What Is Crocs Competitive Advantage

Unlike its competitors, Crocs had a highly responsive and flexible supply chain. Owing to the Crocs executives’ experience in electronics industry, they were accustomed to producing what the customer needed and when it was needed. Thus the business model was focussed on customer needs and responded promptly to changes in demand and trends. The retailers of shoes, therefore, had neither the pressure to forecast exact demand nor the obligation to order bulk orders several months before the selling season.

My fellow students and I were asked to answer four questions related to the Stanford Graduate School of Business Case: GS-57. The Case title “CROCS (A): REVOLUTIONIZING AN INDUSTRY’S SUPPLY CHAIN MODEL FOR COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE” presents how the Crocs Company changed the footwear industry. The following is the questions and answers relative to this assignment.

New Balance decided to improve their operations by implementing a “lean production system” in all of their domestic facilities. The lean production system was taken from Toyota’s manufacturing processes to, “deliver goods on demand, minimize inventory, maximize the use of multi-skilled employees, flatten management structure, and focus resources when and where they are needed” (Veleva, 2010). These improvements helped significantly improve vast processes across New Balance manufacturing, and in one example reduced the time to make a pair of shoes in the Lawrence facility from eight days down to three hours (Veleva, 2010).

The concept of market structures and competitive strategies are important when attempting to compete in any market. Understanding what market structure your product falls under can help companies develop better competitive strategies and identify potential for loss and gains. The athletic footwear industry in the United States is highly profitable and continuously growing. In this paper I will identify market structure of the athletic footwear industry, the major retailers, and competitive strategies that can be used to maximize profits.

Sportsman Shoes has been a leader in the shoe industry for more than thirty years. Sportsman manufactures and sells athletic shoes for all types of sports. The company has pursued a low-cost strategy in order to sustain their success. They sell a limited number of shoe designs and have held costs low through manufacturing efficiency and standardized operations. However, the past five years have been a struggle at Sportsman. The shoe market has seen a rise in the availability of low-cost imported shoes that has threatened Sportsman’s competitive position. As a result, company executives have decided it is time for a strategy shift.

Crocs, Inc. obtained many core competencies throughout the various phases of their supply chain model. Their leading competency apparent in the mid-2000s, was their ability to be efficient and flexible within their supply chain model. This afforded them competitive advantage to revolutionize the footwear supply chain during this time period, in addition to only making injection molded shoes. “Much of this growth had been made possible by highly flexible supply chain which enable the company to build additional product to fulfill new orders quickly within the selling season, allowing it to respond to unexpected high demand.” A second core competency was the ownership of the formulas for the proprietary material resin “croslite”, the primary raw material in their product.

Customers make purchasing decisions based on the information they have among products and the values of goods a company offers. For that reason, companies have to promote their products to increase products awareness. In order to achieve organizational goals, companies must understand the market’s needs to ensure the success of their businesses. Such information can be gained through research. The industry that will form the basis of this paper is Western Canadian Shoe Association. The three brands under study are Reebok, Adidas, and Nike.

Be more aggressive in their marketing strategy. One of the reasons why Crocs got so ahead because they were very aggressive in terms of sales and marketing strategies. They need to target more overseas clients, as North America is already dominated by Crocs. They should also work harder at distributing to more retail stores in North America.

This manager’s report provides a financial performance review of the business operations for athletic footwear industry’s Elite Feet for production Years 11 through 18. Included in the report are trends in company’s annual total revenues, earnings per share (EPS), return on equity (ROE), credit rating, stock price and image rating. Additionally reported are the strategic vision for the company, performance targets for the aforementioned production years plus the next two years, the company’s competitive strategy as well as production strategy, finance strategy and dividend policy. Also discussed is a look at the company’s closest competitors and the actions that could be

The forces of Nike’s customer-supplier relationship is based on joint efforts of improved quality, mutually beneficial partnerships, reduced costs, and increased market share for both parties. According to Nike building customer-supplier relationship is one of the most important goals because it is the analysis of the value chain which is defined as the collection of all activities involved in designing, marketing, manufacturing, delivering and supporting Nike’s products. Having strong relationship with both parties helps Nike to predict and notice any problem at might rise in the supply chain; as a result Nike will be able to develop better solutions to avoid it (Wankel, 2009). The first tier supplier of Nike is located mainly in Taiwan and South Korea, which work closely with R&D personnel in Oreon making the most expensive footwear. Strategies have shown that Nike implements include the vertical integration strategy. In general, the vertical integration strategy allows a firm to gain control over distributors, suppliers and competitors (Nike report, 2015). Nike has implemented forward integration by having its own retail locations throughout the United States, foreign countries & online stores. Every partner has a hugely significant

This speedy production, also made it possible for Crocs to revolutionize the traditional supply chain approach and make its shoes available to a wide range of retailers and consumers.

The coming in of Snyder and other key executives from an electronics company where he worked before, Challenged Crocs Inc to think of revolutionizing the manufacturing and supply of the products throughout the world. A number of problems faced in this move because Crocs products production and distribution had a long procedure. The supply chain model for Crocs follows various faces from production to distribution to retailers. Raw materials are shipped to a third party manufacturer in Italy. The Italian manufacturer carries out compounding and then shipping back to Foam

The athletic shoe industry is made up of companies that produce footwear for athletic use. This is a strong industry and has been around for over 100 years. The athletic shoe industry is one of the fastest growing footwear industries and have top growing sales compared to other footwear industries (NDP Group, 2016). The key players that currently dominate the market are Nike, Adidas, and Puma (Kates & Bolduc, 2013). This paper will use the porter five forces, industry life cycle, and the key players to understand the industry. Over these years the athletic shoe industry has grown into a competitive market.

After sluggish focus and growth in the 1980ies, Nike experienced strong growth in the 1990ies and cemented the position as global recognizable brand. The increased international focus created strains on the supply chain, which was consider inadequate to cater efficiently to the organization and the rapid changes consumer demands . As a consequence of the afore mentioned supply chain problem Nike faced inefficient inventory management, problems in flow of goods and poor demand

Despite this inefficient system, Crocs was one of the first companies to successfully streamline different aspects of the manufacturing and supply chain to create a new customer-centered value chain.