All right, we're gonna get going here with our next presentation. Twenty years ago, at the 2004 ICR conference, which was in Carlsbad, California, was the first time we had private companies participate, one of which was Crocs. I don't know what the CEO at the time, Ron Snyder, presented. I don't know what the reaction was, but I don't think anybody, including Ron, envisioned that 20 years later, this would be a $4 billion revenue company with $3 billion, you know, the Crocs brand alone. So an amazing 20 years. To tell you more about recent developments, as well as the future, we have Andrew Rees, CEO, and Anne Mehlman, CFO. I'll turn it over to Andrew.
Thank you, Brendon. I appreciate that, and the mostly historical references. Good morning, everybody. Thrilled to be here to tell you a little bit more about Crocs, and we really start off with the announcement we put out this morning. So, I'm gonna go through essentially most of the elements of this slide. The rest of the presentation will be a little briefer, but we have a lot of exciting news to share from our fourth quarter. So we finished the year 2023 with about $3.95 billion in revenue, as Brendon referenced, over 11% year-on-year growth, and exceeding the high end of our prior guidance. The Crocs brand is expected to grow during 2023 by 13%.
I think an extraordinary growth rate, given what was a, I think, you know, mostly a pretty difficult consumer environment, so we're very proud of that. HEYDUDE brand represented about $950 million of revenue for the year. If you remember, we bought HEYDUDE two years ago. At that point, it was a $580 million revenue company. So we're extremely proud of the trajectory that we've seen from the HEYDUDE brand. From the fourth quarter alone, revenues of $260 million, up 1%, ahead of our prior guidance, right? So we've guided the quarter to be down between -1% and -4%, so nicely ahead of that prior guidance.
Crocs led the charge with about 10% revenue growth during that period, and HEYDUDE down about 19% as anticipated and ahead of our guidance that we provided for the quarter. So in summary, we felt like we had a really strong holiday season. It played out pretty much as we thought it would. We thought it was gonna be a promotional difficult environment. It played out like that, and we were very pleased with the plans that we had in place. They worked extraordinarily well, and I think we're very well-positioned. As we look forward to 2024, I'll say one more thing with on 2023.
As we look at our full year profit expectations, we believe that will be a little bit ahead of the prior guidance that we'd issued, and we'll be in excess of 27%. So as you kind of think about the Crocs brand or the Crocs company, it's super important to remember this is a highly profitable company. We have systemically very high margins. We're very profitable. We generate very high operating returns and very high cash flows. During the quarter, we also had very strong free cash flow generation. We were able to pay down $277 million of debt, as well as completing $25 million of share buybacks. Anne will talk more about our capital allocation strategy for the future later.
And as we kind of think about the rounding out the quarter and going into 2024, we see things like our inventory position, both the inventories we own and the inventories we have in channel, and both of our brands be in extremely good shape. So in summary, very proud of our performance during 2023. Very pleased with our fourth quarter execution, and super excited about our prospects for the future. So kind of stepping a little bit back from the immediate and thinking about the broader prospects of investing in Crocs, Inc. company, I think there's a lot of extremely compelling reasons to do that.
One, we're a global leader in the casual footwear space with two iconic brands, and we're playing in what we believe is about a $160 billion casual footwear market on a global basis. We're extremely diversified. We're diversified across brands, we're diversified across channels, and we're diversified across geography. And as we look back at 2023, that's clearly helped us. We see a more difficult environment in some places and a bullish environment in others, and we can funnel our resources and our investments to make sure that we can capitalize upon that. We have a very durable profit engine, so we're extremely profitable. That profitability is really driven by systematically high gross margins, especially on the Crocs side, but also on the HEYDUDE side.
And then, I would say extremely diligent control of SG&A allows us to generate high profits and high cash flow. And I think the fundamental proposition, which both of our brands go to market with, and I'll talk a little bit more about this later, is extremely strong. We're leaning into some of the most important, consumer purchase drivers, and we give the consumer incredible value. I think the vast majority, there's maybe a tiny portion of our product that sells for over $100. The vast majority of our product sells at a very approachable price point, extremely important in this kind of consumer environment. And then lastly, but not least, we have a great management team.
You know, I've been at the company now for a long period of time, Anne is a five-year veteran as our CFO, and over the years, we've built up a very strong management team. We're also able to attract extremely strong talent from other brands as they go through potentially more difficult times. So I think we feel very confident in our team's ability to manage the company on a go-forward basis. So to kind of touch on a few of those points, scale is super important. I think it's super important in many industries, but it's very important in the footwear industry. So Crocs is a leader in the casual footwear space, with $3.95 billion in sales last year, anticipation to grow this year.
