Dave Powers and the art of knowing when to leave

Dave Powers retired from running Deckers Brands with a send-off featuring Pitbull. A company selling slippers and running shoes could presumably have arranged something quieter. Instead, after three decades in brands and retail, Powers got a party with a performer whose working name rather discourages a modest farewell.

His announcement on LinkedIn was grateful, informal and conspicuously free of a new corporate destination. He thanked mentors, friends, family, his leadership team and the board. He praised the handover to Stefano Caroti. Then came a sentence many departing executives seem constitutionally unable to write: “Time to rest....”

The timing gives the departure its interest. Powers retired as president and chief executive on August 1, 2024, after eight years in charge. In the last full fiscal year completed under his leadership, Deckers recorded $4.288 billion in sales. Its two largest brands, UGG and HOKA, were both growing. He was handing over a business with momentum, along with the less photogenic work of keeping it.

The long way through the shop

Powers came from New Hampshire and graduated from Northeastern University in 1989. His degree was in marketing, earned cum laude. The early professional education also involved actual stores. His career included Levi’s and Gap, with experience in apparel, merchandising and visual presentation before footwear became the larger part of his working life.

There is a useful distinction between learning to describe a customer and having to serve one. The latter offers immediate correction. A product that looks persuasive in a meeting can sit untouched on a shelf. A display can make perfect sense to its designer and none whatsoever to the person walking past it. Retail makes those disagreements visible.

At Gap, Powers spent a decade taking on increasingly senior responsibilities, including global divisional merchandising for boys. At Timberland, his remit ranged across merchandise, marketing, store design and European retail operations. At Converse, he spent four years as vice president of global direct-to-consumer, working within Nike’s retail leadership organization.

That progression gave him experience of several different ways a brand meets its public. Clothes, boots and canvas sneakers have different histories and customers. The recurring job was to make the product, the place selling it and the story surrounding it agree with one another. An executive can call that strategy. A shopper is more likely to call it a store they like.

A merchant takes the corner office

Deckers hired Powers as president of direct-to-consumer in August 2012. He became president of omnichannel in January 2014, president in March 2015, and CEO in June 2016, succeeding Angel Martinez. The titles widened steadily. His starting point remained the relationship between a brand and the person buying it.

In a 2016 interview, he described himself as a merchant first. He was interested in what customers understood a brand to mean, what its recognizable products were, and where fresh ideas could take it. His warning to anyone tempted to confuse an internal presentation with public opinion was admirably plain.

“What you think of the brand doesn’t matter if the customer doesn’t believe you.”

Dave Powers, 2016

The operational problem was less tidy than the sentence. A portfolio needs different brands to have distinct reasons to exist. Powers discussed positioning Koolaburra in lower-priced sheepskin footwear while keeping UGG premium. He was also working with a leadership team that included Andrea O’Donnell in fashion lifestyle, Wendy Yang in performance lifestyle and Caroti in omnichannel operations.

These names matter because the subsequent growth was work shared across a company. Powers’s career is interesting enough without turning every shoe sold into a personal achievement. His role involved choosing people, allocating attention and making decisions across businesses whose customers did not all want the same thing.

Two very different kinds of comfort

UGG and HOKA make an unlikely-looking pair. One carries the associations of sheepskin and casual dressing. The other built its identity around performance running. Their coexistence under one roof presented a management question: how could Deckers expand each without making either lose its particular appeal?

By fiscal 2024, UGG generated $2.239 billion in annual sales and HOKA $1.807 billion. Together they accounted for roughly 94 percent of Deckers revenue. The size of that combined contribution explains why the company’s growth story became so closely associated with these two names.

The figures also offer a corrective to the idea that footwear success consists of a single clever product followed by applause. Deckers’s 2024 annual report describes investment in awareness, distribution and direct relationships with customers. HOKA represented 42 percent of the portfolio’s revenue that year. Maintaining its identity while increasing access to the brand was becoming a larger undertaking.

At the May 2024 earnings call, management described growth across HOKA’s regions and sales channels, alongside UGG’s expansion through direct sales and international business. It also emphasized full-price selling. Growth has a different quality when people want the product enough to buy it without waiting for a markdown.

That was a meaningful change from the conditions around Powers’s arrival as CEO. Fiscal 2016 had brought pressure from promotions, closeouts and currency movements. Deckers entered the transition with annual revenue of $1.875 billion. By the final full fiscal year before his retirement, the business was more than twice that size. The intervening years required more than a favorable fashion season.

The sale behind the sale

Direct-to-consumer can sound like a slogan devised to make ordinary shopping sound newly technical. For Powers, it was a substantial part of his career before it became his first Deckers title. The work connects stores and digital shopping with the decisions about product, inventory and presentation that determine whether a customer returns.

Deckers’s direct-to-consumer business grew 26.5 percent in fiscal 2024, faster than wholesale. Its annual report put direct sales at 43 percent of the overall revenue mix, up from 40 percent a year earlier. Wholesale remained important. Customers still encountered the brands through several routes, with different retailers playing different roles.

Powers’s interest in consumer insight also came with a caution about interpreting numbers. In a November 2024 interview, after leaving the CEO position, he questioned how outside observers used credit-card transaction data to judge retailers. Such information, he argued, could produce a misleading picture when stripped of context. An abundance of measurements does not relieve anyone of the obligation to understand what is being measured.

A return to the room where he started

In May 2025, Powers returned to Northeastern to address business graduates at Matthews Arena. He was back at the institution where he had completed his degree 36 years earlier. The opening joke concerned the venue: “It never looked this good, but it smelled the same.” Evidently, some brand associations survive renovation.

He credited his co-op placements with giving him confidence early on, when he was young and trying to contribute in rooms full of more experienced people. He urged graduates to think about the kind of leadership they wanted to practice, including their values and the environments in which they did their best work.

There is a connection between that advice and the less visible work behind a consumer brand. A logo has no independent ability to make employees listen to one another. A product launch cannot settle how colleagues behave when plans go wrong. Those questions belong to the people running the place, whether or not they make the advertising.

Powers’s own corporate record included support for employee volunteering and charitable giving. Deckers reported more than 15,000 employee volunteer hours in fiscal 2023, along with over $4.2 million donated through its giving program. Such activity does not settle every question about a company’s conduct. It does show what his language about people and community looked like in an organized program.

Leaving space on the organizational chart

The succession was announced six months before it took effect. Caroti had worked alongside Powers for years and had experience across regional operations, direct selling and HOKA. Their public comments described a relationship of mentorship and friendship. The transition gave both executives time to prepare for a change that would affect the whole organization.

Powers remained a Deckers director after retiring as CEO. In July 2025, the company announced that he would not stand for reelection at its September annual meeting. The gradual departure had reached its next stage. By then, he had also been inducted into the Footwear News Hall of Fame at the December 2024 awards.

His interests extend beyond the company. Protect Our Winters lists him on its board, bringing his consumer-business experience into an organization focused on climate advocacy through the outdoor community. Based in Santa Barbara, he has described enjoying the outdoors with his wife and two sons. There is a fairly direct connection between selling footwear for outdoor life and taking an interest in the places where it gets used.

The portrait that emerges is of someone whose authority accumulated through repeated contact with products, stores, colleagues and customers. His career moved through several recognizable brands, but the underlying questions stayed surprisingly practical. What do people want? What do they believe about you? Who should be trusted to do the next part of the work?

Powers spent years helping other people find a reason to buy a pair of shoes. When his own next step arrived, he left a capable colleague in charge, thanked the people around him and made room in his calendar. The party happened to include Pitbull. Even a merchant should be allowed an unexpected accessory.