!

And that is what these are….”CROCS” This all started out because my daughter Ellen send me an email with a web site called I Hate crocs dot com. And I took a look. I didn’t even know that I hated Crocs but there it was right in front of me. The closest I had ever been to a Crocs [outside of Florida when I got way to close to take a picture of one and it came after me, but that’s a different story and I got the picture. Maybe that was an alligator.] was a pair of pink ones my daughter has. She said she has them because she likes to wear them when gardening or at the dog park. Seems they clean up easy. The red pair above appears to be the latest offering from the real Croc, Inc. on line store. They are called “Cyprus” and you can purchase them for $49.99 . More clicks kept dragging me further and further into this story. Next stop was a Newsweek.com story by Steve Tuttle entitled Make.It. Stop: The case for ending our long national nightmare.
Steve was talking about a press release from Crocs Inc. when he said “The other part of the press release is the announcement of some new footwear styles -- upmarket Crocs priced anywhere from $54.99 to $69.99 for "a high performance boating shoe that combines Crocs lock ™ H2O pods for advanced wet traction and the Crocs Exo-Frame that wraps the foot with a protective Croslite ™ material shell for a supportive fit." At this point I noticed that my story about Crocs was getting way to technical as I had no idea what an H2O pod is and “spell check” was flatly rejecting “Croslite” so I moved on and the next click took me into the financial world. Zac Bissonnette is a blogger and the title of his post was "crocs announces absolutely nothing". WOW, no one likes anything Crocs says in their press releases as according to Zac “Shares of Crocs, Inc. (NASDAQ: CROX) have been in free fall since the end of November, when the stock hit an all-time high of $75.21. After a guidance cut that sent the stock down about 50% last week, Crocs management are searching desperately for whatever it takes to get the stock to do something other than go down". Sounds kinda scary for Crocs, Inc. don’t you think? Well I thought so and I was playing taps and digging a hole for them in our cemetery when one more click brought me to the Denver Post and this story. "Sheri Schmelzer is living every inventor's dream. The Boulder mother of three launched a tiny company selling decorative accessories for Crocs shoes from her basement. Each month, the company sells $2 million worth of Jibbitz, which retail for $2.49 apiece. It has sold more than 6 million of them since the company was launched". Right here and now I have to tell you that a company selling and shipping $2 million dollars worth of product a week is not, what I would call, “a tiny company”. Her basement must be huge in order to ship $2 million let alone create it. Where do the kids play ping-pong at? That won’t occur in my basement because I couldn’t hire anyone taller than 5’5”.

This week, she and her husband, Rich, sold the year-old company called Jibbitz LLC to Crocs Inc. for $10 million, with the potential for another $10 million if it meets certain projections. Only in America does this stuff happen. So what is a Jibbitz, you might ask, so here it is, everything I didn't know about Jibbitz. The numbers, towards the bottom of this picture, tell the story of why it was worth $20 million to Crocs, Inc. [double clicking the picture helps]

I have examined a couple of bloggers who hate these things and I went into this posting thinking that I too hate Crocs but it is definetly a great example of how our free enterprise system really functions. For years our Farmers, Ranchers, contractors and anyone else caught in the mud have been wearing these things. All of them are black and don't offer much of a fashion statement and then along came Crocs. With all of the holes in Crocs, Jibbitzs had a place to go and everyone made money. My daughter even told me that she was going to buy me a pair, Blue I think, and I might just wear them but no Jibbitz please. I might just invent something that would appeal to the guys that will be wearing them. Basketballs, footballs, guns, brands of beer cans, naked women. We'll see what my wife will let me plug into those little holes! I'm going to call them "Bongers"trademarks and patents applied for. Motorcycles, branches of the military, rank obtained, submarines, airplanes, barbecue grills, cars. I'm calling Crocs, Inc. right now.