Hi Starter Story I’m Dane Jensen Founder of Sock Club. We design and knit and ship custom socks. We’ve built our supply chain from the ground up. Sourcing cotton from the southeastern United States and partnering with yarn spinners and sock mills throughout North Carolina to create a beautiful finished product.

Our clients rely on us to make them a unique corporate gift that they can give to their customers as a thank you for their business. We’re a corporate gift company that specializes in one product at the moment. We’ve been in business for 10 years and have been doing more than 10 million in sales for multiple years.

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Tell us about what you’ve been up to! Has the business been growing?

Since the last time we spoke with Starter Story we’ve dealt with the curveball that COVID-19 threw our way. We definitely saw business wind down quickly but we were able to pivot and use our expertise of partnering with vendors and building supply chains and delivering to customers to sell hand sanitizer and masks. We were able to make up with a lot of our lost sales by rolling up our sleeves and solving problems when people needed it most. People often forget that a well-functioning economy can be super helpful in times of crisis. It’s much easier to pivot people already working on delivering a product to a new product than to start from scratch. This is a dark example from history but Germany didn’t think much of America before America entered the war because they saw America as a country just focused on producing frivolous consumer goods but America was able to pivot a lot of that production to wartime goods which proved vital to winning the war. We were very happy to pivot our production to essential items that could help fight the pandemic.

Along with pivoting to new products during the pandemic we also focused a lot on the parts of the business we could control. We focused on technology and building. We built systems that would help us scale when the world returned to normal. We built a customer portal that extends our CRM and makes our communication with our clients higher resolution and makes our sales and design teams more effective.

We’re now in our busiest season and we’re back to the growth we were experiencing preCOVID. We’re not experiencing the same supply chain issues as the rest of the eCommerce world because our production is in America. But with all the growth we are getting we are pushing our America sock mills to their highest capacity and coming up with solutions to do even more. It’s exciting to be growing again.

What have been your biggest lessons learned in the last year?

The biggest lesson I’ve learned this year I think is a lesson we’re all learning. We can’t take the physical world for granted. Software has allowed us the ability to make a lot of things virtual but not everything. Our supply chains are important to providing us material well-being and more and more software isn’t going to solve all our problems.

We need to start working on building solutions that help us in the real world. Sock Club’s vendors and supply chain has been stretched this year and we’re grateful everyday for them. We’re also working with them everyday to come up with solutions so we can continue to deliver for our customers.

What’s in the plans for the upcoming year, and the next 5 years?

We’re back to being a growing business so lots of our plans just deal with meeting demand. That involves growing our team. We need more developers, salespeople, and designers to provide our customers a great experience. We’re also investing a lot of capital into growing our knitting capacity infrastructure. We’re working closely with our vendors so they can do more and we can meet demand. We call these tasks of maintaining and keeping up with the growing business “feeding the beast.” That’s gonna take most of our time but we also dream about the new things we’re gonna do which we call “ugly babies.”

One of our ugly babies is finding product number two. Socks have been an incredible custom product. Our customers have found so many use cases for them. Any use case that a custom shirt might fulfill (merch, promotional item, corporate gift) we’ve seen our customers use socks for. We’re testing new products to see if we can find another product with as much reach as socks. Once we find this product we’ll build out a supply chain just like we did for socks.

Broadly speaking the other ugly baby is building a software product that makes it easy for our customers and our designers to collaborate and design a product together. We want to help customers who are time-strapped with professional design to get them to a custom product that looks better than anything they could imagine but is also exactly what they want. I see two gaps in the market here. One being software focused on making a design where someone is directing a professional and the other being software dedicated to making product design.

Have you read any good books in the last year?

I think Working Backwards has been the most influential book that our team has read this year. It gives a great framework for how to pitch and invent a new business idea. Creating an internal PR the way Amazon does it that is water-tight is difficult. We all have new ideas but I don’t think we all scrutinize them with the intensity of an internal PR. That’s why doing the internal PR and working backwards from the customer is so impactful.

We need to start working on building solutions that help us in the real world.

Advice for other entrepreneurs who might be struggling to grow their business?

Start. Just do it (thanks Nike). Go find your first customer. Sell them something and figure out how to deliver.

Are you looking to hire for certain positions right now?

We’re always looking for great people. If you’re an ambitious person who wants to learn about eCommerce and making and delivering real products send me your resume [email protected]

I know specifically right now we are looking for a Director of Ecommerce, Senior Account Managers, Designers, etc. You can find all our open positions here.

Where can we go to learn more?

If you have any questions or comments, drop a comment below