Value Chain at Crocs, Inc.

The first impression one might have about Crocs' products are that they are basically plastic looking shoes that are comfortable and readily available. Customers familiar with this product boast, like on the company website, about "the company’s proprietary closed-cell resin, Croslite™, a technology that gives each pair of shoes the soft, comfortable, lightweight, non-marking and odor-resistant qualities"(Company.crocs.com, 2011). There are also various comments about how the material does not slip when exposed to water and of the popularity of the shoes since their "first sale in 2003"(Hoyt & Silverman, 2008, p.13). Over the last few years, the popularity of the shoes have dropped off and the purpose of this study is to present an analysis of the company's value chain and determine what changes I would incorporate and why.

Analysis of the company's value chain

To get started, we first need to understand what Crocs' value chain is and how that process plays a role in the strategic direction of the company. The authors of our text, views the value chain as "the entire series of organizational work activities that add value at each step, from raw materials to finished product. In its entirety, the value chain can encompass supplier's suppliers to the customer's customers"(Robbins & Coulter, 2009, p.430). At Crocs, the entire series of organization work activities may be broken down even further using Porter's value chain model of viewing a manufacturing (or service) primary and secondary activities as a "system made up of subsystems, each with inputs, transformation processes and outputs"(Ifm.eng.cam.ac.uk, 2011). A diagram, compliments of Porter(1985) can be seen below:

The diagram relates the primary activities (Inb...

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Helm, C., & Jones, R. (2010). Extending the value chain – A conceptual framework for managing the governance of co-created brand equity. Journal of Brand Management, 17(8), 579-589. doi:10.1057/bm.2010.19

Hoyt, D., & Silverman, A. (2008). Crocs: Revolutionizing an industry’s supply chain model for competitive advantage. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Ifm.eng.cam.ac.uk. (2011). Porter's Value Chain. Retrieved from http://www.ifm.eng.cam.ac.uk/dstools/paradigm/valuch.html

Porter, M. E., (1985). Competitive Advantage. Diagram. The Free Press. New York.

Robbins, S.P., & Coulter, M. (2009). Management (10th ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall.

Storum, D.. (2010). Duerden, McCarvel lead Crocs' mighty turnaround. Boulder County Business Report, 29(27), 6A. Retrieved from ABI/INFORM Dateline. (Document ID: 2241230841).