Everyone has laughed at Crocs. TIME listed it among the fifty worst inventions. Idiocracy used it as the costume of human stupidity. The shoe was, by broad agreement, ugly.

Then the company nearly died — and not because of the mockery. It nearly died of a completely ordinary business mistake: expanding far too fast, into a recession, with too much inventory and too many factories. In 2008 the stock touched seventy-nine cents and the loss ran to roughly a hundred and eighty-five million dollars.

What saved it was counterintuitive. Crocs stopped apologising for the thing people made fun of. This is the story of the ugliest shoe in the room, the collapse that almost ended it, and the decision to lean into the joke instead of away from it.