Disrupting Comfort For Sockcess: Leading Disruptive Production Strategy With Samuel Moses
Imagine ditching the boring office grind and designing killer custom socks from anywhere in the world. That's the life at Sockrates, a company run by the awesome Sam Moses, the founder and CEO of Sockrates, an innovative custom promotional sock provider. Sam unveils his leading disruptive production strategy for creating custom socks with a remote and passionate team. They also explored the impact of automation and AI on business processes, the challenges of managing a remote, creative team, and the importance of maintaining a human touch in their design process. Lastly, they delved into the changing business landscape, the decline of traditional craftsmanship, and the need for a work culture that fosters engagement and motivation. Socrates proves you can build a successful company with a killer culture and a happy team, even if everyone's not in the same building. Who needs cubicles when you've got comfy socks and a passion for awesome design?
You can find more about Sam and Sockrates here: https://sockratescustom.com
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Disrupting Comfort For Sockcess: Leading Disruptive Production Strategy With Samuel Moses
On the show, it's my great pleasure to welcome Samuel Moses to the show. Sam is the CEO of Sockrates Custom Socks company which allows people to get custom socks for their businesses. It's a B2B operation. You're talking about businesses that want to buy at least a minimum of maybe 60 pairs, but usually a hundred or more pairs of socks that have their custom logos, and custom designs, and get them fairly quickly. It's pretty amazing. He has a very clean modern operation. We discuss how he came about doing that, the lessons he's learned along the way, and a little bit of his vision for the future, which I find very insightful and interesting. I hope you do the same. It's my great pleasure to welcome Samuel Moses to the show.
Sockrates is a cool name. I like that. It got the intellect and the practical all there in one name.
Thank you. I got to compliment you because 50% of people call it Sockrates. The fact that you got it the first time, I'm pretty impressed because I usually have to make that correction, but you got it. Thanks for that.
That's like Bill and Ted's excellent adventure.
The word Sockrates we're based on the philosopher. What do your socks say about you? It was the original thought behind the name. Also, it's catchy, cute, and fun, but at the same time, it has an intelligence to it and then professionalism to it. I do believe that our name encompasses who we are and how we work.
I love it as a brand. It's funny. It's thinking about socks. As guys, sometimes, we might feel like our fashion choices are a little muted. We got a shirt, pants, maybe you have a jacket, maybe you have a tie. In today's world, the times you're wearing coats and ties are getting far and few between. What do you get to make a statement? The socks seem to be the last frontier of fashion and statements.
From Necktie To Socks
I started with the necktie world. I had a whole career there. As you can see, I'm not wearing a necktie now. When I got married, my wife thought that I slept in a necktie. I think since about five years now, I don't think I've put one on. That could be the transition to socks, but it is a product where you can differentiate yourself more than other products. Wearing a white shirt is just a white shirt. Polo shirts only have so much variation so it used to be the tie, the sock, and the belt. Now with guys wearing ties less for sure, even belts are about the same as they were. It's like the sock still stands out as that one little piece that a guy has or people have in general to differentiate themselves when they get dressed in the morning.
My wife and I were recently on a trip and we were trying to buy for our loved ones. The guys, you know what they got?
Not much. Wallet, but how often do you change your wallet?
Socks. That's what we got. Different cool socks. Your idea is that people can be the designers of their socks.
We specifically focus on B2B. The only people using us and working with us generally are, there are some exceptions for people's weddings, companies who are doing runs of socks and turning their company into their own sock brands. Let’s say a company like Microsoft is going to a trade show, they want to hand out something to 2,000 people who will visit their booth. We take their logo and colors, we design them a colorful, fashion-forward sock. We add their label to it, which will say the Microsoft logo and everything, some information that they want to have that's specific to the show.
We then run the sock for them, and then it's their sock and they hand it out. It's like a custom run, specifically for B2B. Microsoft is an example of a very large company, but even smaller companies, dental offices, and smaller law firms. Anybody who wants to give thanks to their customer by giving them a gift and at the same time in a professional fashionable way, giving them something that they're going to wear, then when they wear it, they think about them. It's like a promotional item for companies. That's what it is.
Give thanks to your customers by giving them a gift professionally and fashionably.
It's an ability to get your brand. If somebody's wearing your socks, I'm sure that improves their resistance to going elsewhere.
That's exactly it. There's a share of mind. If the socks go in the top drawer, if I open my top drawer and I see your brand, I'm in your mind a little bit. We know that the average life of the socks when given is about 4 to 5 years, which is pretty high. You're in there for 4 to 5 years. Pen, notebook, these kinds of things, the life is not as long and it doesn't have the same impacts so we got something that you’re wearing the product.
It's in a drawer with a billion other pens and then you just pick it up and you don't even notice what it says on the pen anyway.
It's just the life of it's not there and it's overdone. It's like the sock stands out as a thing that it shares of mind, but also what I like about it and what other customers like about it is we do the one size fits most, so it's suitable for ladies and men. Promotional products, a lot of products are good for men, and a lot of products are good for ladies, sometimes finding that product that's good for both and fits both is hard. If you want to do a polo shirt, you have to be careful with the sizing as you deal with different sizes of people.
There's that. It's a great gift. It's a great gift item. We've had a lot of success with it. We entered the market, there weren't many players doing it. Now, of course, there's more. We have a lot of screen advantages. Definitely, a lot of copy, copycats we call them, but that's a compliment on its own. It's a fun product. After people buy it, they thank us and they're excited by it. We have a whole process that we set up of how we do the socks and how we produce it because when you're doing the volumes that we're doing, as fun as it is, it's not fun in regards to the operational side.
