Buzz Watch: UGGs are Back! (In Spite of What Some Fashion Blogs Say)

Authored by Bill Tancer on December 13, 2006 - 12:48pm.

This morning I taped a segment for CNBC about our press release yesterday on the hottest products this holiday season. One of the things that struck me about our search data this holiday is the resurgence of those foot warming sheepskin phenom. the UGGs.

Here's a graph of searches on "ugg boots" for the last two years:

If you read any of the fashion blogs (which I have in researching this issue), UGG Boots are sooo 2004. So why then are searches for this fashion-snubbed footwear brand over double that of searches from the 2005 holiday season?

The answer is in the data. If you look at the demographics of visitors to the official UGG website, visitors are predominately female, 25-44, earning between $60-100K. Our regional data indicates that the New York Tri-State area and California are indexing the highest for visits to the site. Finally, U1 or the Urban Uptown Claritas Prizm segment (affluent urbanites) are the largest contributor of traffic to the site, making up 13.5% of visitors. Combining this data with some guerilla market research stats (read anecdotal) several local San Francisco vendors of the footwear confirm that they are selling out, primarily to parents of Tween girls that have UGGs on their holiday wishlist.

Note: This post originally appeared on Bill Tancer's blog here. Bill is the General Manager, Global Research at Hitwise. His bio can be viewed here.