Marketing mastermind Terence Reilly is responsible for turning rubber shoes and insulated mugs into cultural obsessions.
In 2011, he joined Crocs as Chief Brand Officer and accomplished what seemed impossible: making cheap foam shoes cool. He left in 2020 for Stanley, where he turned an oversized water bottle into a must-have item, then returned to Crocs last year to ramp up the brand’s partnerships and social media presence.
And he has unusual advice for executives looking to jolt a sleepy or small brand: Spend 50% of your time and almost all your marketing money on social media.
““I spend a lot of time on Instagram, WhatsApp, TikTok, YouTube … social media in general is just an amazing opportunity for any brand of any size,” he told me. “That’s where consumers are.
“A lot of purchase decisions begin on TikTok, and so we want to make sure that we are front and center.”
This year, Crocs has focused heavily on TikTok Live shopping, a modern-day QVC where people shop in real time, as well as the platform’s scrollable Shop. So has Hey Dude, another casual shoe brand the company acquired in 2022.
“Both brands, Crocs and Hey Dude, are the number one and number two footwear brands on TikTok Shop,” Reilly said.
Direct-to-consumer revenue has been up for Crocs, though overall revenue for both brands was down — 2.5% for Crocs and 21.6% for Hey Dude — year over year in the third quarter of 2025 as trends changed.
But Reilly is confident he can revitalize with limited-edition drops and by partnering with celebrities including Jelly Roll and Sydney Sweeney, who came on as a Hey Dude global spokesperson in August. (The actress’ controversial ads for American Eagle actually helped brand sales soar.)
He’s been here before.
On his first day at the Colorado-based company, Reilly put up a poster in his office emblazoned with snarky criticism of Crocs: “Those holes are where your dignity leaks out.”
It was a reminder he would need to accomplish something that money typically can’t buy.
“We didn’t have an awareness problem… we needed to make Crocs cool,” Reilly explained as he gave me a tour of the brand’s revitalized mega-store on 34th street. “The brands didn’t want to be part of Crocs, or people didn’t want to be part of Crocs because they thought it was uncool.”
That meant years of reaching out to coveted celebrities and influencers, when Crocs should have been looking for something more organic.
“We got a lot of nos for a long time,” Reilly said. That is, until 2016, when he spotted Post Malone wearing a pair of Crocs backstage.
“It was real,” the exec added. “We weren’t paying somebody to wear shoes—he was wearing them already, and his fans knew that.”
By 2017, they had launched a Crocs and Post Malone partnership.
Crocs now partners with dozens of brands and artists including Disney, Nerf, Nascar, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, SpongeBob, Star Wars, Pringles and MLB.
And while Reilly was grateful that luxury labels including Balenciaga and Christopher Kane jumped on the Crocs bandwagon a few years ago, featuring the shoes in their fashion shows, he knows that capturing high-fashion lightning in a bottle is probably not as likely as getting core customers excited again.
While Crocs stock faltered earlier this year (down 11% over six months), it’s rebounded more than 17% in the last month.
“I think there’s always an element of pop culture, [but] it always comes back to product,” Reilly said.
It also comes back to showing people you actually care. Like when, in 2023, Reilly got major attention after a woman posted on social media about her car catching fire — and her Stanley cup surviving it. He and the brand offered to buy her a new automobile.
“This young lady’s car caught on fire. I saw it on TikTok on a Wednesday, and Thursday I recorded a video without a script and posted it. All of a sudden I started getting phone calls saying, ‘Hey, you’re blowing up on TikTok.’ 100 million views later, I’m getting recognized in airports,” he said.
Asked about the role of luck in his success, Reilly pushed back.
“You make your own luck,” he said. “There’s always going to be an element of luck to anything, but you have to make it. You got to go out and swing, and we swing.”
He paused, gesturing at the Crocs displayed around the store. “I mean, there’s nothing like it. It is wonderfully unordinary. We sell shoes with holes in them.”
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