It has to be very professional and very well-knit. We have all of that and we produce it in Italy. It is like a higher-tier sock. Coming from the neckwear world, I respected Italy so much with their production. We decided to produce everything in Italy. We got the cost down to where we compete and it's the same price as what people are provided in China. We have our niche in the market where we show our expertise and we show our value very quickly.
Sam, how did you get into Socks and Sockrates?
I had a high-end retail store in downtown Toronto, and I had a few stores. We were getting gentlemen into the store. They were buying high-end neckwear. I noticed at the time that there's only a very specific type of customer that we can get, like a higher income executive type or his wife buying or something like that. We weren't getting the masses. We were in a location where we had thousands of maybe even hundreds of thousands of people walking by. It's like the financial district and I introduced the socks at this time we were selling to the public.
We started to produce socks because we were in the necktie world and it was an instant hit. When I saw an instant hit, everybody was coming in. Grandparents were even coming in, grandchildren, and lots of different people across all income levels. Everybody was coming in and enjoying the product. What happened was because I was in downtown Toronto, companies started coming in and saying, “Who produces these socks?” “We're Sockrates. We produce the socks.”
They said, “I have an employee event and I want to give away these socks to my 100 employees. Can you make me with my logo with these socks?” We were like, “That sounds interesting. Why not?” We started to design the socks and we produced the socks, and then more and more companies started coming to us. In 2018 have had a devastating flood that took out the whole store. It was horrible. A restaurant from above flooded us, and then we decided instead of just waiting for the store to be rebuilt, we had this custom sock business already going. We decided to open up a website. At the time, the website was not very good. We got it up there.
We started with the Google ads and immediately we were starting to get customers from all over the world. I'm talking about the United Kingdom. We're talking Israel, we're talking Denmark and Germany, and we're talking all over the world. Obviously, Canada and the US were a big market. We started to realize that this product was in demand. We improved our website to the point where today is a very functional, beautiful website. We improved our processes through our automation, making sure that we were able to get the orders in properly.
More importantly, we became experts in how to design fashionable products that look good. When any brand comes to us, big brands come to us, we make their sock look like you would buy that sock in a store like you would pay $15 for that Spotify sock or you would pay $15 for that Google sock or whatever it is. You would even pay, it's funny to say, you would even pay $12 for that company you've never heard of because it just looks like a cool brand with a cool package that comes with a label. It caught on.
From there, we closed the store because we didn't need to be in that business anymore. We focused solely on custom socks. We now have a team of about fifteen people, project managers, designers social media experts, project managers, and salespeople. We have a lot of people going after this. Everybody has their own niche. Some people focus on healthcare. Some people focus on coffee shops. There are all these little niches within the business.
We've had some success, but most importantly, we've had to learn along the way that there are a lot of headaches that come when you're doing 100 orders or 200 orders versus 5 to 10 orders a month. We've had to adjust along the way. It's like all day, everyday battle to keep up with that. We got our error rate under 1%. If any errors do happen, we immediately redo it. We've grown a lot.
In my career, I've been part of a lot of different businesses. I learned a lot. I learned a lot about how to build a business what the customers are looking for, and what's important with the customers. I learned a lot along the way. Even though this is the third or fourth business that I've opened, this one has been the one that I've been like, “I was in my late 30s, early 40s now. This is where I'm starting to learn a lot.” I feel like a lot of my other successful businesses have led me to this point where this one was the most successful.
That's how life works. We build on past failures and successes. It doesn't matter. Learning experiences along the way. Hopefully, we don't keep banging our heads against the same bar.
They always say you learn from your failures. Nobody wants those failures, but I learned a lot from going through other businesses and what was good about it and what was not good about it. I remember I was in business school in 2004 and we had a speaker coming in and he was a very successful CEO of a major company in Canada. He gave a whole speech on how two of his failures led to his ultimate success. We were all like at the time in our early 20s, but maybe we'll just try to be successful from the first one. Now I'm realizing that he wouldn't want it any other way.
That process of going through was very important to ultimately lead to your success. You don't see it at the time because those are hard failures, but they lead to your ultimate success. When you retroactively look at it, that's the way you want it. You couldn't have gotten to where you're at without going through those. Most people don't just wake up one day and then one year later, they're successful. They got to go through a process of success. I don't fall for those magazines where overnight they were successful. There was probably something that they learned along the way to become successful.
There's no doubt about that. It builds our character, but not only that. For me, I lost a business in the late ‘90s and it was traumatic and horrible. I wouldn't ever wish to go through it. It's painful. You know the right thing to do, but you don't have the money to do it. You end up disappointing people and you cannot pay your bills. It's a spiral. It doesn't just happen at once. It's this long spiral down and it's torturous. I wouldn't wish it on anybody, but looking back, it was the biggest education of my life. I understand a lot of how things go bad and the stakes involved with decision-making. It's made my consulting career a lot more valuable than it would have been otherwise.
Now you see this, you know where the red flags are. You know where the triggers are. You can see if the trend is downwards because in your first business, you're not seeing any trends. You don't have that experience. You don't have that rearview mirror there. That's insightful for sure.
