She's About to Hit $1 Million From Selling Sheer Socks

0:00Nat, I've got pretty big news. tell me. Tickets for Female Founder World Summit just went on sale. Yay. I am so excited for this. If you want to grab a ticket, I'm going to put a link in the show notes for everyone or head to femalefounderworld.com. You'll see a link on the site right there to get your Female Founder World Summit tickets. This is our biggest and best event of the year. And I cannot wait to see you all in New York City on the 2nd of November. Hey, business besties. Welcome back to the Female Founder World Podcast. I'm Jasmine. I'm the host of the show and I have completely lost my voice.

0:34We're coming off the back of our big LA content camp and I'm speaking with some amazing LA founders. So I did not want to push these interviews because we record everything in person. So please bear with me. I do not sound quite the same, but we're going to push on through. Today I'm chatting with Mary Goy. She's the founder of Sock Candy and has been in the Female Founder World community for ages. Mary, welcome to the show. You are now entering Female Founder World with your host Jasmine Garnsworthy. Hi Jasmine, so happy to be here. You started your business in August 2020. How did you get the idea for Sock Candy and what is it that you've created?

1:12Yes, so Sock Candy is a statement women's fashion brand and we're all about celebrating your unconventional personal style and we make funky and elegant sheer socks that are inspired by whimsical prints and bold colors. And they're really meant to be the eye candy and be the centerpiece of your outfit. And I started the brand because I've actually always loved styling socks with sandals and heels. It was always part of my styling quirk, but I just felt like there weren't elegant yet affordable socks on the market. And I always felt like people, you know, thought of socks as an afterthought. You know, it's not really something that people think of as a way to add that special touch to their outfit has always been more of like a functional item.

1:56And, you know, I found myself, I was either like settling for socks that weren't very sophisticated from a Prince standpoint, or they were super expensive. I was buying like 30, $40 pairs of socks. And so I felt like there was really a gap in the marketplace for elegant socks that make a statement that were still affordable. They're so fun. And I, I kind of think I've been like maybe watching you build this since almost day one. I feel like you've been kind of like on our radar for a while and I just want to call out a few of these things that that you've achieved because people need to understand like what it is that you've created and it's so amazing like you ended last year with$720 ,000 in sales yes amazing um this year Chrissy Teigen bought your socks organically posted on Instagram yeah that was crazy so amazing you had a New York dot com like there are so many milestones that you've hit in the last few years and i just think it really speaks to the fact that you're creating something that people genuinely want you're executing it really well you guys are fully bootstrapped right yes yeah we are bootstrapped um just mix of my own savings and then gift and money for my family so amazing well super fortunate that's so so incredible let's talk about getting the business off the ground and we're going to run through how you kind of hit some of these milestones so you launched in August 2020 and you launched with a few different styles and kind of like, you know, I know that you were really kind of learning and testing in that phase, but to get the business off the ground, can you give us an idea of like what some of those things were that you did and where that early money went?

3:35I'm not going to, I'm not going to make you tell me how much money you spent. If you want to tell me, go for it. But I'm keen to know like where the cash went. Sure. Yeah. So I think first and foremost, for me, it was always about building a brand first and foremost. So rather than even just launching one product. Which you've totally done. Thank you. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. And so I would say that, you know, the early days. So, you know, once I decided that I was going to start a sock company, I was going to make these statement fashion socks for fashion girls. You know, the first thing I did was think of the name, you know, the logo, what the what the what I want people to feel when they when they see the brand.

4:14Early dollars definitely went to building the logo, building the website, definitely was going to use Shopify, of course, to start. I initially really thought of the brand as a direct to consumer brand. And that's really how we started. You know, now we've expanded into wholesale as well. But in the beginning, I wanted to make sure that when people first go to our website, they see us as a fashion brand. So not even just as a stock brand, but as a fashion brand that we're here to provide styling inspiration, you know, show you the different ways that you can mix and match patterns and incorporate a fun accessory into your daily looks.

4:48I actually purposely, I didn't want to use like a standard Shopify template, for example. I wanted a custom site. I wanted it to look very professional and high end and really give you that feeling. And then I would say that we also did really invest a lot in our photo shoots. So when we first launched, we launched with 10 styles. And it's actually very interesting because when we first launched, we launched with seven cotton styles and three sheer styles. We've obviously since then become known as the sheer socks brand. And I quickly realized that people really wanted these sheer socks because there was just nothing like it on the market with the complex prints and patterns and the colors.

5:28But for me, it was always very important to showcase these socks in an editorial and high fashion way. So a lot of other stock companies, they're just showing them as a flat lay or just against white, right? It's not really thought of as the hero piece. And I think that's part of why we've been able to really stand out is that we are able to incorporate these socks and photograph them. So we invest a lot on, you know, photo shoots, finding the exact right space, not just the white space. You know, all the style, obviously all the styling and everything is from my personal style, my personal collection.

6:04In the beginning, I modeled everything. Now we've also brought on some models based on what we need, but definitely just spending on the photography, the styling, like all of that, just the brand building versus just thinking of it as like, okay, this is just one pair of socks. How did you learn how to do all of that? So I think it's a combination of my background. Went to school for marketing and then right out of college, I worked at big ad agencies and account management. So advertising, branding, marketing. That was just, that's what I studied and what I really did on a daily basis. And then I actually quit my advertising job because I was very unhappy.

6:42And because I've always loved fashion, I've always wanted to be in fashion. And I actually pursued fashion blogging for about three years. I decided that I was going to quit, go all in on fashion blogging because that meant that I didn't have a choice but to succeed. So that was like my mentality. Give myself six months and doing the fashion blogging. And at that time it was mainly Instagram. You know, it was still relatively new, the influencer industry really honed my ability to showcase my own personal style. You know, I was taking alpha photos every single day and then working with brands and learning how can I incorporate their products into my personal style, make it feel authentic, create images that are compelling, that do well on Instagram, that people enjoy.