We're a scale player in the casual footwear environment, as illustrated by this slide. In terms of operating margins, I've mentioned this a few times, that's because we're super proud of this. We'll have greater than 27% operating margins in 2023. And I think, you know, one thing that we do hear frequently from the investment community, is that, "You have extraordinary margins. How could you possibly sustain those?" Well, I would emphasize we have sustained them for the last three or four years, right? So this is not a one-year number. This is a number that we've sustained over a period of time, and we intend to continue to sustain it into the future, even while making substantial investments in our business this year. We'll talk more about that in a moment.
From a market point of view, this is some of our own data that we've accumulated. If you can look at the footwear space, the footwear industry, it's a big industry on a global basis. And I think one of the things that's extremely powerful about our brands is we think they will be—they are global and will be global brands. We're accessing today, about half of the casual footwear market. We think about the casual footwear market on a global basis being a little over $300 billion. We have products that compete and play in about half of that. So we're focused on about a $160 billion market.
So we have a lot of runway for growth and a lot of headroom in our existing business before even contemplating, diversifying into other businesses. So, we think there's a lot of close in and very accessible growth for the brands that we have. Our portfolio is aligned with what we think are very long-term, durable, and global consumer trends, and we've seen a number of these play out very strongly over the last five years. The consumer is looking for casual, right? This is probably one of the most formal audiences, that you'll see, and people are wearing jackets, people are wearing dress shoes.
If you're out in the average population, if you're going out to dinner, or if you're shopping in the mall, you see the consumer is extremely casual, and they're getting more and more casual over time. The consumer's looking for comfort. There's no reason for them to tolerate uncomfortable, and you can see that in our category. You can see that in many adjacent categories, particularly the apparel category. So they're looking for comfort. So if you can deliver casual comfort, give the consumer opportunities for personalization, such as we do on Crocs, and you can sell them at an extremely value-oriented price point, less than $100, here in the U.S. We think the...
We're positioned both of our brands against what are very long-term, durable purchase drivers for the consumer. And then increasingly we know that that younger audience, that teen consumer, is particularly important in terms of attracting them and having them represent your brands and promote your brands. They're extremely active. I'm sure many of you have teenage children, and many of you potentially also study the teen audience. They're very, very vocal. They're avid, fanatical users of social media. They promote the brands that they love, and they hate the brands that they hate. Both of our brands are performing extremely well.
If we look at recent surveys that highlight the footwear brands that resonate with the teen consumer, you can see Crocs positioned at number 6, and right behind it, HEYDUDE, which is our second brand. Diversified sources of growth. So we kind of think about diversification on lots of different axes. Number one, we have two brands. I think a number of years ago, we were talking to the investment community, and they would talk about how we were overly focused on one brand and key silhouettes within that brand. We represented a risk, and frankly, we agree, that did represent a risk. So we made an acquisition two years ago that allowed us some substantive diversification from a brand perspective.
But we're also diversified from a channel perspective, about 50% DTC and about 50% wholesale. We think both channels are super important, right? We're not planning to be a DTC company. We're not planning to be a wholesale company. We are planning to leverage both channels of distribution to effectively reach a very large consumer audience. From a geographical perspective, we're also diversified with about close to 40% of our business from international markets. That's everything outside of the United States. And as we think about going forward, we foresee the international portion of our business growing ahead of the domestic portion of our business, which I think gives us access to some fast-growing and also extremely attractive markets in the international sphere.
From a digital penetration, I think one of the themes that we'll probably hear a lot about here at this conference. I think digital was a nice winner again during the holiday season. We continue to see the consumer preferring digital interaction with their brands, and we continue to benefit from that and have a very strong digital business. The other point is an established footprint across the world. We're not a U.S. company that's planning to build an international business. We have a large international business that spans the world, and as you can see, that some of that international diversification really showed up with higher growth that we're seeing in Asia, 37% growth in our Asian business. I think this number is through the end of Q3. It's 12 months through the end of Q3.
We haven't yet disclosed Q4, but we had great growth in Asia during Q4. That was driven a lot by China. For those who've been following the story for a while, we've been on a multi-year pathway to rebuilding and repositioning our China business. I would say that started to really show fruit during 2023 with extraordinary growth in China, but also other important markets like South Korea and Australia were strong in our Asian business. So, near-term catalysts. So what we think is gonna happen in the future, and things that it'll be important to think about and pay attention to. We believe we have continued strong growth opportunities within the Crocs brand. We'll talk a little bit about kind of guidance later.
