Deckers Outdoor

Deckers Outdoor Corporation — Deckers Brands — is the Goleta, California footwear company founded in 1973, which grew from selling sandals at craft fairs into the owner of UGG, HOKA, Teva, Sanuk and Koolaburra. Deckers trades on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol DECK. Its brands divide between everyday casual lifestyle footwear, led by UGG sheepskin boots, and high-performance running and outdoor footwear, led by the HOKA brand's rapid growth; products are sold through department stores, specialty retailers, its own stores and online worldwide.

Company Profile

The February 2019 summary in the record lists the portfolio as it then stood: UGG, Koolaburra, HOKA ONE ONE, Teva and Sanuk, designed, marketed and distributed for both everyday casual use and high-performance activities. The October 2013 summary records the three-brand company of that era — UGG, Teva and Sanuk — designing footwear for outdoor and casual use and selling handbags and accessories alongside.

The movement between the two summaries is the story: a company once synonymous with one boot added a performance-running engine, HOKA, that came to rival UGG in size, converting Deckers from a single-phenomenon stock into a two-brand portfolio. Teva, the original sport sandal of 1984, remains the bridge between the company's craft-fair origins and its performance present.

The range behind the name is footwear, apparel and accessories under UGG, HOKA, Teva, Sanuk and Koolaburra. Its customers are casual-lifestyle and high-performance customers worldwide, through retailers, its own stores and online. That combination — what is sold, and to whom — is the simplest way to place Deckers Outdoor in the industry: it explains the company's costs, its competitors and the kind of news that moved its shares when it had them. A change in either half of the combination, a new product category or a new customer, is usually the first sign that the business described in the older summaries is turning into something different.

Scale should be read from the dated summaries with their dates attached. Store counts, sales descriptions and market positions quoted there were the company's own account of itself in that year, and they are the right basis for comparing Deckers Outdoor with the other companies in this section — a component supplier against a retailer, or a catalogue house against a mall chain — as long as each figure is compared with figures from roughly the same period.

For current dealings, the snapshot at the top of this page is the place to start: it gives the company's present status — Operating — and links to the official website, which is where current product ranges, store information and investor or corporate contacts are maintained. Anything in the dated summaries that conflicts with the snapshot should be read as the older position: summaries describe the year they are dated, and the snapshot describes the company as it stands now.

For anyone researching the fashion industry's public-company era, Deckers Outdoor is a useful case: a sandal maker that ended up owning both the world's best-known sheepskin boot and its fastest-growing running shoe. The summaries in this section were compiled while the story was still unfolding, which is exactly what makes them worth keeping — they preserve what the company said about itself at the time, before the outcome was known.