This week, we connected with footwear brands showing at FFANY, the footwear trade show in New York City, including to discuss the turnarounds and rebranding strategies happening at brands like Toms and Wolverine World Wide.
This week, some of the biggest footwear brands in the country gathered in New York City for the annual Fashion Footwear Association of New York Market Week, commonly known as FFANY.
The event brings together brands like Crocs, Hey Dude and Clarks, along with footwear-heavy portfolio companies like Wolverine World Wide, the owner of Saucony and Sperry. This year, the hot topics among attendees included navigating tariffs, expanding their product categories to keep up with the fast-moving trend cycle and balancing profit margin with price-sensitive customers.
Chris Hufnagel, the CEO of Wolverine World Wide, told Glossy that one of the biggest current challenges in the footwear market is navigating tariffs. Wolverine Worldwide was in the middle of a years-long turnaround effort when tariffs were announced earlier this year. Hufnagel said that, to mitigate impacts on the business, the company had a tariff response team in place, which began making changes the day after the first round of tariffs was announced.
Wolverine expects tariff-related impacts on the business to be around $65 million next year, even after mitigation efforts such as diversifying its manufacturing. Wolverine has moved most of its production out of China, which accounted for 40% of its output a few years ago but is now in the low single digits. Instead, Cambodia, Vietnam, Indonesia, and Bangladesh make up the bulk of its manufacturing, and China will be nearly phased out of it by the end of next year. Wolverine has raised prices on some of its brands, including Saucony, by around $10-$15 on some models.
“There is a risk of over-diversifying,” Hufnagel said. “We don’t want to be too dependent on one country, but you also don’t want to be in so many places that it gets too complicated, from a logistics perspective.”
“The U.S. consumer has been amazingly resilient,” Hufnagel said. “Consumer reports are fairly dire, but for us, the U.S. consumer has hung on pretty well, in terms of spending. I do worry about the bifurcation of income, where the rich get richer and there’s more pressure on middle and lower incomes. That’s not good for society, and it’s hard for brands, too.”
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Wolverine, under Hufnagel’s leadership, has been focused on turning around the business from a low point in 2024. Its annual revenue was above $2 billion for four years before 2024, but dropped to $1.7 billion last year. In its most recent quarterly report in November, Wolverine reported revenue of around $470 million, a 6% increase from the year before, putting it back on track to have its first year of revenue growth since 2022.
That growth has been driven mainly by its athletic brands Saucony and Merrell. The running shoe brand Saucony, in particular, saw a 27% revenue increase in the last quarter, making it Wolverine’s best-performing brand and the main driver of its growth.
Hufnagel said Wolverine has been taking a “key city” approach to grow these two brands, heavily in singular cities, like London, Paris and Tokyo. For example, Saucony has a heavy presence in Paris, including pop-ups, a flagship store, wholesale accounts and events like sponsored runs.
For many brands, FFANY is an opportunity to debut new products or to spotlight turnarounds or transition periods. The first collection of Wrangler-branded footwear, licensed and created by Genesco Brands Group after signing a deal with Wrangler last year, debuted at the event with work boots and Western-inspired looks.
Another brand that was at FFANY and is in the middle of a turnaround is Toms. The certified B Corp brand grew rapidly in the 2000s and early 2010s through its charitable “1-for-1” business model, which gave away one pair of shoes for every pair sold. After an ownership change in 2019 and leaving behind the 1-for-1 model in favor of more diversified and targeted charitable causes, Toms has been steadily expanding its product offerings to include boots, sneakers and ballet flats.
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Katie Wagner, a Crocs veteran who was announced as Toms’s chief commercial officer this week, told Glossy that the brand is ready to start storytelling again after laying low for a few years. Toms’s new CEO, Jessica Alsing, another Crocs veteran who took the reins in October, said the brand will debut unexpected collaborations in the next year, as well as more colorways and patterns in limited editions and smaller batches to tap into fast-moving fashion trend cycles.
“We’re in the early days of the new Toms,” Wagner said, noting that giving and social impact are still a core part of the brand’s identity.
Stat of the week
According to data from the retail CRM company Endear, clienteling drove a 30 times higher conversion rate this Black Friday and Cyber Monday than traditional marketing. Customers who received personal messages spent 80% more, on average, compared to others. One of Endear’s clients, the womenswear brand M.M.LaFleur, reported a 13% year-over-year increase in sales during BFCM by proactively reaching out to loyal customers and inviting them to book in-store styling appointments.
News to know
- The CFDA announced this week that it is banning the use of fur on the runways for future New York Fashion Weeks. Fashion’s love of fur has ebbed and flowed in recent years, although there was a notable spike in fur styles last season.
- Prada officially closed the acquisition of Versace on Tuesday for around $1.5 billion. Former owner Capri Holdings had paid $2 billion for Versace in 2018 and sold it off to Prada after the failed merger with Tapestry in late 2024.
- This week, the U.K.’s Advertising Standards Authority banned ads from several apparel brands, including Nike, Superdry and Lacoste, over their misleading use of sustainable terminology. The Authority said the use of terms like “sustainable materials” is ambiguous and misleading, given the lack of context and clarity over what materials are used and what makes them sustainable.
