Here’s Why Crocs’ Stock Went Wild This Week

A funny thing happened at last Sunday’s Emmy Awards: Actor Alan Cumming, nominated for television’s coveted statuette for his role in CBS’s “The Good Wife,” walked the red carpet in Crocs—the comfy clogs known more for being functional than fashionable.

When the stock market opened this week, another funny thing happened: shares of Crocs soared about 3%, and kept surging, and were up more than 5% by Wednesday’s close, even as the broader market was down. Crocs’ stock has given back some of its gains over the last couple of days, but is still up for the week, while the S&P 500 and Nasdaq have both declined.

Critics have questioned whether Crocs shoes could ever become mainstream, as some customers have rejected the look as “ugly.” But since a new CEO took over at the beginning of the year, and Crocs named new financial and marketing chiefs earlier this month, the brand has increasingly shown signs of strength.

In April, Crocs announced that it sold more than 30 million pairs of shoes in 2014. And after Prince George, the son of Britain’s Prince William and Kate Middleton, donned Crocs clogs in front of paparazzi in June, sales of the royal toddler’s shoe jumped 1,500%. Cumming’s red carpet pose may have a similar effect.

“To see a guy like Alan Cumming putting on the shoes and waking the red carpet—as an investor I look at that and say, ‘amen,'” said Michael Bigger, founder of Long Island-based hedge fund Bigger Capital, who bought a “big position” in Crocs in 2009 when shares traded around $1. “I really, really like that. It gets attention to the brand that they didn’t have before.”

Cumming’s choice of Emmy’s footwear was Crocs’ forthcoming CitiLane Roka model in black, part of the shoemaker’s 2016 spring and summer line. But Cumming also wears Crocs on other occasions, as he demonstrated by tweeting a stream of photos of himself sporting another version of the clogs, including the hashtag #crocsontheredcarpet.

The actor’s outfit got mixed reviews on Instagram: