Starting A $525K/Month Custom Socks Business With The Fastest Shipping Speed
Hello! Who are you and what business did you start?
My name is Samuel Moses and I am the Founder and CEO of Sockrates Custom Socks. We specialize in producing the best high-quality custom socks, with an unbeatable 7-day turnaround for our B2B clients all over the world.
Our customers range from start-up companies to Fortune 500s like Google, Disney, and Netflix, in any field of work you can imagine. We have 10 dedicated full-time staff and we work tirelessly to provide our clients with the best service and product possible - which is our #1 obsession at Sockrates.
Our big differentiator in the market is that we produce our socks in a small town outside Milan, Italy - Castel Goffredo. Once named the “city of socks”, Castel Goffredo was a town built on making socks and hosiery. While a lot of manufacturing has moved overseas, a few generational sock-making families continue to run their family businesses and maintain that rich history.
Producing our custom socks in Italy is a huge advantage as all the yarn producers in Europe are so closely situated to each other. That ranges from huge manufacturers to specialty bespoke yarn providers, which is how we have access to such a huge range of colors very quickly. We turn around a batch of our custom socks for our clients in 7 calendar days, making us the fastest in the market.
We started Sockrates 4 years ago and we did 10-15 orders a month in Canada and the US. Today, we can expect anywhere from 150-350 orders a month from all over the world. Our major markets are the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, Australia, Israel, and Denmark.
What's your backstory and how did you come up with the idea?
I came out of business school in the early 2000s and began my career in Management Consulting. I was traveling a lot and working incredibly long hours and after a few years, I was starting to burn out. I left that firm and partnered with a business school professor helping build his market research firm.
After a trip to New York City to visit a client, I spotted a small men’s accessory store from Italy; Andrew’s Ties, and immediately fell in love with it. I contacted the head office in Milano, Italy, and got the rights to open a store in Toronto and a year later I opened a store in the financial district in downtown Toronto.
The store was a higher-end menswear store catering to executives in nearby businesses, which included banking, law, insurance, etc. and we sold neckties, pocket squares, socks, suspenders, bowties, and dress shirts.
After a few years of managing and running the retail store, I noticed that we only really catered to a pretty small demographic: higher-income men in the financial district. I wanted the store to be more accessible to others. At that time, a sock brand called Happy Socks was really popular and I reached out to them to carry their socks.
The sock idea was great because the sizing was unisex and the price point was lower, so that opened up a huge demographic we hadn’t seen before. I still remember the first day I put a suitcase in the front of the store with 50 pairs of socks and within an hour they were sold out. We eventually became one of the biggest sellers of Happy Socks in Canada and the store revenues grew quickly.
In 2012, I got married and as fortune had it, my wife had a strong advertising background. She took one look at Happy Socks in the store and saw how much we were selling and pushed me to create our brand, which we named Sockrates (Sock-RA-Teez) after the Greek philosopher.
The whole idea was to showcase what your socks say about your personality - Our original tagline was “know thy sock” a play on Socrates’ “know thyself”. During this time we produced the socks in China and used overseas designers to make designs for us, and we sold them in the store.
The socks were a tremendous hit because we had discovered what drew people into our store, and we realized people came in asking us over and over for something that just wasn’t available in the market yet. From there we opened a few temporary stores, pop-ups, and sold some socks into retail, all on the Sockrates brand.
This is when we learned the production side of the business. We started diving deeper into the details like paper weight for the labels, the number of needles in the sock, and the huge range of shipping options (ocean and air).
Being in the financial district led to the birth of our custom sock business. At the time, we had companies that would buy bulk orders of our socks to give out at events or as tradeshow giveaways (unbranded!).
We had so many companies around us that we interacted with daily, and a lot of these people were marketing, human resources, and event executives so it very naturally turned into them asking if we could produce socks with their logos, colors and branding.
We started to do these orders and realized that there was a really big need for this in the market. Companies loved that we took care of everything. We started out in retail so that one price - customer-focused mentality was there from the beginning. The shift from B2C to B2B was slow but it became apparent to us quickly that this was the route for us.
Today we service thousands of clients all over the world and have completely pivoted out of retail with offices in Boca Raton, Florida, and Toronto, Canada. Last year we shipped and delivered well over a million pairs of socks.
Take us through the process of building the first version of your product.
At Sockrates we are obsessed with making sure that every touch with the customer is a positive one from the minute they reach out, to when they receive their high-quality custom socks and beyond that. Every member of our closely-knit team works hard to ensure that we are exceeding client expectations.
The process begins with the client submitting our easy-to-fill form and sharing some details on what they want on their custom socks. We have worked hard on our website ensuring that most of the questions the client may have are answered right there, and we show our process and how easy it is to create branded custom socks for their company.
From there our Socktologists (project managers!) reach out to the client and introduce themselves. We collect the logos and colors from the client and then it moves to our design team who will produce a “sock board” of designs for them to look at.
The client goes back and forth with their project manager to get down to the final sock(s) designs and we attach a quantity to it. Once everyone’s happy we move the deal into production. We call this the first half of the deal.
After this, our designers will work with the team in Italy to source the threads we need based on the color books they both have. We source everything to the Pantone Matching System to ensure we are consistent with our results. After the yarns are attached and ordered by our VP of Design, Becky will send over the design to the factory in BMP format.
Becky programs every design stitch by stitch to make sure it is perfect for production. From there, our team in Italy threads the machines and starts pumping out the client's custom socks. The socks then go through a steaming process to get them flat and ready for packaging. Labels are put on, the socks are packed into our branded sock boxes and shipped directly to the client.
From the day we hand the design and artwork to the manufacturing team in Italy, to when we ship is 7 days. There are times during the busy season (which for us is October to December) when the client is in a rush that we ship in less than 7 days, but 7 days are usually so fast that the clients are in shock when they get their custom socks at their door.
The challenges we have faced over time and what we are continually working on within this custom socks business is making sure that whether we get 10 orders a month (in the early days) or 400 - that each client is getting the same quality work, both from a design perspective and a production one.
Staying consistent is so important to us and we are not interested in growth if this ingredient is not the major focus. At the end of the day, our clients; whether they’ve been with us from day 1 or it’s their first order, have trusted us with their brand and we want to make sure we live up to that on every order.
If we fall short, which can happen in rare circumstances - we do whatever it takes to make things right with our clients. But this is rare, and our amazing Google reviews speak for themselves!
Find a mentor or someone who you can speak to and run ideas by them in a constructive way - usually, it leads you down a better path than just doing quickly whatever comes into your head first.
Describe the process of launching the business.
No one would believe it, but the process of launching Sockrates came out of a pretty tragic event. In early 2018 our retail store was flooded by some construction that was happening nearby and it took close to 10 months to be rebuilt. That gave us time to focus on the business and look at Sockrates Custom Socks as a business that wasn’t just tied to our retail store.
Our store manager at the time, Becky, had already started working on the designs for companies for us - she is a graduate of a top art school in Canada (how convenient!) and we started to create the process of what we have today. This took a long time to perfect and even today we are continually improving it.
With custom products, the client must know exactly what they are getting and how the final product (sock and sock labels) will look and be delivered. Becky created the concept of design boards - before we were just showing drawings of socks stand-alone but she created this concept for Sockrates where we present 6-7 sock options to the client, and from there we started the conversation of what the client was looking.
We offer this to our clients with no obligation or commitment because we know that the first step for the client is to be wow’d by the designs - seeing their brand come alive via custom socks.
After being in necktie and accessory manufacturing in Italy, Becky and I decided that we would go to Italy to meet with sock factories. We wanted our product to be different from what the market was currently presenting and we knew that in Italy we would find that.
We found a family-owned factory in Castel Goffredo and we hit it off. It took time to get the program to be the well-oiled machine it is today, but the manufacturing team in Italy has always been so patient and the collaborative effort has been incredible. When Becky and I visit the factory annually there is a feeling of family as we have all grown this business together.
Today, Sockrates makes up over 90% of their business and when you walk into the factory you see the Sockrates logo and branding all over the machines. How amazing is that!
Up until that point, we were selling to clients in the store and word of mouth in Canada. Becky worked on putting up a website with a web developer and we got the first site up. It was quick and looking back not very good but it got the job done so that we could start advertising on it.
The main challenge we had was that we did not have a lot of sock samples to photograph. All of our socks went directly to the client so getting a lot of samples to us took time and energy and it always seemed like we were trying to catch up on samples.
Today, in my office I have around 5,000 sock samples across thousands of designs to hand out to potential clients and website photographers and I think back to the days when I had 5 branded socks to photograph and make a site out of - it has been quite the journey!
After the site launched we started advertising on Google and leads started to come in right away. In 2018 there were not many competitors and what we were doing was very unique. Companies reached out from all over and we started working on our process of getting them sock boards and finalizing the job.
My wife and I made a decision that we would self-finance the business from the beginning. I didn’t want to take on investors even though I had a few offers. I felt that this had to be done with Becky and I working hard and making it happen and we had to trust each other every step of the way.
I had to trust Becky on everything design related and she had to trust me on the overall operations and strategy behind making Sockrates a success.
We quickly outgrew the process we had. Becky used to run credit cards in her house on the extra POS machine from the store. Looking back it is very funny to think about as now the process to order is so much tighter and streamlined. We had to massage and rethink a lot of how we were handling the increasing orders so that we didn’t change the experience for the clients (while also maintaining our sanity).
