About The Brand

If you love socks with personality and positivity, you might just love FEAT Socks. Based in the Venice Beach area of Los Angeles, FEAT Socks has created a fun and energetic brand around their motto, “Live Like This.” Their adventurous style can be seen in the growing range of products they sell directly to consumers, which now spans well beyond socks—the company currently offers bags, hats, shirts, beach towels, and even iPhone cases.

How They Deliver Value

FEAT Socks has eliminated the middleman in two significant ways: avoiding expensive retail channels, and avoiding ineffective marketing channels. Instead, the brand sells directly to consumers, outsources fulfillment, and markets their products through internet influencers and YouTube celebrities.

In an interview published on DigitalCommerce360.com, co-founder Taylor Offer expressed his belief that influencers with large social media followings are the best way to market to millennials. According to the blog post, each influencer receives a profit-split, and in the case Aly Raisman—a popular U.S. gymnast—the line of socks also carries the influencer’s name.

Regarding the company’s innovative approach toward eliminating the middleman in unnecessary retail channels, in a blog post at http://www.starterstory.com/feat-socks, Offer was quoted as saying the following:

We chased Nordstrom for years. We were chasing buyers there to have meetings with us, and flying to Seattle often until we finally got a purchase order from them and a few other stores. We had the potential to be in 500 stores across the country. But, we decided to turn them all down. We had to ask ourselves, who’s our target market? It’s us. Would we ever buy a $15 pair of socks at Nordstrom? Hell no.

There are many downsides to selling in retail. We are not in control of our brand. When you are just a sock on the rack, you have less of a connection with your customer. We want the customer to find us through our brand and through our social channels. Retail is also time-consuming from a logistical perspective. Retail is expensive. Nordstrom wants a 75% IMU (Initial Mark Up). Which means if you sell your product for $12 at the store, they want to buy it from you for $3. We are not making any money on that. Why don’t we just sell at a lower price point directly to our customer?

Retail is a dying industry. What’s the point of running into a burning house? We are focusing strictly on e-commerce, and putting all of our efforts into that. Retail is good exposure, but we would rather go direct and sell to the customer for $8, and give $4 to Facebook, for example.

Products and Pricing

When it comes to their flagship sock products, the company offers a wide range of styles and themes. For the eclectic, thrill-seeking sock wearers, FEAT offers a “mystery box” of 9 or 18 pairs of randomly selected socks at a steep discount. Most socks on their site currently range from $5 to $12 per pair. They also offer a sock subscription service, which delivers socks to consumers on a monthly basis (currently delivering one, three, or six pairs per month).

Final Thoughts

FEAT Socks is a NoMiddleman favorite, and they’ve got a strong following on social media, where they regularly post high-quality images to Instagram and video content to YouTube. To learn more about this company, you can visit them at FEATSocks.com.