The Marketing Bestie Podcast with zoeunlimited - why the rich is obsessed with UGLY

Episode Date: September 7, 2026

how to go from UGLY to HOT?NEVER start a presentation from scratch again. Try Gamma for FREE https://taap.it/gammazoecrocs case study deck: https://gamma.app/docs/Crocs-Branding-Lore-Chronological-Case-Study-vnph4igz2vf0adx→͢͢my 5 years of marketing notes (free) https://tapx.it/unlimitedyou-challenge 🩷✍🏻FREE EMAIL LIST https://tapx.it/stanzoeunlimited😋today's flavor: https://taap.it/salud get 10% off with ZOELearn & Grow with me.💖 Instagram: https://tapthe.link/zoeunlimitedig💜 TikTok: https://tapthe.link/zoeunlimitedtiktok🖤 Listen on Apple & Spotify: https://tapthe.link/zoeunlimitedapple https://tapthe.link/zoeunlimitedspotify🪭 All my outfits https://tapthe.link/zoeunlimitedltk👩🏻‍💻 LinkedIn https://tapthe.link/zoeunlimitedlinkedin🛒 Amazon Essentials https://tapthe.link/zoeunlimited👉use code ZOEUNLIMITED for 10% off ALL travels on Klook https://t.ly/aA76T👉 get 30 extra days of free Stan Store https://taap.it/freestanstore📧 Business inquiries: [e-mail] //🕙Timestamps: 0:00 Intro3:11 Crocs 1.0 3:52 marketing law 15:51 marketing law 27:43 marketing law 39:56marketing law 411:08 marketing law 5

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What does Kendall Jenner, the Royal Family, Justin B. and Bella Hadid have in common, they all wear the C word. C-word. Money can buy you ugly, but can it buy you brand? Why? Do rich people like ugly things? I still can't believe this one's real. I've had enough. And how do you turn ugly into hot?

It's all marketing. You had the fashion world going crazy because, yo, very controversial. You wear crocs. If you want to easily predict taste and have good taste, by the end of this video, you'll know the exact five things to look for because though you might have never worn a crock me too it did turn two dollars of ugly plastic into dollars in fact 6.8 billion dollars as your marketing bestie who graduated top 1% UCLA business economics with a background in marketing

we are going to study the five weird marketing laws crocs used to turn ugly into hot into a status symbol why being ugly is a new status symbol for women being clean even ugly is the ultimate flag. Why, Balenciaga Rick Owens' Golden Goose will take a Veneta puddle boots, Maisormerjilla tabby boots. So, so well. Yet no one did it better than a good pair of foamy crocs

that turned $2 of raw materials into $6.8 billion. But effortlessly, becoming that girl. Paris Fashion Week, Justin Bieber, Siza, Kendall Jenner, British royalty, Vogue, Balenciaga Cheerio, KFC. Everyone is obsessed. Everybody loves crox.

But if you apply the marketing laws wrong, it will kill your brand. So watch carefully through the branding warnings at the end. A brand is not just slapping yourself on a billboard, it is how your future college, future boss, future boyfriend sees you. And yes, you have one. I'm creating this series to analyze pop culture brands from a marketing perspective, because I believe business can be fun to learn. And making presentations can be fun too. If you can get beautiful visuals in

Two minutes. Minutes? Yes, with our old friend Gamma. Now even easier to go from idea to presentation. Because they have a direct connector in Cloud and GPT. Let's say I'm having a very messy. Brainstorming session about Crocs and Cloud. There are so much data and stories. But I just want to see it visually. In just a few clicks, I get a polished deck that looks like it took weeks. And the best part is. When your idea changes, the deck changes with it. No design skills required. No blank page, no stress. You don't even need to leave quad or GPT. I can send my Crocs deck to you for free, link in description. And you can turn anything into a presentation with Gamma for free.

Also, link in description. Plus, my five years of marketing notes I made free for you. Today's Deepuff drink is tangerine flavored. To keep our community small to ambitious people who want to understand pop culture through a smarter branding perspective, please do not subscribe if you're not ready to expand your mind. So how to crissue? Crox, a brand that even the founders found ugly, become an it girl in fashion.

Let's take it back to, Crox 1.0 was born to be ugly. Scott, Lyndon, and George went sailing and Monsieur Scott introduced the idea of a boating shoe, made of proprietary foamy resin, that was light slip resistant and waterproof. The tiny problem was, the oversized rounded toe, the ventilation holes, the chunky foam, didn't scream tasteful. The other two laughed, but... By the time they reached dog after wearing crocs for a few days, they were sold. The question is, how do you sell the ugliest shoes to others? This batia, this handle, it's like a bucket. Put your sand on it and go to the beach.

