The Glossy 50 honors the year’s biggest changemakers across fashion and beauty. More from the series →
This year, sister brands Hoka and Ugg led the footwear industry shakeup. Through collaborations with both high-fashion and mass brands, both businesses far exceeded analyst expectations, brought in double-digit sales growth, and pushed their parent company Deckers Brands to a record $4.99 billion in annual revenue.
Stefano Caroti, president and CEO of Deckers, characterized the success of both brands as a process that was years in the making. Ugg was founded in 1978 and joined Deckers in 1995, while Hoka was founded in 2009 and acquired by Deckers in 2012. Deckers’s only other brand is another long-running footwear company, Teva.
“Our results have been fantastic, and we did it just by staying true to our values,” Caroti told Glossy. “Building a strong brand takes decades, but it can be destroyed in weeks. So we’re balancing the needs of a public company and delivering quarterly results with brands we want to grow in the long term.”
Caroti himself has been with Deckers since 2015, serving as head of omnichannel, interim president of Hoka and, most recently, chief commercial officer. He officially took the role of CEO when Dave Powers retired in February 2024. Since then, Caroti’s leadership has helped Deckers, and its biggest brands, Hoka and Ugg, thrive.
Both Hoka and Ugg have been steadily moving into a more fashion-forward part of the footwear market. This year, Hoka partnered with brands including Free People, Junya Watanabe, Marni and Reformation, reimagining its performance running shoes as fashion-forward styles. Hoka’s revenue grew by 11% year over year in the quarter ending September 30, to $634 million.
Ugg’s high-fashion collaborations are even more advanced than Hoka’s, Caroti said. This year, it partnered with designers including Jeremy Scott and high-fashion brands like Sacai. Ugg’s revenue rose over 10% in the quarter ending September 30, to $759.6 million.
“The brands all compete in different spaces,” Caroti said. “Hoka is performance and running, which is completely different from the fashion lifestyle space. But both brands are starting to target a fashion lifestyle customer now.”
Going forward, Caroti said one of his main priorities for Deckers and its subsidiaries is continuing to balance short-term performance gains with long-term growth and sustainability.
Some of those long-term plans include more international expansion. Hoka’s and Ugg’s sales growth in international markets outpaced the U.S. business in the last quarter, growing 38% from the same period last year. Hoka has seen particular growth in China and EMEA, and, after becoming one of the fastest-growing running brands in Europe, Deckers opened the first Hoka store in Germany in September.
“Going global is one of our main focuses,” Caroti said. “[We’re also prioritizing] creative innovation on the lifestyle side and doubling down on innovation across the business. We know our strategy is sound, we just have to keep executing on it and keep delivering sustainable, profitable growth.”