When you start a business there is no substitute for working hard and being focused on your business.
We learned a lot in the first year of launching Sockrates and I’ll never forget it - neither will my wife because I would talk about Sockrates nonstop (She’d probably tell you I still do) because it was like this baby that was growing and we had to really learn quickly as the clients were coming in fast with a lot of requests - some of which we had never heard before because we were so new to the game.
Since launch, what has worked to attract and retain customers?
The number one thing we do to retain our clients is to take care of them every step of the way. We try to make sure that we are always doing the heavy lifting, so the whole experience is a positive one. If something goes wrong, which it can at times, we take ownership and do whatever we can to make it right.
Showing the customers that you have their back has been the reason we get so many referrals and this approach has worked well for us.
In the early days, we really relied on Google Ads for the majority of our leads. With not many competitors in the space, companies from all over the world would find us and we would continually optimize our system to make ordering custom socks easy for them.
I felt from the beginning this was a critical success factor for us - making sure the process from reaching out to ordering is simple, making sure delivery is simple, and making sure our pricing model is simple. We don’t have any add-on fees and there are no rush fees, there is one price to your door no matter where you are in the world.
I have got tremendous feedback from clients telling me that the reason they felt Sockrates was the right fit for them, was because of our all-in pricing model and the simplicity of how easy the ordering process was. B2B clients are busy and have a lot of things they need to take care of so designing and delivering custom socks can’t be a hassle.
After about 2 years we realized that there was a lot more competition in the market. At that time we had serviced around 3,000 corporate clients and we were getting a lot of re-orders, but we wanted to not focus only on Google Ads, so we started to shift our focus to SEO.
We hired a web developer who focused on optimizing our site (we’ve rebuilt it 4 times now, we just launched the latest version in May!) and work on the way we communicate on it. We show a lot of examples of our work, but the main message is our phenomenal manufacturing team in Italy, the quality of the design work, and course the ease with which we make this for the client.
Recently I have been going on a lot of podcasts telling our story which has also been a strong driver of traffic, and we are focusing more on asking for more reviews after a job is complete and sending out thank-you gifts to our major accounts. We’ve even started working on how to improve the experience of receiving your custom socks. We always think it should feel like Christmas when you crack that box open!
Another strategy that has worked well for us is I do some deep dive with some of our bigger clients as to what we can improve on. It is an honest conversation about what they like about working with us and where we can improve. I do around 3-5 of these quick interviews a month and we’ve benefited from them.
On our team calls I share the feedback from the clients and we incorporate it back into our operations. A lot of the clients emailed me a few months later and were impressed that I acted on their advice and were happy to be part of the process of growth at Sockrates.
How are you doing today and what does the future look like?
Right now we are definitely in a growth phase. Our month-over-month growth rate is over 50% and our number of requests is going up every month. We’ve been lucky to be profitable from the beginning but also have been investing a lot of resources into our tech, systems, and people to continue to grow while maintaining healthy margins.
We find that the average customer orders 3.25 times during their journey with us (so far) and every eight customers will refer someone new to us which we close around 65% of the time. So we know that having happy customers from the beginning makes for a great growth model.
From a leads standpoint, we welcome 75% of all leads that come into our website as new Sockrates customers, who we refer to as our Sockrates family.
We currently have ten full-time employees which include Designers, an SEO Growth Manager, Sales Associates, Project Managers, and a Web Developer. We all work pretty closely together and communicate well, and we are all focused on doing our jobs as well as we can given the pressures of the work. Our business is very time sensitive - so things have to move at a fast pace to meet deadlines and manage client expectations.
We’ve grown in the European market a lot and currently, the UK is one of our biggest markets. They love the Made in Italy quality product and trust it. Plus, shipping into the UK and EU from Italy is relatively easy for us to do compared to our competitors who produce in the US or China.
We are focused now on expanding our reach fully into the EU as I believe there is so much space for us to add value there. That comes with great SEO and social proofing as the EU market is a different region to sell in than North America.
One fascinating aspect of our business is that in 95% of the work we do we do not receive the product other than a few samples of the final job afterwards. That makes our communication and relationship with our manufacturing team so important. We are in daily contact with them and they are really on board with the high standards we have for our clients.
Over the years they have learned how picky we are with the packaging labels and socks and even how we pack the boxes to ensure a smooth delivery and optimal experience for the end users.
Through starting the business, have you learned anything particularly helpful or advantageous?
I learned the value of having a strong team around you. Earlier in my career I felt like a one-man show doing everything on my own and making things happen, but with Sockrates it is the team and system that creates all the value.
Our team works and communicates so well together which is such a great thing to experience, especially when the majority of us work remotely. We have open communication which helps us to fix problems quickly and move forward to grow along with the business demands.
What I also learned is to embrace making small changes, which can have compounding effects over time. Sometimes the smallest changes can mean so much for a business. For example, when we changed the website and added a section on the 3 steps to make a custom sock order, we saw great results.
It helped demonstrate the ease of ordering high-quality branded custom socks, which up until then might have seemed a little daunting. That doesn’t seem like a massive change but it made such a huge difference for us.
Also, we are always improving our sock boards to the clients so it's communicating better by adding the date, version numbers, Pantone numbers, and final quantity, and sectioning out labels if there is more than one on the job - this again seems small but makes a big difference in client communications to avoid errors down the road. When you do 150-300 orders a month, anything you can do to avoid oversights is huge!
When you start a business there is no substitute for working hard and being focused on your business. I used to always think of other business ideas and what I found in Sockrates was focusing on our core business was really where my head had to be at all times with no distractions.
The landscape for any business is always so competitive and you can’t compete working 50% of the time you need to be all in and dedicated. That is when the magic will start to happen - years and years of working hard on your business with other people who are as dedicated as you are.
Sometimes clients ask us how we created a passionate culture around the custom socks at Sockrates Custom Socks and I tell them Becky and I are just very hard-working and passionate. I think there’s a kind of osmosis with that where that passion leaks into every other aspect of the business - we just don’t know any other way but to work hard and believe in what we do.
What platform/tools do you use for your business?
For us, Salesforce is huge. We’re on Salesforce all day long. Everything comes in and goes out via Salesforce. When you are managing multiple projects at a time, it is super important that the communication from our project managers to our designers is super clear and focused. We manage it via stages in Salesforce and it works well.
All email communication from the clients is stored in Salesforce so anyone who is working on a project can see it and act on it if needed. 98% of our orders are all email based so we have a log of everything being asked for and requested from the clients.
When we started we were using Airtable for project management on designs but we outgrew that. Now every client deal goes into Salesforce from before they order and after all tracking information goes in there and has a lot of automation behind it. Adding automation to our systems has been key for us.
We use Shippo to ship out client samples within the US and Canada (for Europe our manufacturing team in Italy sends it out) and we use Wave Accounting to keep our books in order. We try to keep it simple but as things have grown and we’ve had to adapt to stay organized and efficient.
For emailing, we prefer the manual approach where we email our clients individually. We don’t mass email and we break it down by month. Usually, we reach out to clients every 6 months after they order and we email older clients a few times a year.
We tell them about the new hot sock of the season (retro, ankle, wool, etc) and sometimes we’ll even send them some new fresh designs to look at. Overall we try to strike a healthy balance between providing value in our emails and not bombarding them with too much information.
What have been the most influential books, podcasts, or other resources?
When I was in business school in my twenties, I read hundreds of business books. Literally every new book that came out I read it. Once a week for years.
I probably read fifty books alone on Walmart and another twenty-five on Coca-Cola. I was really into it. The book that influenced me the most I think in my career is a book called The Impossible Just Takes A Little Longer by Art Berg. His story and journey is just so motivating and humbling, that when I read it in my twenties I internalized it, and took action from it.
Another book I read once a year is How to Win Friends and Influence People and How to Stop Worrying and Start Living by Dale Carnegie. I love his approach and you can’t read it enough. Of course, I’ll read Inc. and Entrepreneur magazine cover-to-cover but that is a given, even my kids know to leave me alone when I am reading those!
Advice for other entrepreneurs who want to get started or are just starting out?
I think it is important for entrepreneurs whether they are starting out, or they are more seasoned, to have a person they trust and respect as a sounding board for their ideas. There is no initiative that we undertake at Sockrates that Becky and I, and other members of our team discuss and delve into as a team, and having that support system for Sockrates is so important.
Find a mentor or someone who you can speak to and run ideas by them in a constructive way - usually, it leads you down a better path than just doing quickly whatever comes into your head first.
I also think, at the same time, it is important not to overthink things. When we started Sockrates we figured out things on the go. It wasn’t realistic to know everything up front so we dove into a lot of areas of the business which at the time was new for us.
We made mistakes along the way but these mistakes led us to where we are today. The mistakes are always an important part of the journey. Becky always tells me that if we look back a few years and you’re not cringing at what you see, then we didn't grow from the past as much as we should have.
Are you looking to hire for certain positions right now?
As we are growing, we are always looking for talented people. Right now we are looking for a few more Designers and Project Managers.
If you are passionate about working for a growing company in those areas we’d love to hear from you. Email me directly and let’s talk about you joining the Sockrates team.
Where can we go to learn more?
- Website
- Email: [email protected] or [email protected]
- Blog
- Phone: 1-833-383-8817
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