You said you have a team of about fifteen. You're serving a worldwide market now. I love your story, Sam, that it was driven by market demand. You had people coming to you, “Can you do this?” That's a good way to get a business launched.
Sockrates
That's it. They were coming to us, and they were like, “This is what we want.” I didn't even know that business existed. I'll never forget my first client. She had to call me four times because I kept ignoring her. I was like, “I don't know what you're talking about. Go into the store, grab three pairs of socks, and leave. I don't understand.” She's like, “No, we want to do it for a trade show.” I was like, “I don't know what you're talking about.” She explained to me what she was looking for and I was like, “We can do that.”
I had some freelance designer draw me some sock. I have a picture of it in my office. It's terrible. I'm so proud of that sock because we did it. It's so funny that sometimes the world will send you hints that this could be a good idea because I did this one sock order, and now we do hundreds a month. I did this one sock order and it got into some magazine over there, like a magazine in Niagara Falls or something in a small city. I was like, “Wait a minute, if I do one sock order, I'm getting into a magazine, maybe this is something.”
I'm not going to say that every sock I do gets into the magazine. They don't, but sometimes the universe is like you're manifesting. Sometimes the world will send you some hints and they'll be like, “Sam, there is something here.” This is not just a random thing that happened. We started to get some tourism boards. These guys before COVID were into this. They were into giving out socks to the people who booked meetings in their cities.
They were giving the sock out and I came up with the idea of putting our logo at the back of the sock, like powered by Sockrates. The clients were okay with it. When they gave the sock out, we were getting calls from those people. It was like this instant referral process. The more socks you get out, now we're getting a few million pairs out a year, there's going to be a certain amount of people that see the socks, like the socks, and then come to you. I do get a lot of calls for one pair of socks, which we don't do, but I'll send them some samples or something.
What would a minimum order be for a smaller company that would want that?
We like to tell people 100 pairs but we want to work with people so we usually do 60 pairs. That’s like 5,000 pairs. It’s because there’s some labor involved. We got to design the socks. We got to buy the yarn and all that. At this point, we do enough volume that we have the yarn to use for other jobs. We can get the minimum down to 60 which is pretty much industry-leading minimums. The number two thing that we offer people is a seven-day turnaround time. Let’s say you order today. I give you the sock and you say yes. You will have the socks in your hands by early next week.
How do you turn the order around so quickly?
The big secret is our factory in Italy only produces socks for us because of the volumes. We're not waiting in lines like a lot of our competitors are with other people. Another big thing is that we program the sock ourselves. There's no lineup. We do it right on the spot versus other people who are pooling their socks with other companies, and then they have to wait in line for it to get programmed. We could have the sock on the machine within a few hours of you ordering. The number three thing is our sock factory in Italy is right across the street from the largest yarn factory.
We're able to get to the yarn quickly if we don't have the colors. Think of an American producer. They would have to ship those yarns in, It would take five to seven days just to get the yarn. They cannot offer it that fast. They have their solution for that, where they pick 30 colors and say, “All socks must be within these 30 colors,” but we're able to offer all the colors. That's our big thing. You're not going to convince Coca-Cola to change their red. We're saying, we do all the colors, and then we do it in seven days. That's the magic right there. You get it to your door, two-day shipping UPS. It's fast
When I came into the industry, the other players were doing 35 to 40 days. I told the young lady who works with me now, Becky, she's the head designer. I said, “Nobody wants to wait 40 days. Have you ever ordered something and wanted to wait 40 days?” Now with Amazon, they've changed the whole way we look at things. It’s 2 to 3 days max. This is a custom product. These are companies B2B. They understand seven days is not two days, but it's good enough.
That brings me to a topic I wanted to talk with you about, Sam, which is the impact of automation and AI on business and force-multiplying through automation. I wanted your view on that topic and what you see, not only what you've been able to do so far, but what you might be looking forward to.
Automation And AI
We're always on top of that. The number one thing for us is everything goes into our Salesforce. Our Salesforce is highly customized for us to deal with volumes. The way that we talk from the project managers to the designer is all about automation, like statuses that are changing automatically. When we get a payment, we know right away. We don't rely on going to an email and manual effort like that. Another thing that we found when we started to get bigger was we would send the tracking number to the customer manually. The tracking number would be generated by the Italian factory on our UPS account.
That's great for five orders, but when you start to get to 100, 150, or 200 orders a month, you cannot manually do that. We programmed the API for UPS into our Salesforce. The second that UPS scans that box, an email goes out to the client and says, “Your box is on the way.” That sounds like a simple solution, but the amount of time that saved us, and then I took it to invoice creation, and making sure that all of these checkboxes were checked. For example, if an order comes in and there are two labels, men's and ladie’s sizing, the system has to be able to communicate with Italy to do that properly.
Otherwise, there are too many errors. There are too many places for errors. We had to make everything in a way automated so that there was no memory. Nobody had to memorize anything because you cannot memorize even ten deals, forget about ten orders, forget about hundreds of orders. We went through that process of improving our systems and that helped us. Now we're set up in a way that we can do many more orders even.
Number two is the AI. We're on top of the AI for marketing whether it's our social media, reach-out, or cold email campaigns, and all of our email marketing. We're on top of these AI tools that we can use to assist us. The cool thing about it is everybody is worried about losing jobs to AI. I think that it's taking the people that you have and making them more efficient with this AI. It doesn't cut down any job. It makes the employee that much more powerful. I would hire more people and use these AI tools and then magnify the success. I haven't seen anything like that where people need to downsize.
