Crocs’ Québec roots.

Interesting article in The Christian Science Monitor on Crocs’ troubles. Here’s an excerpt:

While analysts say that a market for its shoes will persist – probably among the nurses, cooks,

 and other people who spend a lot of time on their feet – the boom times are over.

Part of the reason is on display at Sports Experts, a busy shoe store in a Montreal shopping mall. A few racks of Crocs – the clunky hole-filled shoes adopted by boaters that went mainstream when the likes of Jack Nicholson and Brad Pitt started wearing them – had no takers.

"We don't sell a lot of these anymore. There's not a big demand," says Olivier Brunet, a store employee.

In their heyday nowhere were Crocs more popular than in Quebec, where they were born. This year, some Montreal stores canceled their orders.

The shoe and its patented "croslite" material (a resin that doesn't absorb waters or retain odors) were originally owned by Foam Creations, a Quebec company. Though that company was bought out by Crocs in 2004, Quebeckers were proud of Crocs as a provincial innovation that went global, like the Ski-Doo snowmobile. More than 100 million foam clogs have been sold.