Dr. Martens Is Ready for a Reboot

Dr. Martens is in the midst of a reboot — pun intended.

The company’s familiar chunky black boots with their bright yellow stitching became a common sight as sales surged during the pandemic — only to fizzle out in the years that followed.

After years struggling to get its business back on the right footing, with sales dropping 8 percent in 2024, the footwear label has been working to revamp its image. Under new chief executive Ije Nwokorie, the brand is now focused on reigniting demand for its core boots and spark consumers’ interest in its other products.

As it stands, the company shows early signs of stabilising. In the 26 weeks through Sept. 28, revenue inched up about 1 percent compared with the same period last year.

“We’re not redefining, we’re refining,” said Carla Murphy in her first interview since taking over as Dr. Martens’ chief brand officer in July.

That process begins with re-anchoring the brand in its origins while making that story relevant to a broader customer base, Murphy said. This strategy takes form in the brand’s new two-story London flagship, which opens on Thursday on Brewer Street in the city’s buzzy Soho neighbourhood.

Meant to be the most elevated physical expression of Dr. Martens to date, the space leans heavily into heritage and craft, channelling the workshop atmosphere that defined the brand’s early years. There’s leather seating with stitching that emulates the stitches in the brand’s iconic soles. A lit-up display of the brand’s signature products is accompanied by a visual breakdown of how they’re constructed. In a red-tiled corner, the store highlights its “Made in England” offerings, the words spelled out in contrasting white tiles on the floor.

Meanwhile cultural programming is built into the store’s architecture. A dedicated space highlights community partners and makers: Second Best is the inaugural resident, with customised boots and its own apparel; a Metallica residency is set to follow. There’s a bar for repairs, restoration and customisation, the first permanent version of the service, while the upper level houses a café operated by London enterprises Dusty Knuckle bakery and The Luminary. The shop will also host screenings, talks, listening sessions and workshops intended to give people reasons to return even when they’re not shopping.

Importantly, the store showcases the full range of Dr. Martens’ products, including its new bags and small leather goods, an exclusive Brewer St collection only available on site, as well as limited-edition collaborations with brands such as Marc Jacobs and MM6.

“Stores are the brand’s best chance to represent brand identity as they see fit ,” said Alison Lygo, a retail equity research director at Deutsche Numis, who noted that much of what Dr. Martens is doing today is focused on showcasing the breadth of its brand.

For Murphy, the brand’s new trajectory is as much about cultural clarity as commercial correction. “Sometimes brands forget to look at themselves enough,” she said. “We have really high recognition, but maybe not as much mental availability [for consumers] because we haven’t connected all the dots beyond the boot.”

The company still faces obstacles to overcome. In the US, its biggest growth engine, it expanded too quickly during Covid, opening locations that no longer aligned with shifting footfall patterns, and ran into inventory management issues that left wholesale partners with excess stock they struggled to clear. Now, the company is working to correct those errors.

Dr. Martens “didn’t really work with wholesale partners in terms of marketing and products on a particularly collaborative basis earlier,” Lygo said, making the new focus on rebuilding those mid-term relationships “a good thing.”

The new tariffs are also a major challenge. The company is absorbing part of the cost this year rather than raising prices sharply and plans to offset the remainder next year through modest price adjustments and cost efficiencies.

But the work is yielding results. The US returned to mid-single-digit growth in the first half of Dr. Martens’ 2025 fiscal year. The pace of Europe’s decline slowed, while Asia saw small gains in store traffic.

Murphy said the company hopes to expand a version of the new London store concept to New York in the coming year, followed by other key cities in Europe and Asia.

The goal for now, she added, is to rebuild desire by returning to what made the brand meaningful in the first place.

“When a brand’s story is the same outside and inside, that’s where the magic happens,” she said. “We’re deep in the execution of the plan now and the brand is in motion for its next chapter.”