It's like a small-minded thing to think that because what you want to do is take the people that you have or more even, and use AI tools and scale and grow even faster than you are, or not even faster, but better with more efficiency, more transparency with your business with the clients, better experience for the clients, whatever you can do. We're using all these tools and we're always looking into new ones. We haven't done the create your own designs through AI yet because we want that designer touch. Our designers are like artists. We’re a little snobby about that. We want the design to be done by hand almost.
I imagine you also want a brand image standard.
We don't want it to be so generic that a machine pops it out. Every time we do a deal, we look up the brand if we've never heard of them. We look at their core values and then we try to put that into the sock. A more conservative company, like a law firm, does not have flashy colors. They just don't. They're more conservative. They're more old school, like trust, honesty, and integrity. They don't want that flashiness, but a cool up-and-coming tech company, they still have trust and they still have integrity, but they are more loud colors, fun, and bold. Maybe the AI could do it, but we want it to be the human element to that. There are always more designers that we can train and hire as we scale. I'd rather get more people involved than try to get a machine to do it.
The lines are certainly starting to blur there. I was watching a video before we started talking. It was specifically about music generated by AI. Have you ever heard of Rick Beato?
No, I haven't.
He's a very successful music producer on YouTube and he does analysis-type videos and breaks things down. He was comparing some songs that were AI-generated versus not AI-generated. A lot of people couldn't tell. His kids could immediately tell the difference. They can tell a synthesized voice. He couldn't. A lot of other people couldn't. His kids could.
It was mysterious to him as to what it was, but his kids also said, “It won't be this way for much longer.” They'll fix the problems. They can hear the artifacts of their generation. They'll fix those artifacts of generation within probably six months or so, then that'll go away. You think about a song, so it all comes down to the prompts. What prompts are you putting in there? It's going to be a matter of what people like and what they respond to.
There's going to be some preference there also. After we do a project, sometimes I send a video to the guy and the customer is like, “Thanks for using me.” I'll say, “Steve, thanks for using me.” I then found that there's an AI that I could record the video once and then they can plug in everybody's name as I scale, but I like that process of doing it individually.
There are pros and cons to everything, but probably we're all going to be convinced at some point that it's so good that you cannot resist it or that the competitors are using it and you have to use it because your time has to be used elsewhere. There's a fine line right now, but the line keeps moving. That's the problem. It’s like the dot-com bubble craziness of 2000. Every ten years, some new hot thing comes in.
This one is a doozy.
This one is crazy.
It was funny. I was on a television show in Arizona. I was talking to this guy's target range. He's a gun guy. He teaches people gun safety and expert in firearms. I asked him about his view of AI. He said, “We're screwed.” Some people see through the lens of this thing as a threat. There's reason to think that for sure. I'm sensing from how you're talking, Sam, you and I are sort of similar thinking. These are powerful tools. We have to figure out how to use them.
Use it to make things better.
I tend to be optimistic. I look through a lens of there are going to be problems. There are going to be growing pangs. There are going to be some things that we have to deal with, but the net effect is going to be extremely positive because I think smarter is better. If we have tools that make us smarter, that seems like it's going to generally move in a positive direction.
I have no problem with it. I have a Tesla. If I skid into the other lane and it brings me back to my lane, I'm very happy that it did that. I'm not against that, but there are lines. Overall, so far our team has embraced it. We're doing well with it and we're enjoying it. I think you have to enjoy it more than be scared of it. Only go as far as you're comfortable with.
Right now I'm not comfortable with creating an emulator. I could look into it, but create an emulator that spits out designs. I want that human touch, but who knows? Maybe a year from now we change it. We would still be the same amount of designers. We would just use this tool to pitch in a different, more mass-market way. Maybe in every email we send out, we put the guy's logos and colors in. We’ll just do things differently.
You could pitch a prospective client with finished designs that took you ten seconds to do.
Versus waiting for them to show some interest and then giving them the free designs. It's just a different model like 10,000 people now get finished designs with their socks, and create logos on them. Now that I'm saying this out loud, that sounds pretty cool to me. That's a pretty good hook but we're not there yet. I'm not there yet. I think there are some opportunities and it's not scary. It's a good opportunity and we'll see.
You said you had a team of fifteen. Are they spread out geographically?
Everybody works remotely with the exception of a few sales guys who work in my office in Florida.
Are you physically in Florida?
Yeah. I'm in Boca Raton, Florida.
Of your fifteen, where are they spread around?
We have mainly in the US but also some in Canada who work for us. We use some overseas talent for some of the social media, LinkedIn stuff, and that thing.
That's one of the things that I keep encountering more and more, the small global company.
It's amazing. My wife will always be like, “What holidays do you keep because there's Canadian holidays, there's an American holiday, there's British holidays? We do have somebody in Britain. We do a lot of UK business. It's good, but I like waking up at these requests that can come in from the UK and all these countries because it's like always busy at night. Australia starts to come in. It's always busy but we work Eastern time, 9 to 6 Eastern time. Some people will get their email a couple of hours afterward but that's okay.
You've got a fairly small team and you've got the creative niche product but I want to ask you this, Sam, because sometimes people have a tough time keeping a remote team on the same page, moving in the same direction with a sense of enthusiasm for the mission. What's your experience been with that? Do you have some things that you learned along those lines at all?
Keeping A Remote Team
The number one thing that I learned is the more passionate that I am or my number two in the company, the more that they respond to it. When they see me working hard, they work hard. I noticed that that's a big thing. It's a fun product, so they get into it because we're into it. We send them samples. We send them gifts, but they love seeing the final results. It's exciting to see these midsize brands and large brands reaching out. When they reach out, how excited they are like, “We went to a trade show and we love the socks from last time. We'd love to order again.”
It keeps that engine going of being passionate about what you're doing. It is hard. I'm not going to lie. Sometimes when people bring up socks on the weekend, I'm trying to relax. It gets a little tough because all day, every day, that's all I'm talking about. During the hours that we're working and focused and creating content and talking about new designs and talking about stuff like that, it's pretty good because everybody is pitching in to keep us all excited and going.
The downside to that is if you ever have somebody who is a toxic person, it can get damaged very quickly. We try to keep the staff. We're a small team, but everybody is important. Everybody has been with us for a pretty long time. That is a good point where if you have toxicity from any place, you cannot tolerate it. Sometimes I encounter clients where the leaders might be hesitant to remove somebody. If you knew how much that was costing you, you wouldn't spend more than two seconds thinking about it.
If you ever have somebody who's a toxic person, it can get damaged very quickly.
It's not only costing me. It's not fair to the people that are working hard and their livelihood is important also. Meeting the other people. I'm not going to put other people's livelihoods at stake because one person is not the right fit for the organization. They can go work somewhere else. I think you have to be realistic about that. You get over that. It's not about being nice. It's about doing the right thing for the whole team. It's almost like a misplaced compassion in a way. Your compassion for the person who might be causing the problem, but how about your compassion for everybody you have to deal with and the net effects of all that?
It's not right. Sometimes also you hired somebody in year 1 and you're in year 3 or 4. We saw this on the tech side where the business has changed so much that their skillset, unfortunately, is no longer the right fit. That's almost harder because you like the person. They're part of the company and everybody is excited together, so we try to get them some training or something like that.
If we go through all of those avenues and it doesn't work, I think that it's better for them to maybe try to find a job where there is a right fit because they'll be happier also. Nobody is happy in a place where they don't feel like they're contributing. At that point, you're just clock-watching and trying to get a salary without having a passion for what you're doing. In our company, a small-knit team, we need to have passion. If the passion is not there, it's very hard to do business.
I love that you said that. If I feel like I'm out of my depth, it's not like it's a newsflash. Most people do it. They might not admit it to themselves on the conscious level, but underneath they know it. That creates anxiety that then manifests in lots of different ways. I often say that as leaders, you have two choices. You can change your people or you can change your people. One of the two. One is up to them and the other is up to you.
That's the only two choices you have. That's a good point. That's great. I'm going to write that one down.
Feel free. The one thing in today's world that seems not optional is change. We have to be better tomorrow than we are today.
I go through that with my factory in Italy because it's a culture difference where they're like, “Sam, we're doing well. Why are you trying to change things? Why Salesforce? Why this? Why that? We were happy on the air table. Why are we doing Salesforce?” I'm like, “We cannot think like that. We always have to be better than we were the day before.” My head designer once told me, “If you're not embarrassed by the work you were doing a year ago, then you probably haven't grown enough.”
If the website is not that much better, if the designs we send are not that much better, if the process is not that much better, because I'm all about the client experience. I want it to be a great experience for them to order these socks. I don't want them to have to struggle through or suffer through it. If all of that is not that much better, you probably haven’t grown that much or you're probably on your way down than on your way up. She keeps reminding me of that. I always take a look back a year or two years behind and I'm like, “That doesn't look very good.” The growth is there and the maturity. They see a maturing business.
I love that. I'm going to use that as one of the quotes out of our talk today. If you're not embarrassed by how you're doing a year ago, you're not growing enough. That's phenomenal.
I love it. She's so right. You have to think about how you do it better. Otherwise, it's just taking a step back. Especially today, maybe 15 or 20 years ago, maybe even more than that, you could have scaled a little bit slower, but these days, you have to be on top of things because things change so fast. The trends are changing. The way that people want to transact with you is changing. The expectations are changing. The way that we gift our clients after they do business with us, the way that we give them gifts is different. Everything changes so fast.
The trends are changing. You have to be on top of things because things change so fast.
I'm thinking about the pressure you’re putting on the competitive landscape. If I'm already in the promotional business and I've got my paradigm that it's going to be 2 weeks, 4 weeks, 6 weeks, or whatever it is, it doesn't matter what the order is. Here you come along Sockrates and you can deliver in a week, but you're not delivering something else. Your customer goes to this other company and says, “What's the problem here?” That's a lot of pressure. You're part of the force of that forward pressure.
Transparency And Exceeding Competitions
We started this all-inclusive pricing where we don't charge for the label. We don't charge for shipping. We do it all at once. You make a move and you see that these twenty competitors, a lot of them are just following. They're like, “That's what we're doing now.” A few of them do all-inclusive pricing, “That's what we're doing now.” You see them trying to copy it. It's all about who could do it best because anybody could say that they could do seven days, but very few could do seven days.
You had to prove that you could do that and stick to it because if you tell a client seven days and you deliver in twelve, that's worse than just telling them twelve from the beginning. We went through that process of explaining on our website very clearly, how we do this in seven days. We don't just say it. We're going to show you every step of the way over those 150 hours. What's going on every twelve hours?
