How the Stanley Cup Went Viral

In the spring of 2020, Terence Reilly left his position as the chief marketing officer of Crocs, the footwear brand, and became the president of the beverage-container manufacturer Stanley. For Stanley, which had been selling workaday flasks for more than a century, it was an unexpectedly fashionable hire. At Crocs, Reilly had kicked off a kind of miracle. For years, the company’s stock price had hovered around thirteen dollars a share, and its signature shoe—clunky, holey, styrofoam-like—seemed to be beloved by Mario Batali and few others. Then Reilly took over as Crocs C.M.O, in 2015, bringing its marketing operations in-house, launching collaborations with celebrities like Post Malone, and embracing social-media notoriety. In 2018, Crocs stock began careening upward, eventually hitting a peak, in 2021, of a hundred and eighty dollars a share. Its negative reputation had become a kind of asset: the bad kind of recognizability turned into the good.