Speaking last week at Piper Jaffray’s Consumer Conference, Angel Martinez, Deckers Brands’ CEO, said that over the last four to five years, consumers have grown to want either a “brand experience” or they’re buying on price.
He said the company has taken steps to make sure its brands, particularly Ugg, convey a consistent brand message at every touch point. The big challenge is showcasing that consistent brand message across their website and the experience in-store and also being able to deliver on the transaction side.
“What we're seeing is nothing short of a revolution in how consumers choose to access brands,” said Martinez. “And the traditional role of a retailer as a middleman between the brand and the consumer is changing radically.”
But he said it’s also critical for brands to innovate, particularly a “classic” one like Ugg. With the core Ugg Classic product amounting to a two-year replenishment cycle for consumers, Ugg is finding success expanding into weather-appropriate fashion products and other more casual products. Said Martinez, “What we find is that when we give a consumer a reason to pay attention and focus on that, we can accelerate the cycle.”
Two years ago, Ugg added some new colors to its holiday campaign and it “performed extremely well.” Last year, a campaign focused on some of the newer looks but “classic sort of got put in the back of their mind a little bit.” As a result, this coming holiday season, Ugg will feature “very aggressive product-specific campaign around classics for the holiday in addition to all the innovative new specialty classic and casual product.”
Martinez said Ugg has learned a lesson taught by the jeans category. Back in the middle of the 20th century, Levi’s with its classic 501 line dominated the denim category. Unfortunately, “they forgot they need to innovate.” Fashion jeans brands like Gloria Vanderbilt and others arrived and Levi’s 501 became increasingly less relevant.
Martinez said Ugg’s Classic style is similar to denim.
“It'll always be in your closet,” said Martinez. “It will never, in some form another, go out of style. Because luxury and comfort are not going to go out of style, just like jeans. I've never met anyone who says — I used to wear jeans. I stopped wearing them. They're too damn comfortable. Nobody says that. Same is true of Classic.”
Martinez adds, “We have to treat classic a lot like the jeans industry evolved. There are skinny jeans, there are acid washed jeans, there are stone washed jeans, there's stovepipe jeans, there's boot cut jeans. They're all still jeans. And unfortunately for Levi, they figured that out about ten years too late. We've sort of read that book and understand that Classic has to be treated a lot like that same thing.”
