GOLDMAN: Millennial women have a 'foot fetish' - here's what we know about it
Goldman Sachs equity research teamed up with Teen Vogue in order to identify the brands that the newest crop of trendsetters are buying and talking about.
In their report, the experts somewhat facetiously noted that millennial women had a "foot fetish."
What they meant by that was that several "iconic" casual footwear brands were extremely popular among young, cool consumers this year. Most notably, Birkenstock, Sorel, and Nike.
In order to determine a brand's popularity, the analysts looked at three metrics: affinity, ownership, and "word of mouth." The first two are pretty self-explanatory, while the third measures how much millennial trendsetters talked about a given brand on social media.
The biggest winners were the "ugly-chic" brands Birkenstock and Sorel, which saw the largest year-over-year jumps across all three categories. Birkenstock was up ~7% in terms of ownership and affinity, and up a monster 10% in terms of "word of mouth." Meanwhile, Sorel was up ~10% in terms of affinity, and ~5% in terms of "word of mouth."
The analysts also crowned Nike a winner, as it rose across all three metrics despite already having a large base. Given Nike's huge year and athleisure's rising popularity, this isn't particularly surprising.
On the flip side, Sperry, Keds, and UGG shoes all underperformed across all three metrics.
Goldman analysts also measured which brands were "poised to break out." They effectively looked at which brands were super popular among "It Girls" (or trendsetters), but were not yet popular among the average consumer base.
"Steve Madden and Keds continue to over-index among It Girls in terms of affinity, ownership, and word of mouth relative to the national sample," the analysts wrote. "With a more accessible price point than higher fashion peers, we believe [that Steve Madden] continues to be effective in engaging fashion oriented young customers."
In short, millennials are loving casual footwear, and it looks like the trend might not be going anywhere anytime soon.