{"id":122041,"date":"2020-12-14T17:18:35","date_gmt":"2020-12-14T17:18:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news.microsoft.com\/?p=440349"},"modified":"2020-12-14T17:18:35","modified_gmt":"2020-12-14T17:18:35","slug":"behind-the-scenes-of-crocs-free-pair-for-healthcare-initiative","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/2020\/12\/14\/behind-the-scenes-of-crocs-free-pair-for-healthcare-initiative\/","title":{"rendered":"Behind the scenes of Crocs\u2019 \u2018Free Pair for Healthcare\u2019 initiative"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, media images of health care workers caring for COVID-19 patients provided some of the first glimpses into the devastating impacts of the global crisis. <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Executives at Crocs not only saw those stressed, overwhelmed frontline workers, but also started getting requests from them for shoes to keep them going during the long hours. The company realized it had an opportunity to offer a little kindness and comfort to a group of loyal customers at a particularly challenging time. Crocs came up with an ambitious idea: to give away 10,000 pairs of shoes every day to people working on the front lines of the COVID-19 epidemic. <\/span><\/span> <\/span><\/span> <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Less than a week later, Crocs was ready to launch its \u201cFree Pair for Healthcare\u201d initiative, a 45-day event starting in late March during which the company donated more than 860,000 pairs of Crocs to workers mostly in the U.S., but also in Canada and Europe. <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\"Close-up
Crocs donated more than 860,000 pairs of shoes during its 45-day campaign for health care workers.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Crocs\u2019 iconic foam clogs \u2014 in black and white, in lemon and mint and leopard print \u2014 arrived on the doorsteps of grateful health care workers and frontline responders, who posted messages and photos of their Crocs, some personalized with the brand\u2019s proprietary Jibbitz charms, on social media.<\/span><\/span> <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThanks so much Crocs for thinking of us during this time,\u201d Kristy Baron, a registered nurse from Fort Wayne, Indiana, wrote on Facebook. \u201cI\u2019m a nurse working on the front lines and your caring is much appreciated.\u201d<\/span><\/span> <\/span><\/span> <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Adam Michaels, Crocs\u2019 chief digital officer, says the company created the campaign to help as many people as possible and provide comfort where it was needed most. <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cIt became obvious that we have a product that a group of our consumers have been buying from us for years, and that particular group had an immediate and real need,\u201d he says. \u201cWe thought the best way to give back was to give them the footwear they needed on the front lines of fighting COVID-19.\u201d<\/span><\/span> <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Behind the scenes, the campaign was an enormous undertaking. It required building a platform that could fulfill orders, communicate with customers and handle up to 500,000 daily visitors to the site \u2014 while still maintaining enough inventory to fill orders while production was scaled back because of the pandemic. <\/span><\/span>Microsoft Teams<\/span><\/span><\/a> was integral to the effort, enabling employees working remotely around the U.S. to quickly share designs and documents, provide input and make decisions in real time without getting bogged down by email chains, Michaels says.<\/span><\/span> <\/span><\/span> <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

The campaign ramp-up, he says, was \u201cone of the fastest turnarounds we\u2019ve had for any project, especially of that magnitude. Teams was key to that. It allowed us to iterate so much faster than traditional channels. Doing that remotely, without Microsoft Teams, in the timeframe we had, we probably wouldn\u2019t have been able to do it.\u201d <\/span><\/span> <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Teams has been a critical tool for Crocs in other ways during the pandemic. Employees in Europe hosted a sales meeting via a live Teams event, showing and talking through the Crocs line to potential retail customers. Teams was also used to design and launch two seasons of new products, an undertaking that would typically involve flying employees from around the world to Crocs\u2019 headquarters in Niwot, Colorado.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\"Smiling
Crocs\u2019 iconic foam clogs were sent to health care workers in the U.S., Canada and Europe through the \u201cFree Pair for Healthcare\u201d initiative.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

And regular town hall meetings on Teams have allowed employees to connect with each other and hear directly from the company\u2019s CEO, Andrew Rees, whose dog, Cooper, sometimes makes an appearance.<\/p>\n

Mike Feliton, Crocs\u2019 senior vice president and chief information officer overseeing technology, chose Teams for the company\u2019s collaboration platform<\/a> because it allows users to easily work together in a shared space. Crocs rolled out Teams in the summer of 2019, and when the pandemic hit \u2014 forcing Crocs to temporarily close most of its 360 stores \u2014 employees companywide immediately turned to Teams to connect and collaborate.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe adopted the platform from our CEO down almost instantaneously,\u201d Feliton says. \u201cTeams has been central to our business.\u201d<\/p>\n

