How the Stanley Cup Went Viral [Video]

In the spring of 2020, Terence Reilly left his position as the chief marketing officer of Crocs, the footwear brand, and became the president of the beverage-container manufacturer Stanley. For Stanley, which had been selling workaday flasks for more than a century, it was an unexpectedly fashionable hire. At Crocs, Reilly had kicked off a kind of miracle. For years, the company’s stock price had hovered around thirteen dollars a share, and its signature shoe—clunky, holey, styrofoam-like—seemed to be beloved by Mario Batali and few others. Then Reilly took over as Crocs C.M.O, in 2015, bringing its marketing operations in-house, launching collaborations with celebrities like Post Malone, and embracing social-media notoriety. In 2018, Crocs stock began careening upward, eventually hitting a peak, in 2021, of a hundred and eighty dollars a share. Its negative reputation had become a kind of asset: the bad kind of recognizability turned into the good.

Reilly has in …