Disgusting. Marketing law number one. Counter-signaling. Luxury is about signaling. Not beauty. When everyone can recognize beautiful, beauty loses signaling power. This is why recent discourse covers. Looking quote below the beauty algorithm,

is actually high status, meaning not having the lip filler, not having the Botox, not having your nails done, not having a facelift, because you're too rich to bother. You need no money or validation from the beauty algorithm. Rich face stretched, frozen, surgically optimized for a specific kind of Instagram ready attractiveness, an old money face, completely untouched, aggressively natural, even borderline ugly. Though Crocs did not begin in luxury, they very much fell into a little bit of a little bit more. this vertical, especially when they launched their ugly can be beautiful campaign. So ugly it is fashion. So ugly it is cool. It is cool to have a carefree attitude of what others think.

Therefore, wearing crux became a signal that you are confident. And you are not following trends or conventional beauty. This is how a wave of celebrities began to be seeing crux. Justin Bieber, Kendall Jenner, Bella Hadid, British Royal Family. French sociologist Pierre Bordeaux argued that as people accumulate cultural capital, their taste often shifts away from what is universally admired toward what requires context to appreciate. Because taste from a sociological POV is used to exclude.

It's implicitly a judgment about where you belong socially, not just what you like. What counts as good taste shifts, specifically because elites need new ways to distinguish themselves once the old markers get copied by everyone else. Show me your designer handbags. Everyone in the mother has a burkin, so it's commonplace. That's why a wave of luxury consumers started embracing distressed sneakers,

oversized silhouettes, intentionally awkward proportions. Until that becomes a new norm and the pendulum shifts the other wave. However, this is just level one. To go from ugly to hot, Crocs needed marketing law. Number two, polarization. Visit BetMGM Casino and check out the newest exclusive. The Price is Right Fortune Pick. BetMDM and Game Sense remind you to play responsibly, 19 plus to wager.

plus to wager. Ontario only. Please play responsibly. If you have questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact connects Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor, free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming Ontario.

New from Nespresso. Blend wellness into your coffee routine with a coffee plus range, infused with functional benefits. Choose the coffee you love with added B vitamins. Like coffee plus B-12 to help support immune function and coffee plus B6 to keep your day moving. Or go with the flow and choose ginseng delight. Our new double espresso with ginseng extract. Whatever lies ahead,

don't change your morning. Let your morning change you. Discover coffee plus on espresso.com. When you're a mid-sized business, you need every competitive advantage you can get. Like an AI solution that works for you, not against you. SAP Grow is built with AI embedded at its core working across every system and it's ready to go from day one so you can hit the ground running bring it with sap grow AI cloud ERP for any size business crocs lovers swear their lives on them my crocs collection as a bro called a student i had a three model the bear and he called for him crocs are sexy I got it and crocs haters swear they will never wear them nobody should be wearing crooks ever again the crocs man you guys say

ain't rockin' unless you're crocking is absolutely disgusting. Crocs, they're not it for me. Polarization creates conversations, thus culture. The same law translates to personal branding. Doja, Kanye, Lady Gaga, they might not be everyone's cup of tea, but the core fans are die-hards. You might not like them,

but you respect them for their confidence. The enemy to great branding is not hate. It is indifference. Anything between love and hate becomes mid and outperformed. Being ugly is better than being mid. Circling back to the coverage. conversation of taste. Kant in the critique of judgment made the claim when we call something beautiful. We're not just reporting a private preference We are implicitly claiming everyone should agree even though there is no rule we can point to that proves it

He called this judgment subjective universality taste feels personal but is asserted as if it were shared Therefore the human urge to make a private judgment into a public one became the engine of polarity for these two dollar plastics Ah dollies welcome come one come all Wisdom K's magical croc and jibbett Wonderland after a service. Wisda! Yes? I said change your shoes. Well, you need to change your attitudes.

Bye-bye. Have fun getting fired, guys. With some buzz around crocs alone would not be enough. It would be just a fat, like Beanie Babies, LaBooos. This is a brand that's lasted for 24 years. How to Not Die. And become a real brand. Marketing Law Number 3.

Associations. In 2020, when the pandemic hits, most brands suffered because nobody is going. out needing new shoes. But something weird happened to Crocs. Sales increased by 12% in 2020 with the total of $1.38 billion. What happened? How did the ugly duckling strategically climb her way up? The social ladder through three tiers. Tier one, luxury. Balenciaga, Christopher Kane brought cultural legitimacy and media coverage. Prices begin to be aspirational. Less volume drive, but resale driven. Takashi Murakami once, resale as high as $1,350. This Barney's New York one, I'd actually maybe wear.