It explains it properly. Some customers have said, “The only reason I use you is because you are very transparent on how my order is going to go.” Let's say a company swipes a card or wires us $10,000. There has to be a lot of trust there. You have to trust that we're going to do this properly. Nobody wants to be the one that picked the vendor that doesn't fulfill. We are accountable to these buyers.
I love that transparency. It's being a good partner. It's just saying, “Here's what it is. You're in the locker room with me.”
There's nothing more that irks me when after I've sold something in B2B or B2C, but more B2B. I've sold something for my business. Have you ever noticed that when they're selling you, they're on top of you? They're calling you, they're doing Zoom calls with you, they're explaining, and everybody is so nice, then you buy the product and then they disappear. Where are they? It's like you're dating and then you get married and things aren't the same. I don't want that. I want it to be that even after they transact, it's still an experience to work with Sockrates.
The way that we communicate, the follow-up that they tell us how they like the socks. If there was anything they didn't like, they would tell us. It's open communication. I don't want to hit and run, get the order and run. We want to get the order, produce the order, and ship the order, but we also want to keep the customer in touch and provide them with maybe some tips on how to use the socks or whatever it is, but we want the experience to continue well beyond the sale. That's important also.
Is that translating into repeat sales and retained customers over a long time?
Yeah. It's very hard in any business to get a new customer but to keep your base happy and get reordered. For our reorder rate, we did the math. For every 100 new clients, it's a lot of clients, but for 100 new clients, 65 will reorder close to 3 times. It's about 2.8 times over the course of their life. That's a good snowball effect on a new customer. That's because we're staying in touch with them. We're sending them a gift afterward. We're asking them, “How did you like the sock?” If we would just ship the socks and disappear, I don't think it would be that high because people forget and people move on. It's very important for us to keep it going because we have a very specific use case for these socks. We want to stay in touch with the customer.
Let me ask you something else about this. You've got a model that's working well. You've got a brand, a formula, and all of the things that we've laid out here. It sounds like a tasty recipe for success to me. Have you thought about ways to plug in something else to this and maybe expand horizontally or vertically?
Yeah. For example, we came up with this sock called the Eco-Luxe sock. It's a wool sock in Italy. It's a very high-quality wool. It's a beautiful wool. There's nothing like it in the market. We developed it in Italy and we took it to the custom market and we noticed that the custom customer, because of the limitations on how much you can customize it, it's not working as well in the custom market. I thought to myself, “This is such a great product, I cannot just let go of this product.” We're starting to market it to ski resorts that they sell in their ski shops or retail like a ski brand to add to their product offering in their stores or to their distributors.
We're trying to move in that direction as well where these socks can be offered in environments where they're selling the sock. The majority of our use is when they give it out for free. Not all, like for example, Pilates studios and yoga studios will buy the sock and then sell it, but 96% of the way that people buy this is to give it away for free, but that's not the only way that it can be used. We can also sell it to the shops and get it out on a retail level. We're not going to open retail stores, but we can get it out to retailers who already have established brands and traffic.
Very high-end ski resorts, hotels, these kinds of things where there are distributors that are buying these things. We'd love to get it out there. It gets the Sockrates name out there more. Also, it's a great product, that very luxurious wool sock where it's very soft and warm, cozy sock. It's a great product for the up north market. I'm in Boca Raton. I'm not going to wear it. I'm from Toronto or in Minnesota in the winter, it's such a good product. We're trying to move in that direction as well.
Do I ever think we're going to be a heavy retail company? No, because we love the custom process, but I have things in my head. Imagine you went to an airport and in every airport in Hudson News or something, there was a sock, but it was designed for that airport. Fort Lauderdale has a different one than Austin, Texas. You go to the airport store, and they all look the same. Everything is the same. Why don't we do regional-based designs? We can do that. We're set up for that.
A big company that produces socks and brings them in a container, they're not going to do that because they do runs of 100,000 pairs of black with a white polka dot or something. They're not going to do all that and just service Jacksonville Airport or Atlanta Airport, but that's a great market for us. We would love to do designs just for the Atlanta airport. We're thinking about moving in that direction.
There's another direction like the healthcare world. The compression socks have been a tremendous hit for us for custom. Hospitals will buy for their doctors and their nurses and give them out as a gift. Why cannot small practices buy the socks and give them out to their patients as a nice gift for them? A doctor's office needs customers just like anybody else. They're not above the needs of customers.
We're trying to think outside the box a little bit of one narrow use case. Although that use case has been very successful for us, we're trying to also open it up to other people because we get people all the time calling us like, “I got the socks, I just ordered ten pairs.” Now you cannot do that. What happens if they were being sold in airports or whatever they were sold there, then they can have access to it.
You mentioned earlier that some of the growth pangs were figuring out the logistics of different size orders would come in and managing the fulfillment side of things. It seems like you've got that on a groove now. If you could see the challenge that you look at, it takes your energy up right now, what are you looking at that you feel like, “I got to figure this one out?” Is there anything on your radar screen about that?
Building A Capable Team
Yes. I think the number one thing that I'm trying to figure out as it relates to stressors in the business is the team and making sure I have the right people in place. We're at the point where we're growing, but I'm looking to maybe bring somebody in, some more senior hires, as it relates to a director of marketing or head of SEO or these kinds of positions. I think the model has been with me, the number two, her name is Becky. We do a lot of the telling people what to do. Steve Jobs had a great line. He's like, “I don't want to hire people and tell them what to do. I want to hire people and I'll need them to tell me what to do.”
