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In 2022, the Crocs Classic Clog was the best-selling item of clothing on Amazon, the brand was one of the fastest growing brands in the U.S., and global net revenue had increased to approximately $3.6 billion. By most accounts, Crocs had become the "it" shoe. Crocs shoes were spotted on high-fashion runways, collaborating with luxury brands and designers including Balenciaga, Christopher Kane, and Christian Cowan, and on the feet of massively popular celebrities such as Justin Bieber, Post Malone, Bad Bunny, and Luke Combs. Crocs was also considered a top preferred footwear brand among U.S. teens in 2023. Few could have predicted Crocs' meteoric success given the state of the brand just ten years earlier. Indeed, in the late 2000's and early 2010's, Crocs shoes were often mercilessly mocked for their hideous appearance, and the organization had nearly gone bankrupt. So how did Crocs clogs go from internet meme fodder to sought-after cultural sensation? Could the Crocs brand maintain its popularity and grow more globally, or was the brand destined to fall out of favor once the tides of fashion changed again? How should Crocs evolve its product portfolio and marketing strategy to ensure a stable and permanent place in consumers' wardrobes?

The case explores the challenges of revenue recognition and financial reporting for Stride Funding (Stride), a fintech startup that has disrupted the student loan market. Stride leveraged proprietary machine learning and financial models to underwrite alternative student loans via Income Sharing Agreements (ISA). Under an ISA, borrowers agree to share a portion of their future earned income with a lender for a set period of time. Stride has adopted a distinctive business model that is analogous to the Software as a Service (SaaS) business. Rather than issuing ISAs directly, Stride performed as a program manager and created lending platforms that enabled educational institutions and programs to fund ISAs using their own capital. As a fund manager, Stride was responsible for developing credit models, administering the ISA contracts, managing account status, producing the loan documents, and updating the platform and program structure. In return for their services, Stride charged various fees to the institutions and programs. Having successfully completed its Series A round, Stride experienced substantial growth and improved business performance. As the company grew, its executives recognized the need to change its current financial reporting based on cash accounting to comply with U.S. GAAP. They anticipated that this change would affect how to report some of its revenues which are important financial metrics for early-stage companies like Stride. The CEO of Stride Funding wanted to know the full financial impact of this change and its implications for the next funding round. Moreover, they needed to determine whether it made sense for Stride, with its innovative business model, to adopt the GAAP reporting at this juncture.

A Bentley University and Gallup survey on businesses' role in making a positive impact on society and the environment found that despite some differences across demographics, overall consumers feel that companies should take action to minimize their environmental impact but that large companies in particular aren't doing enough. The author suggests several actions companies can take to improve their environmental sustainability performance.

The Germany-based startup Vytal operated the largest digital-native reusable packaging-as-a-service network globally, having raised nearly €15 million, established a large network of restaurant partners, and prevented the use of millions of single-use take-out food containers. However, Vytal's growth was slower than expected, challenging its unique pay-per-use model and environmental goals. This case highlights Vytal's growth trajectory in the years leading up to 2023, outlining its business model, utilization of digital technology, strategies for acquiring partners and customers, and regulatory developments within Europe. It also presents several options that the founders are considering to reach profitability, prepare for a Series B financing round, and expand internationally, such as charging partners for unused containers, implementing consumer fees on single-use containers, launching a loyalty program, and franchising to expand more rapidly.

Clair was founded with a simple mission: to expedite America's workers access to their hard-earned wages. In the headwinds of the COVID-19 pandemic, the startup had successfully raised a seed round of $4.5 million, and within two years the earned wage access (EWA) FinTech had partnered with 10 human capital management system providers to access over 8,000 employers and over 300,000 employees. However, as the economic outlook plummeted and available external capital began to dry up, Clair's founders considered whether other business models offered more attractive prospects for the startup's long-term success. Should Clair stay the course or choose to pivot, and what tradeoffs would each pathway entail? With investors requiring a clear long-term vision and a viable path to profitability, this decision would determine Clair's ability to thrive and fulfill its founding mission.

In late January 2020, the chief executive officer and third-generation successor of BEZNOSKA s.r.o., a traditional Czech manufacturer of joint implants, was preparing for an annual shareholders' meeting with the family business owners. The annual report indicated that the company had experienced its worst financial year in its 30-year history. The company was also facing challenges from new competitors in the market and the need to comply with a new legislation. The chief executive officer was planning to stop issuing dividend payments from the company's profits to the three owners of the family business, who were his family members. The chief executive officer knew that his decision would be contentious, especially for his aunt who was not active in the company but had criticized his performance in the past. The chief executive officer decided that the best solution to the ongoing problems was for his aunt to sell her stake in the family business, which she would likely reject. But even if she were to agree, how should the ownership shares be restructured?

