Ugg’s New Collection Is Designed to Keep You Warm Below Zero. Here’s How It Fared in the Wild.
On a recent frosty week at the Ion, a boutique hotel in Iceland located about an hour’s drive away from Reykjavik, a group of people from locales as spread out as Japan and Los Angeles were decked out in nearly head-to-toe Ugg. Our purpose? To determine whether the brand’s recently launched Ugg Extreme collection could do what it was intended to do: stand up to the harshest, coldest conditions on the planet. (Or, at least, the harshest, coldest conditions someone heading to a luxury wilderness camp might face.)
It turned out to be an ideal setting for the assignment: With windchills in the low teens, the weather was frosty, and the new line of technical winter boots proved their mettle. While the brand has long made its signature sheepskin products synonymous with keeping cozy and merely comfortable, this new collection is positioned as performance wear for the kind of weather that might give Jimmy Chin second thoughts about leaving base camp. Take the Shasta boot, for instance: it counts the waterproof internal Gore-Tex layer among its key technical traits; there’s also the Adirondack Meridian hiker with Vibram Icetrek outsole built for enhanced traction on slippery or icy surfaces.
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Both styles featured prominently in our wardrobe for the week, which saw us go on Golden Circle tours across the rocky and snowy terrains of remote Iceland. The Shasta Down Puffer Jacket, the collection’s lone apparel offering, proved useful for nights when it was blisteringly cold. It’s a heavy-duty, cold-weather jacket with luxe interior shearling, polar fleece in pockets, and down-filling made to withstand temperatures down to around -10°F. (The boot styles range in price from $350 to $500, and the puffer will set you back $1,498.)
For those less demanding outings (like hanging out by the luxurious Sky Lagoon or dinner in the capital), many of the invited test crew opted for some of Ugg’s everyday styles like the Classic Short Weather Hybrid, a walking shoe with a contrasting waterproof outsole. But nothing could steal the attention from the more performance-minded models
The big marketing undertaking comes as Ugg’s parent company Deckers reported record revenue and earnings in its latest fiscal quarter, which cited Ugg as a brand that drove “exceptional performance” (net sales at Ugg increased 28.1 percent to $610.5 million in the second quarter of 2023). While Ugg Extreme is one of the latest category additions for the brand, it’s part of a continuing overall lifestyle expansion effort that sees it move into new areas of growth beyond the core boot product. And with temperatures dipping across the hemisphere, the new line couldn’t have arrived at a better time.
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