How To Make Your Own Custom Socks Brand

Is Selling Custom Socks Profitable?

As long as you make sure that you take enough time to prepare, selling socks is actually quite a lucrative business to enter into. The global socks market was around 18 billion dollars in 2022 and is expected to double by the time 2032 rolls around. So right now is an ample time to get into selling your socks! Take a look through how to set your sock business up for success with this comprehensive guide.

Start With Home Research

Find Your Market

In order to have a successful sock business, you will want to find as close of a balance as possible between what you offer and what the market you’re entering already has. A great way to start is to gather sales data from your competitors and collect the following information:

• What are my competitors pricing their socks?
• What type of socks have the highest sales?
• What are the best platforms to sell socks on?
• How are my competitors advertising their socks?
• What are the customer reviews of my competitors’ socks?

If you are going to be selling online, definitely visit some company-to-company platforms like Amazon and see which of your competitors are being promoted. Take a look at what key words they’re using and try to incorporate those words into your business dialogue as much as possible. By taking a look at the reviews of your competitors too, you can begin to fill in gaps that your competition was not able to provide with their custom socks.

Find Your Audience

After you have a solid understanding of your enemies, it’s time to meet your new friends: your clientele. It’s just as important to know what your audience is thinking when they are purchasing custom socks. The best way to catch your audience’s attention is to simply narrow your audience you’re searching to impress. Here are a few more questions to consider for narrowing down your socks audience:

• What will my audience be doing in my socks?
• What kind of shoes would someone be wearing with my socks?
• What kind of sock patterns already exist for my audience?
• How old is the audience that will want my socks? (Sometimes you have to entice the parents AND the kids!)

Find Your Socks

Once you have an idea of where your socks are selling, you need to find what socks you are planning to sell. Depending on what your brand is all about, you will want to select brands and styles that will work best for your business vision. If your audience is for fly fishing, you will want to make sure that your socks are both fun and functional for fishermen. Don’t give them fluffy socks that won’t fit in their boots!

Build Your Brand

Find Your Method of Distribution

We don’t need a brick and mortar shop to create a small business anymore now that the internet has revolutionized selling around the world. More recently, e-commerce has widened to the point where you aren’t even dedicated to one distribution platform.

Get Control Of Your Brand Online

You will want to have the full ability to customize your socks brand online. There are a variety of platforms that allow you to add elements of your brand to their pre-built sites. So it’ll be about going that extra mile with systems and integrations that make your brand feel unique. Plus that means that you can get your own website domain.

Keeping in mind that you can customize integrations online, you can go the extra mile to entice and keep your audience with your brand. Both retarget your consumers with SEO as well as create email lists for your regular clients to subscribe to so they can keep up to date with your latest offers.

Using Online Marketplaces

If you need to keep it easier on your mind while getting your business prepared, it’s more than okay to use online marketplaces like Etsy or Amazon Handmade. These shopping sites offer an already existing domain you can sell on rather than building your business domain from scratch. There is also an extremely large net of internetgoers coming into and out of these domains every day.

Find Your Pricing

In order to make a profit with custom socks, you will need to know how much you are spending based on everything you’ve researched thus far. Cost can go into a multitude of areas:

• Supply
• Marketing and Promo
• Venue (If not selling online)
• Website domain
• Employee Salary

Calculating how each of these affects your bottom line (and what that bottom line is), you can apply it to the overall cost that your socks need to be to make an overall profit.

Find a Supplier

Now that you have all the information that you need, it’s time to find someone to work with on getting your custom socks to you! An important part of finding a distributor is knowing how they will work with you for every stage of your business development.

• Startup Stage: Just starting to dip your feet into running a business? Dropshipping is a great method of supply since it’s easy to work with and has a low entry bar to start selling.
• Steady Stage: You’ve found some footing with your sock business and some knowledge of the stock market. You can start working more in wholesale distribution with a lower minimum order quantity and can provide more styles, without heavy costs in shipping.
• Long-Term Stage: By this point, you can maintain a constant demand for your socks and work with much larger wholesale companies. The most cost-effective choice at this stage is to purchase from China since their providers for over 80% of the world’s sock market.

You’re On Your Way!

Socks are an essential part of what we wear on a daily basis. We wear them all the time, we wear them down, and we lose them often if we’re not careful. There’s always a need for new sets of socks. You can capitalize on our need for socks that are both comfortable and cater to whatever niche you are focusing on.