Conventional wisdom suggests that marketers should play it safe in a polarized culture and focus on potential customers who haven't yet made up their minds those in the middle, where the majority of the market is. But brand messaging can be more effective if it targets the subcultures that are strong brand supporters. Using McDonald's successful fan-driven marketing strategy as an example, the author describes how the propagation effect can leverage existing customers to win over new ones.

Trinity Earth, founded by Zhu Jinfu, was a Chinese data solution provider focusing on the film and television industry. Since its establishment, Trinity Earth had launched a mix of products and services and continuously created value for the whole industry. While its earliest products tended to be functional tools, the company proceeded to synthesize these products for empowering and then enabling its clients. It started by acquiring data as a potential resource and proceeded to tap into this valuable asset which it ultimately aspired to capitalize.In the same time, the business model of Trinity Earth also changed a lot. The value of its data services was not a monolith, but was derived from collaboration on four levels - data, computing, analytics and human-machine interaction - with their own ways to generate revenues whose significance varied as the company kept developing. In the initial stage, profits came from product sales. With the enrichment and refinement of products, Trinity Earth turned to building a comprehensive network and hence its unique competence. However, with the rapid development of the film and television industry in China, Trinity Earth found itself difficult to fit into the mainstream, or majority market. What were the reasons？What would Zhu and Trinity Earth do to deal with this challenge?

Companies frequently consider diversification to be a crucial strategic decision during their growth journey to mitigate business risks and pursue continued expansion. Nonetheless, when pursuing diversified expansion, companies must accurately identify the suitable industry or domain and maintain a balanced relationship between specialization and diversification. Failure to do so can have negative repercussions on their development. This case study centers around Adisseo, a well-established company specializing in animal feed additives, and examines their diversification efforts in addition to their primary operations, such as methionine, by accelerating the development of other businesses through various means. This case primarily addresses the following inquiries: How did Adisseo cultivate its core competencies throughout its eight-decade-long development? What is Adisseo's position in the global methionine industry and what strengths does it possess? Who are Adisseo's competitors in this sector, and what challenges does the company encounter? Additionally, the case examines the progress of Adisseo's other business ventures apart from methionine and identifies their competitors and challenges. It also evaluates the accomplishments resulting from the implementation of Adisseo's "two-business-pillar" strategy, as well as the problems the company faces. Adisseo's explorations and practices offer valuable insights for similar enterprises facing technical barriers and pursuing diversification.

DayTwo is a young Israeli startup that applies research on the gut microbiome and machine learning algorithms to deliver personalized nutritional recommendations to its users in order to minimize blood sugar spikes after meals. After a first year of trial rollout in Israel, CEO Lihi Segal and her team are devising a global go-to-market plan for the firm. The team is considering several target markets, ranging from people with diabetes to professional athletes, and distribution strategies including selling direct to consumers or through partnerships with healthcare professionals or insurance companies. Their choices are important because they will affect DayTwo's costs, pricing, positioning, distribution channels, marketing efforts, and product development.

Andrew Kress (CEO and founder) and his team had built a promising marketplace business at HealthVerity serving its core market in healthcare, with a focus on pharmaceutical R&D and services. Thus far, HealthVerity's products had been unique to the pharma and pharma services customer segment. However, there was a real opportunity to apply the underlying technology across multiple industries, for which some investors strongly advocated. The company was grappling with questions of whether to increase revenues by expanding to other verticals beyond healthcare or by going deep with its current customer base and providing end-user analytics-based applications on top of their marketplace offerings. The company believed they had a unique understanding of a technically-challenging market in healthcare, and wondered how the model would scale. Kress wondered if there were ways in which the company could focus on specific analytics solutions or end-user applications (and which ones, specifically?), and if so, would that be worth the effort and risk, or did the approach need to be all or nothing? And was he limiting his thinking about the risk and opportunity to enter adjacent markets solely because of lack of familiarity or was there a real chance to serve other customer segments well if better understood and resourced, and how quickly could the company figure out the answer to that question without risking excessive time and capital?

Beth Sharp and Jennifer Brilliant founded Miracle Therapeutics based on intellectual property developed by Brilliant and her post-doctoral student, John Supreme, in Brilliant's lab at Elite University (EU). Miracle will have to obtain a license from EU to the Brilliant patent rights and other technology, and the founders want this license to be exclusive. With venture funding waiting in the wings, Sharp and Brilliant set up a meeting with EU's Technology License Office (TLO) to discuss the terms of the license. The TLO's licensing manager, Susie Deal-maker has provided them with a licensing term sheet template for review prior to negotiating the key terms. The case explores the components of a technology/IP license and the process of negotiating a deal with a University.