We have 7,000 to 8,000 clients globally, big companies and small companies. We have a great system in place to produce the socks. I'm looking to bring in some talent to work on new initiatives to improve our email marketing, keeping our current base engaged more, getting more content out to distributors, and this kind of stuff. I think that's the number one thing for me from an HR perspective. I've also had the need to hire an administrative assistant, an executive assistant thing. As you know, you get bogged down. You have eight hours and six of it goes on things that could have been outsourced.
I still remember being in business school. It was the first week and they brought in this big speaker and he said to us, and I didn't believe him at the time, but now I can see it. I'm not this extreme, but he's like, “You should never do anything that you can pay somebody to do because you have to value your time to focus your time on the things that nobody else can do.” Nobody else can maybe take a meeting with the CEO of a big company that you're about to close, but somebody else can do the email marketing campaigns or something. You cannot do everything. It's been a long process for me because I used to do everything related to project management.
Becky used to do everything as it relates to design when it was just the two of us. We were doing great, but then we realized we were going to burn out here. We started bringing in people and it's been hard for us to hand things off and trust. It's like your own little baby. It’s like, “I got to hand over my baby now.” It's been a magical thing because when you do it and you see that it's successful, you're like, “They're enjoying it as much as I did.” They're as good at that as me, if not better than me at that specific task, which is wonderful. I wish that they were all better than me at every task. That's it.
To me, the version of success of a manager is where you don't have that much to do. Everything you do is quadrant two. Nothing is on fire. You determine your schedule, you're available for anything that comes up and you're working out priorities for the future. That to me is a sign of doing it the right way.
I take these Zoom calls with some clients and people, and they all joke because I'm in Boca Raton and I'm one-half mile from the beach. They're like, “Sam, what are you going to do after this call, go to the beach?” I'm thinking to myself, “I've been in this office for years. I've never one time gone to the beach because I'm working. I got to pay bills and work.” I'm like, “What did a level of success be that the company is doing great and everybody is being serviced and things are doing great?” I did go to the beach in the middle of the day.
Did that become a successful thing? My team always jokes like, “You'll never do that.” I'm like, “I'm an office guy. I need to be in the office with my coffee working.” I liked the idea that one time, maybe in a year, I did that. I’m not there yet. I don't think any entrepreneur will ever say they're there. They always feel like they have to be working. You're right. If things are going well, it should be running pretty smoothly unless there's something on fire.
It's funny because I recently went on an extended trip where I was in Europe and I turned my phone off. It was an actual vacation, and I realized that it had been years since I hadn't been connected. Being an entrepreneur, there are no hours, it’s not days. You're thinking about it all the time.
I hope you enjoyed that. I feel like a lot of pleasure for you that you did that because it's great. You probably came back and there were probably some issues you had to deal with, but it was okay.
I think it was fine.
Ignorance is bliss sometimes. Sometimes it's not fine. You have to be honest. This was a disaster but I think you probably enjoyed your time with your family and everything. You came back and you dealt with the issues the same way you would have had to deal with the issues if you didn't turn off your phone. You just dealt with it and maybe a week later or two weeks later.
In my business, I'm not running a production, so not all businesses are created. The dynamics are not always the same. I'm in the people business consulting on people's strategy, building the Eye of Power as a business. I'm in that building mode, which is very demanding. You feel like you might lose a little bit of momentum.
Before I was in the retail business, I was in the market research business. It’s the same thing as consulting, but doing studies for companies. My big client back in the day was Blackberry. It's a weird feeling because I remember I was only as good as my last deal. I had to always have a deal on the horizon and these deals were like 3 to 6-month engagements. When you're getting to month 4 or 5, you're in the back of your head being like, “This is going to end. I need to have another one,” versus mine is more like, “We have production orders, but I got to get through the production.” I hope that there's more production afterward, but you never threw it. There's always production going on.
You must feel like you've got the baby birds that need the worms constantly sort of thing.
There always have to be some leads and things that we're working on. It's like a snowball effect. It comes, and it goes over the line, then we got to do it again. It's a fun business. We enjoy it. Every business has its challenges and every business has its good things. Ours is pretty good. I don't miss the world of inventory, like having $300,000 of inventory on walls. I don't miss heavy rents and I don't miss that, but there are some things I do miss about the retail world.
Leading Disruptive Production Strategy: Every business has its challenges and good things.
I like the retail world. I like Christmas time during the retail world. That was fun. I liked how much the customer appreciated right away taking their product and how much they loved it. When you had good staff in your retail store, they were amazing. They loved retail. There are certain people that are born for retail. Retail has changed so much. I don't even know if this world exists anymore. I don't know if people are opening retail stores the same way back then.
There’s no pocket.
The most thing I miss is the necktie because of the passion that these people had when they made their neckties, they were fifth or sixth-generation people who were making the neckties in Italy, small villages in Italy. I miss that because those guys were amazing to work with. They believed what they were doing was a great thing. The business has gone down so much for them. It's heartbreaking a little bit. It's like you're the last company to sell the buggy whip of the horses. You could have been the best buggy whip maker in the world, but at the end of the day, you have to change businesses.
The Italians and clothes glow well together. I was in Pisa and I walked into a store. It was a men's shoe store. I had never seen shoes like that before. The craftsmanship. It was unbelievable.