Feliton was so impressed with how Teams helped facilitate Crocs\u2019 health care campaign that he sent an email to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, thanking him for the technology.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs we were so successful with that campaign, I couldn\u2019t do anything but<\/em> reach out to Satya and thank him for that product, because I felt like he not only heard me, but everybody else in the business world that was looking for a collaboration tool that really worked, and this did,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

The pandemic also prompted Crocs to intensify the digital-first strategy it embarked on about five years ago<\/a>. Recognizing that more consumers were shopping online, the company closed some stores and ramped up its marketing efforts on digital channels. When COVID-19 hit, Crocs invested heavily with Microsoft Advertising <\/a>and increased its focus on paid search to target customers who might not have previously bought Crocs online.<\/p>\n

Company official say those efforts contributed to Crocs\u2019 reported<\/a> record third quarter revenue of $361.7 million, with digital sales up 35.5.%.<\/p>\n

Crocs has shifted almost all its operations to Microsoft Azure<\/a>, with help from the Azure Migration Program<\/a>,<\/u> and is using Power BI<\/a>, Microsoft\u2019s data visualization platform, to pull together data from various sources. Previously, if the company wanted to see, for example, how its clogs were selling compared with sandals in a particular region, it had to rely on analysts pulling data from multiple systems. Now, Crocs is getting detailed data reports several times a day through Power BI.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe huge benefit is that we know what\u2019s going on with our business essentially in real time,\u201d Michaels says. \u201cThat allows us to make decisions and react much more quickly to impact the future. Power BI has democratized the data so our teams can make better decisions at every level.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Smiling
Crocs have had a resurgence in recent years, and its limited edition collaborations often sell out within minutes.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Crocs have been hailed as the <\/span><\/span>ultimate pandemic shoe<\/span><\/a> \u2014 comfortable and affordable, easy to clean and appropriately casual for legions of employees working from home. The New York Times declared that Crocs had \u201c<\/span><\/span>won 2020<\/span><\/a>,\u201d noting that while U.S. retail footwear sales are down 20 percent this year over the same period in 2019, sales of Crocs are up 48 percent. According to fashion search platform Lyst, searches for Crocs <\/span><\/span>spiked 41 percent<\/span><\/a> in Q3.<\/span><\/span> <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Crocs are clearly having a moment, but the brand\u2019s resurgence predates the pandemic. In 2016, British designer <\/span><\/span>Christopher Kane<\/span><\/a> debuted marbled-design Crocs encrusted with geode Jibbitz charms on runways at London Fashion Week. The next year, design house Balenciaga released an outrageously high <\/span><\/span>platform version<\/span><\/a> of Crocs Classic clogs that retailed for $850.<\/span><\/span> <\/span><\/p>\n

Additional Crocs collaborations followed with the Grateful Dead, Justin Bieber and Puerto Rican pop star Bad Bunny, among others. The limited edition collaborations, which have also included a <\/span><\/span>Kentucky Fried Chicken<\/span><\/a> clog topped with a scented drumstick Jibbitz, often sell out within minutes.<\/span><\/span>    <\/span><\/p>\n

Michaels acknowledges that Crocs is in the enviable position of having the right product for a moment no one could have anticipated. <\/span><\/span> <\/span><\/span> <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cIt would be much tougher to be in the dress shoe and dress apparel line of work right now,\u201d he says, \u201cbut the more casual footwear has become more relevant to consumers now than it was even a few months ago.<\/span><\/span> <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cAnd because of the work we\u2019ve done in the health care space, I think our brand actually has even more momentum than it did when COVID hit,\u201d Michaels says. \u201cWe\u2019re very fortunate for that.\u201d <\/span><\/span> <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Top photo: Workers at Children\u2019s Hospital Colorado wearing Crocs clogs donated by the company. (Photos courtesy of Crocs)<\/em><\/p>\n

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In the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, media images of health care workers caring for COVID-19 patients provided some of the first glimpses into the devastating impacts of the global crisis. Executives at Crocs not only saw those stressed, overwhelmed frontline workers, but also started getting requests from them for shoes to keep them […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":122042,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[49],"tags":[156,298],"class_list":["post-122041","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-microsoft-news","tag-microsoft-teams","tag-transform"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/122041","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=122041"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/122041\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/122042"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=122041"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=122041"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=122041"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}