Tianlala is a Chinese new-style tea drink brand that has been developing, producing, and selling fresh ice cream, tea, and coffee since 2015. By 2021, the brand covered twenty-eight provinces, 105 cities, and three municipalities across China. It had opened more than one hundred directly operated stores and more than six thousand franchised stores nationwide, served more than two hundred million customers, and sold an average of 1.5 million cups of milk tea every day. It had taken only six years for Tianlala, a small, unknown milk-tea brand, to become one of the representative brands in the low-tier city market, going from being unknown to being accepted and appreciated by consumers, especially young ones. Despite this quick growth, the question for Wang Wei, the founder of Tianlala, was, How should the company reinforce its brand to grow further?

In December 2021, Steven Cahillane, chief executive officer of The Kellogg's Company, was facing worker unrest and a union strike. After several rounds of discussion between the workers' union and management, an amicable settlement could not be reached related to abolishing the two-tier pay system that Kellogg's introduced in 2015. After negotiations unfolded and management and the union still could not reach a conclusion, the union launched a strike on October 7, 2021. How could Cahillane improve relations with the workers' union? How could he bring the strike to an end? Does Kellogg's management have more bargaining power than workers?

"Vail Resorts, one of the world's largest snow sports resort management companies, faces serious climate change issues. For years, the organization tried to deal with rising temperatures and less snowfall by growing its resort network and diversifying its product portfolio to extend its season. Alicia Campero, Vail Resorts' Vice President of Sustainability Strategy, was leading the corporate effort to contain the company's environmental footprint while also limiting its business exposure to poor snow conditions. How should she handle negative press coverage or the intense competition from their rivals? Will she be able to provide significant value to millions of skiers and snowboarders during their resort visits? Can she manage the weather-related revenue risk and improve the company's profitability with strategic global expansion? Can she overcome the challenges of managing differences when expanding abroad in 2023? Using publicly available ski industry statistics, climate data, and country-level cultural indices, readers of this case assume the role of Campero and her team. Students must make strategic decisions about what the organization will do regarding climate change. The case provides facts on Vail Resorts' multitude of property acquisitions, stock performance, finances, and competitors, which will help readers make strategic recommendations on where the company should focus its next major geographic expansion."

Spreadsheet supplement for case 523005.

Despite widespread public commitments to integrate sustainability into business models, less than a third of U.S. employers engage in practices that support that objective, recent research shows. Many employees see a lack of commitment from management and short-term focus as key challenges. The authors share six practices observed at organizations that have made good progress at embedding sustainability into the business.

As robots are increasingly being incorporated into the workforce, one unexpected benefit is the ability to better assess the performance of their human counterparts on an individual level. Based on their research, the authors describe how having humans and robots work side by side can help busy managers more easily measure and improve workers' performance, and identify and reward top contributors.

Established in 1929, Chow Tai Fook Jewellery Group (CTF) was not only among the most popular brands in the Chinese-speaking world but also one of the largest jewellry retailers in the world with over 7,400 points of sale, mainly in Mainland China, generating Group revenue about US$5 billion in early 2023. Despite the COVID-19 pandemic and rising macro-economic headwinds, how did CTF achieve a resilient business performance? Two strategies based on retail expansion and smart retailing which automated the order fulfillment process and enhanced customer shopping experiences proved successful. Moreover, elevated product offerings through brand differentiation targeting different market segments such as high-end luxury, mass luxury and youth were also implemented. As of 2023, would CTF's strategy be robust enough to face the continuing economic and political challenges? Should it continue to expand? And is its current brand portfolio too broad?

Any company might one day face the test of a grave crisis that puts its very existence at risk. How can it survive the darkest moments and rise from the ashes? What is key to a company's longevity? The case of Luckin provides one possible answer. This case illustrated changes in Luckin's corporate strategy, business model, and operations strategy after its accounting fraud scandal. Luckin had previously adopted an aggressive expansion strategy. This approach featured prolific store openings, huge levels of financing, big customer discounts, and operations supported by a data-driven "new retail" system that acquired customers online and delivered products and services offline. This signature system took Luckin years to develop and refine. Customers didn't instantly abandon Luckin the aftermath of the scandal. Instead, customers rushed to Luckin stores to use up all their coupons just in case the company went out of business. While ensuring its stores could continue operating normally to keep up with this surge in demand, Luckin's new management team suspended its previous strategy and pivoted towards business performance. It focused on younger consumers and refined its operations strategy. The company launched new initiatives, including establishing private-domain traffic, introducing new products rigorously, and finetuning store operations to drive continued improvements in business performance. In August 2022, Luckin claimed to have "risen from the ashes and completely reinvented itself" as it announced second-quarter earnings. At that point in time, however, China's coffee segment was witnessing many emerging brands backed by deep-pocketed investors. Could Luckin sustain its growth amid such competition? How could it stay competitive?