#1 Croc Fan??

I am sure many of you out there own a pair of Crocs or know someone who does. It recently came to my attention that one of my good friends is apparently the biggest Croc fan out there, even having a website called Crocfans.com. He even was recently contacted by The New York Times for an interview.

The following is the portion of the article where my friend is quoted...my favorite line is when he pulls out the phrase, "well by gosh..." Good stuff Chidester!!

Rob Walker of The New York Times writes:

David Chidester, a computer-products marketer in Dallas, started a site called CrocFans.com in 2005, shortly after his wife discovered the shoes. He posts Crocs-related items like a recent photograph of President Bush wearing a pair — black, with what appear to be presidential-seal socks — and his traffic has grown steadily, hitting its latest high last month. Chidester says he has no affiliation with and has never heard from the company, but he sticks to the official comfort line just the same: he wears his green pair to work on his lawn and a more understated khaki pair to the mall, purely for functional reasons.

After a while, all the comfort talk starts to sound a little bit like a guy with a Mohawk saying he simply wants to spend less time washing his hair. Perhaps it is the Crocs fans’ refusal to admit that the shoes are an aesthetic statement that really motivates people like Kate Leth and Vincenzo Ravina, two college students in Halifax, Nova Scotia, who operate a Web site called ihatecrocs.com. “We don’t understand why people can’t freely admit that they’re hideous,” says Leth, who describes herself as “stunned” at the persistence of the shoes and the e-mail she gets from around the world as Crocs enter new markets “like a disease spreading.” In addition to anti-Croc rants, the site includes videos of the shoes being burned with firecrackers or shredded with scissors; Leth says they have sold “a few hundred” anti-Croc T-shirts, many to members of one of the larger Croc-hating Facebook groups.

This, of course, is precisely what gives Crocs a dash of maverick cachet far beyond anything an ad campaign or celebrity endorsement could provide. Leth’s site also shares the anti-anti-Croc e-mail it receives, the tone of which is often defiant. “I liken it to Apple computers,” the Croc fan Chidester suggests. “It’s something different, people get behind it and if you say something bad about it — well, by gosh you’re wrong.” He hastens to add that he’s more open-minded and amused by the criticisms and that he’ll be sticking with Crocs even if the vogue for wearing them passes. Which will probably happen right around the time the vogue for hating them does.