These are not shoe stores that we walk into. These are different. The craft, which every stitch and everything is like the guy making a shoe would be a day's activity. You and your kids would be passionate about it. It's unbelievable. You walk into a shoe store in America, the shoe is one year shoe. They're selling you shoes that can last for twenty years. It's a whole different ball game, but not everybody appreciates that. Not everybody needs it. It's a very specific niche.
I've never even owned a shoe like that before. Now I know what I'm shooting for.
When you land the big one, that's where I'm going. They have a lot of passion for what they're doing. I have to respect that.
I have another episode that's coming up soon that was inspired by another visit I had. I was working as a guest on a TV show. We were there for two days as the production was going. I was so inspired. I'm doing an episode on being around professionals. When you're around people who are passionate, I get that sense from you too. I get the sense that you're building a team of people who have that spark, but when you're around people who are good at what they do, they're involved in what they do.
Everybody is showing that respect for themselves and others, to me, it's the most uplifting thing because that's what it's supposed to be. I'll tell you that one of the things that breaks my heart is Gallup organization did a worldwide survey of the world of work that came out in 2022, and 75% of the world's workforce is not engaged. Only one in four is engaged.
That's so depressing.
It's like, “What are you doing?”
That might even be tied to depression and people not being happy with their lives.
It’s terrible.
If you're not happy with what you're doing, 8 out of your 14 hours awake or 16 hours awake, or however long you're up, that's a big problem. Whatever employers can do or people could do to fix that is important.
If you're unhappy with what you do, that's a problem. Whatever employers or people could do to fix that is important.
It ripples out. It's not just that I'm miserable, so I'm watching the clock. I'm not engaged. I'm not having fun, or I feel like I'm wasting my life. That's a high cost in itself, but it's the ripple effect of the untapped potential of that person and the way they treat people around them and the effect on the culture around them, and how that ripples into the world. I always think of it like it's a wonderful life where you don't know all the little effects you have. That can work for positive and negative. I think we're paying such a high price. Part of what we're trying to do with the AI power is to try to flip that script. You're never going to get it down to zero because people have to find their way. The rule could be engaged.
How nice would it be for it to be 70-30 and not 75.
In my opinion, that's how it should be.
It's like unemployment. You don't get to 0% unemployment because there are some people who need to find a job or whatever.
You try new things. You stretch yourself.
Seven percent.
As you were saying, the job might move past you or a personality comes in that you don't mesh with. You're going to have the noise in the system and we're not ever shooting for zero on anything. We can have a new paradigm I think.
New standards. For sure that's a good one. It's sad to hear that study but it's very insightful to hear that number.
It's what's moved me because I think that that's something that we can do something about because a lot of it is not the work itself, it's the culture. It's how you engage as a team with each other as human beings. If people feel seen and valued, that's most of the equation right there.
That's number one. It's not even always tied in to pay. It's more about how they feel. Do they feel motivated? Do they feel engaged? This thing. Do they feel valued? That's the big one. Seen and valued.
People's value is not even always tied to pay. It's more about how they feel.
Seen for the individual they are. Now a lot of times, they're the ones hiding.
It's hard. Nobody is perfect.
It's a culture thing.
No employees or managers are perfect. Sometimes the communication is broken. It's good to start the conversation back if you have to.
That's what we're trying to do. We've got a partnership with a company called Reteam. We're trying to do that with organizations to flip that script. We're starting brand new. I'm excited about that journey. We'll have to compare notes with our journey down the road. How's that?
Stay in touch. Great.
Thank you so much. I appreciate the discussion. I loved how you shared your passion and insights. It's a unique journey. This conversation isn't one like I've had before, but I love that. That's fantastic.
Thank you so much for having me. It's great talking to you. We'll stay in touch.
Sounds good.
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Sam, thanks so much for being with me today. I very much appreciate your time and your insights. A couple of things that I like that you shared with us were the fact that you're able to get your turnaround down to seven days. Not only that, but you're transparent and you show that process with your clients so that they can see exactly where in the process their orders are. I think that's fantastic. You also shared that you found that the more passion at the top that translates into passion in the organization, the speed of the ship is the speed of the captain sort of an observation. That's your lived experience too. It was nice to share that.
I thought that being transparent and being responsive like that, shows a real respect for your partners and customers. You want to deliver value and be somebody that can be counted on. That's very valuable in the world. I think that's something that people should pay attention to not only do business with you but maybe be inspired by whatever world of work they might be in. Thanks again, Sam. I appreciate you being on the show.
Important Links
Samuel Moses - LinkedIn
About Samuel Moses
With a passion for entrepreneurship from a very young age, Samuel is the Founder and CEO of Sockrates Custom Socks, a company based in Boca Raton Florida which specializes in producing the highest quality custom socks at the fastest turnaround time.
With over 4000 clients, Sockrates has emerged as the industry leader in its field with clients in the United States, Germany, France, Iceland, UK, Israel and Canada.
After graduating from the prestigious Schulich School of Business in Toronto, Ontario, Samuel worked for an Investment Banking consulting group where he was responsible for presenting research and findings to key C level decision executives within the banking industry around the world. Next he became a partner of an established market research firm in Toronto where he consulted on studies for companies spanning from 50 million in revenues to the Fortune 500.
With a keen eye for both the small details and big picture approach to business, Samuel is sought out for advice on various business topics such as business strategy, team leadership, business communication, marketing and organizational culture.