Resales for 800. Let's not forget the raw materials cost only around $2. Okay, fine. Crox is a new rich girl. Get in, loser, we're going shopping. But to become a hot girl, you also need hot friends. Tier 2. Celebrity. Post Malone, Beaver, Bad Bunny, Siza.

Stepping on the Grammy carpet, how much are your hot friends really worth? Well, interesting how $1.38 billion spike of sales happened in 2020. What else happened in 2020? me starting YouTube while working as a CPA. Beaver X Drew House dropped in 2020. Bad Bunny dropped in 2020. Post Malone's fifth collab,

duet max clock 2, dropped in 2020. These clubs dropped at only $60 price points, driving a hype cycle scarcity. Sold out in minutes headlines and a secondary resale market. But now that you have hot friends, you also need to have a personality. Tier 3, pulp culture crossovers.

KFC McDonald's Pizza Hut Cheerios. A bucket of chicken and theme clock with a fried chicken gibbets leaning fully into a meme category. It's so absurd, it's genius. Tongues of free press. Then we have Disney Hello Kitty Shrek, SpongeBob Barbie that create nostalgia, fandom, collectibility. Twilight wines with Edward and Jacob Jibitz that I gave away because I don't wear crocs. But wherever culture moves, Crocs is there.

It got hot because culture is hot. As you can start to see, the genius of Crocs is that it is a blank canvas for associations. It gives you a platform to tell people who you are. However, how was the ugly problem finally solved? Marketing law for personalization. The gibbet story is actually one of the best real-world examples of how a design flaw, aka the holes people mocked, became the mechanism for marketing.

In July 2005, Sherry, a stay-at-home mom in Colorado, was doing arts and crafts with her kids, and grabbed a small white flower from her daughter's sewing kit, stuck it into one of the holes of her crux, And, quote, it just exploded from there. Every pair of crocs has up to 30 holes. You can do the math here. Revenue went from $200,000 a month to $2 million a month in six months.

A, it turns a commodity object into a recurring revenue platform. A pair of crocs is just one-time purchase. But Jibitz converts that same object into an ongoing relationship. The charms now generate roughly $250 million in annual revenue, essentially free money, layered on top of shoes that were already sold. B, it manufactures collectibility out of nothing. C, it made every future celebrity brand collab dramatically cheaper to execute.

Notice how they don't need to make a new shoe each time and can just release a handful of theme gibbets. It also turned consumers into marketers. It's really hard to have the same pair of crocs as anyone else. However, none of this will matter without Marketing Law Number 5. Product. Time magazine ranked crocs among its, quote, 50 worst inventions in 2010.

But haters are just confused fans. No, really. They're always working overtime to bring traffic to you. A rule that I trust like the law of gravity. Product first, market second. The best marketing cannot save a shitty product. As Charlie Munger says, If you mix raisins with turds, they're still turds.

As much as we all know, Crocs, do you not look like Luton? Its founders, who were its original haters, became convinced. Once people wore the shoes, they stopped carrying what it looks like. and function became the moat. The function being the lightweight and anti-slip properties, though originally designed for boating, all of a sudden, these became standard work shoes for nurses, chefs, healthcare workers. So ironically, Crocs became the ugly brand everyone hated, but secretly owned. Taste isn't just about knowing what's beautiful, it's knowing what's worth valuing.

And the more cultural capital you have, the more you can afford to appreciate things that aren't immediately beautiful. So to answer our initial question. Why do rich people like ugly things? It's because sometimes the ability to see value. Where everyone else sees ugliness is itself a status signal. However, as a branding warning, you can't just make something hella ugly and expect it to become cool.

Crocs had utility underneath the controversy. People can hate how they look and still admit they are comfortable. If ugly is the only distinctive trait, you'll end up in the graveyard of Pontiac-Aztec, Microsoft Zoom, Amazon Fire Phone. The lesson we can all learn from cross going from ugly to hot. $2 to $6.8 billion is, don't be weird for attention. Be so distinctly yourself that attention becomes inevitable.

If you want to understand pop culture through a smarter branding perspective, follow the pot for more, give it a five-star review. It's completely free and will help the show help you. This is your marketing best to Zoe Unlimited. Episodes are available on all podcast networks, Apple Spotify, YouTube. And if you did I hate this episode, I know you might not hate these other two I made. just for you.