But if we think about the Crocs brand, that, that growth opportunity is gonna be driven by a continued very high cadence of newness, innovation, and driving new product into the marketplace. Very strong marketing, particularly social marketing, that we put behind, that product to, ensure that it resonates with new consumers. And we also have, I think, the opportunity to slightly broaden our product portfolio over time. To date, we've been super focused on, clogs, sandals, and personalization. We think there's an opportunity to, to broaden that, somewhat as we go forward. Global, continues to be super important. As we look forward, our expectations is that our international business, particularly Asia, for Crocs, will continue to flourish.
We will also be doing the work, and some of this will be hard work, but we'll be doing the work to introduce the HEYDUDE brand to select international markets. We believe it's relevant in a range of international markets. It starts from zero. It starts with zero revenue, and it starts with zero brand awareness. But we've every reason to believe that that's a pathway that will be fruitful over time. From a HEYDUDE perspective, we will have a very acute focus on channel segmentation and ensuring that significant wholesale partners here in the United States have differentiated products on their shelves and an opportunity to compete effectively with each other. I think that's something we have not done as well as we could have done for the last 12 months.
We'll be looking to enhance that over the next year. From a gross margin standpoint, we feel very solid or very confident in our future gross margins both on the Crocs side and also within HEYDUDE. We will be lapping a number of gross margin drags from a HEYDUDE perspective, namely our distribution infrastructure and some of the things that we had to wrestle with there, but also some pricing opportunities we have with HEYDUDE, where we were competing with the gray market historically. So we think we've got strengthening gross margins within Crocs. And then from a growth perspective for HEYDUDE, we'll... We opened 5 outlet stores in the fourth quarter. We're very happy with the performance of those stores.
We see an opportunity to continue to develop our omni-channel business for HEY DUDE. Historically, it's been mainly focused on wholesale and digital, and we think there's a broadening distribution footprint opportunity with HEYDUDE . We'll be thoughtful and careful about that, but we think that's pretty compelling as well. And then from a capital allocation, I don't wanna steal too much of Anne's thunder, but we generate a lot of cash as a company. So we have the opportunity to leverage that cash to continue to pay down, especially some of our variable debt, but also return cash to shareholders as we buy back shares in the future. So I think there's a number of important near-term catalysts.
If I transition from those catalysts to some of our long-term enterprise priorities, I just wanna highlight a few, and then I'll turn it over to Anne. We remain confident in the $5 billion dollar opportunity for the Crocs brand. We see this as a scale brand. And really, what we're trying to say there, is this is a big brand on a global basis. Scale is important in this business. This brand is relevant to a large number of consumers around the world, and we're very confident that that opportunity continues to exist for the Crocs brand. We're gonna return HEYDUDE to a more profitable, consistent growth trajectory. We've had a very strong growth year in 2022, and a plateau year in 2023.
I think as we kind of have the brand under our portfolio, we're able to cadence the investments that we're making and the strategies that were put in place to provide, you know, more consistent, but we think, you know, more consistent and long-term durable growth. We're committed to our maintaining best-in-class margins. You know, the backbone of that strong operating margin and that high cash flow generation is those gross margins. We're committed to maintaining those through product innovation, through pricing, through managing our supply chain effectively, through controlling our inventories, both on the Crocs side, and we see sequential improvements from a HEY DUDE perspective. And then as we kind of look at our operating margins, I think we've talked historically about being a 26% plus operating margin company.
As we look at this year, we plan to be a little bit below that. We don't think... You know, we think we're gonna have very high margins on a go-forward basis, but we see a lot of opportunities. We've gained a lot of share this year. We see a lot of opportunities to invest in our company, invest in our capabilities, and so to improve the probability and sustain our future growth rates. So we will be a little bit below that this year, and we don't see the need to be at 26%+ each and every year. We do see an opportunity to continue to be a very high profit-generating company for the for the sustained future. So, with that, I think... Oh, I got one more important slide.
So, if we just sort of step back a little bit, so since 2017, this company has generated $4.9 billion, I'm gonna call that $5.5 billion of shareholder value at a annualized TSR of 39%. So I think, a pretty extraordinary performance over that time period, and we see many opportunities to sustain that value, that, that creation, that shareholder value creation, into the future. So with that, thank you very much. I'm gonna hand it over to Anne.
Thank you, Andrew. Good morning. So as Andrew just talked about, we've created significant value at the enterprise level. We've expanded revenue and profit growth year-over-year for the last six years, and the enterprise is now generating over $1 billion in operating income. We have best-in-class profitability, combined with our asset-Light Model, allows us to generate significant free cash flow as well, which we will talk about in a few slides about how our capital allocation priorities shake out. We do expect 2023 to be a record year for the enterprise, as well as the Crocs brand. We had a good year, almost $4 billion in revenue, 11% revenue growth, and that was really on the back of a strong Q4.
