Hoka One One's Sales Growth

Hoka One One, known simply as Hoka, has been one of the biggest success stories in the world of running over the last decade or so. Launched in 2009 in France, the maximalist design of their shoes immediately stood out, although it may have then taken a while for some runners to warm up to it.

Hoka was acquired by Deckers - a major US publicly traded shoe company who also owns top brands like UGG and Teva - in 2012. At the time Deckers simply stated that the 'acquisition of Hoka is not material to the Company's consolidated financial statements.'

Fast forward 10 years, last week Deckers reported its fourth quarter and full year financial results for the 2022 fiscal year. Luckily Deckers has been reporting Hoka's results separately for the last four years - previously Hoka was just looped in as one of the 'Other brands' in Deckers' portfolio. That allows us to see yet another record breaking quarter and year for Hoka, and to say its imact has now become 'material' would be a big understatement.

These are three charts to put Hoka's growth into perspective.

Hoka's sales

That's pretty self explanatory, but Hoka's annual sales grew four times (to $891.6 million) just over four years.

Hoka as part of Deckers

• The total Deckers annual sales grew more than 50% over the four-year period to $3.15 billion.
• Hoka's growth outpaced that with Hoka's share of total raising from 11% in FY19 to 28.3% in FY22.
• There is a significant seasonality in Deckers revenues, driven by its main brand UGG having its strongest quarter in the period ending 31st December.
• That is partially offset by Hoka whose sales are also (somewhat) seasonal, but less so than UGG's and have their strongest quarter in the period ending 31st March.

What about the rest of the market?

Finally, here is an imperfect comparison with another iconinc running brand - Brooks Running, who are owned by Berkshire Hathaway.

Eight years - that's what it took Brooks to get from $500 million in sales to $1 billion ($1.11 billion to be precise), which they announced earlier this year.

Hoka has not yet hit the $1 billion mark, but it has gone from $350 million to $890 million in two years. It will be interesting to see whether they manage to maintain that growth rate in the coming years as well.