We were able to raise expectations for both revenue and operating margins, and the operating margin beat was really based on strong gross margins as we saw, improvement in both brands, and saw a lot of improvement around HEYDUDE gross margins as we stopped and pulled back, competing a little bit on the gray market channel, and are seeing those strategies start to culminate in better gross margins overall. From, as I just mentioned, we had six years of Crocs brand revenue growth at a 20% CAGR, and we hit the $3 billion mark. When you think about this, really excited about Q4. We saw really good international growth.
We saw growth in every region, so both in our domestic business in North America as well as our international markets, and we saw all of our key geographies grow, which is Japan, India, China, Western Europe, U.S., and South Korea. From a Crocs brand highlights, from a quarter perspective, we ended up almost 10% year-over-year, so that was above the high end of guidance. We had broad-based growth, as I just mentioned. We were also a top five footwear brand in key strategic accounts in holiday in North America. We were in line with promotions. I would say promotions were slightly better than last year in our DTC channels. We ended the year, most importantly, with really healthy channel inventory, as well as really clean inventory on our own balance sheet.
From a full year perspective, again, hitting that $3 billion mark, we had another year of double-digit brand growth and broad global growth. A couple of key highlights to call out: we had continued strength across Asia, notably in China. I think we grew over 80% in Q4 in China, so culminating in a record revenue for China, but yet China is still under-penetrated compared to the rest of the world. So still a big long-term opportunity. We also had triple-digit growth in Australia and strong double-digit growth in a lot of our other international markets. Our sandal revenues hit our target of $400 million that we laid out, which is great.
That's a growth pillar we laid out for Crocs, and we had strong franchises that we introduced and continued to build on with our Echo, our Brooklyn, which I'm wearing, our core Classic, and a lot of our hype product, especially in our Asian markets. From a HEYDUDE perspective, we also exceeded the high end of guidance. You know, we really ended with clean inventories as well at HEYDUDE , both in-channel, and we've seen that inventory improve on our own balance sheet and exit the year in a very strong inventory position. We had about 55% of our revenues come from our DTC channels, so we're starting to really see that diversification from a channel perspective. We ended at $949 million of revenue, which makes HEYDUDE a solid scale brand.
We drove brand awareness from 18% to 32%, so that's a really good milestone for us. We took proactive action to improve the channel inventory, which we feel like we did, and we also elevated pricing on digital, which, as I mentioned earlier, supported growth margin expansion sequentially into Q4. We also have closed over 50% of our non-strategic distribution and pulled back on digital rights, and we are very excited for better product and channel segmentation in 2024 and long-term prospects for HEYDUDE. So focusing now on 2024, we have laid out our initial guidance framework. So as Andrew mentioned, we're gonna have 4%-6% growth on Crocs, flat to slightly up on HEYDUDE, which will put the enterprise at 3%-5%.
We do believe that our gross margins will be up next year. We think Crocs gross margins will be relatively stable, and HEYDUDE will improve, and they will improve sequentially throughout the year. Our adjusted operating margins will be approximately 25% as we invest those improved gross margins into SG&A to support our long-term future growth. A couple key call-outs as you think about shaping, as we mentioned, coming out of Q3, HEYDUDE will be softer in the first half of the year, especially Q1 will be the low water mark based on what we see in our wholesale order books and will improve sequentially, both from a revenue and gross margin. From a Crocs standpoint, it should be a pretty normalized year. We are changing our upcoming segments as we transform from a mono-brand company.
We've now owned HEYDUDE for two years, and so we're changing our segments to be HEYDUDE brand and Crocs brand. We will still provide revenue insight by both, international and domestic for the brands, as well as DTC and wholesale for both brands. You will still have your revenue disaggregations, but our formal segments from a profit standpoint will be by brand. We did issue an 8-K, where you can see that, how that lays out, from a segment perspective. I think if I can talk about the most important slide, if there's one slide to focus on in this deck, we generate a massive amount of free cash flow.
We were able to pay down $665 million of debt this year, which puts us below our long-term leverage target at the high end of 1.5. We'll continue to deleverage this year, and if I just skip to our capital allocation priorities, brand growth investment, we're an Asset-Light Model. We'll focus on debt paydown this year as we pay down some of that variable rate debt and also returning capital to shareholders. That concludes our presentation. Thank you very much for your interest!