7:24And that I think combined that with my advertising background is I think, I guess in my opinion, what made it the perfect storm to start a brand like Sock Candy. I want to fast forward to 2021. So this was kind of your first full year in business. You ended the year doing$80 ,000 in sales. How did customers find you in that year? That year, we were still primarily direct to consumer. And I would say our biggest channel that year was Instagram. Yeah. So from the end, that was the other thing from the very beginning, Instagram was as important as our website to me. Like we, every single day was posting on it.

8:03Like we were prioritizing Instagram as a channel and the way that we shot our photos and content, I always thought about it as like almost Instagram first, like not even website first. So that first year it was primarily Instagram. I, and I think we started dabbling into meta ads, maybe the second half of that year, just kind of trying. It wasn't really working at that time. I was kind of like doing it on my own. So the first year was just, I would say definitely Instagram, I think may probably a little bit of like organic Google search. We weren't doing like any paid search at that point, but also from the very beginning, I knew that SEO was really important.

8:44So we were really trying to build up people typed in sheer socks or fashion socks that we would show up organically on Google search. Now we're actually the number one. If you type in sheer socks organically, we show up number one. Oh, wow. And then number two and three are Target and Amazon. So they're like bidding against us, which maybe is not. And yours is organically number one. Yes, ours is organically number one. Go you. That just makes my heart swell. I love to see that it's like a small business. Yeah. At the top there, organically. I bet you also had a huge amount of word of mouth because you have a really distinctive style of sock and I'm sure that people are constantly going up to folks who are wearing the socks saying like hey where did you get those I love those and I'm sure in the beginning it was a lot of that too yes oh and then in 2021 we also we did a lot of in-person markets I'm totally forgetting that because we don't do them anymore so we did a lot of pop-ups you know any we you know, we would do like Renegade Craft, we would do West Coast Craft, all the local LA markets.

9:46So we were doing all of that just to help sort of build that in-person connection, customers coming up and seeing the socks. And yeah, to your point about sort of that community, we started to see, you know, people started tagging us on Instagram and started sharing. So that was encouraging. It's such a great way, those in-person events, it's such a great way to find your, you know, those first like sticky 100, 1000 customers who love your brand. I think people like really sleep on the in real life thing, but like to get the traction in the beginning, it really matters. Yeah. And it's, you get to see like your customer in real life, right?

10:23It's like in your head, you think about, oh, my customer is this or that. But then it's like, if they just come up to your booth and you're like, oh, this is my, this is actually my customer. And now like if I'm out and about and if I'm somewhere like I almost have a feeling like it was so funny like the other weekend we were at the museum the broad in downtown LA and I'm in the museum and I'm like I feel like I could see my customer here like I just felt like the way people were dressed and like I just felt like I was gonna see a customer there and I saw a customer there someone wearing my socks because you're so connected to your brand that feeling yeah it's so weird it's the weirdest thing that's really cool and I think really important as well.

11:042022 was a pretty big year for you. You figured out meta ads and tell me a little bit about what that did for the business and how you, how you made that happen. Yeah. So 2022 was the biggest growth year for us. That was the first year that we also became profitable. And I attribute a big part of that to finally figuring out how to effectively do meta ads. So I started doing it in 2021, was doing it on my own. It didn't really have a strategy, basically didn't know what I was doing. Like we had great images, but there was no strategy, no targeting. So 2022, I was like, you know, I know that this could work.

11:41I know that online is the way to go. I know that we would do really well on Meta because of our images, but I just don't know how to optimize these ads. So I actually went on Upwork and, And, you know, I so I knew that I need to help. I in the beginning, I wasn't sure how to get that help. I had looked into like agencies and a lot of them just felt really like spammy and just kind of like you're getting like this template email and they're telling you they can do all these amazing things for you. It just didn't feel quite right to me. So then I went on Upwork to try and just find like a freelancer, like a one person type.

12:19You need like one expert who can hold your hands. One person that knows it and you can trust. Yeah. And so I found this girl who's just this one woman show on Upwork. She had amazing reviews, which is why I love Upwork. Businesses saying that it doubled their sales, like they really started to finally see traction. And so, you know, I contacted her and it's amazing because she provides this two month hands on training program where she will literally teach you everything she knows. And you start from square one. So basically she like makes you survey your current customers. She then uses the language from those customers to write the ads, which is so smart, like would never have occurred to me.

13:00She comes up with all of these different ad angles to test. I think we tested like 100 combinations of different ads with different audiences. And this was the part that I knew I needed help because I just did not have the knowledge to set up such a complex testing situation on the Meta platform. And so she teaches you all of that. And it's a two month training program. And her goal at the end is for you to not need her again, because she'll then teach you how to optimize. Right. So the first month is test and learn. The second month we're going in every week. You do a weekly call with her and she's telling you, OK, this is how you evaluate which ad set to turn on, turn off, increase ad spend, decrease.

13:41Like so then you get used to knowing how to do that. And then after that, it's like you don't you don't need her anymore. And I've been optimizing it. The opposite of an agency. Yes, exactly. I'm going to make myself redundant so that you have the knowledge in-house. Exactly. And so she's not like sticky about not sharing any of that. She tells you all her tips and tricks. It's not. I mean, so she, well, at the time, I don't want to like misspeak for her. At the time, it was$2 ,500 a month for the two months. So worth it when you look at what agencies cost. Exactly. Exactly. And so that made a huge difference.

14:11So we ended 2022 at like 263k in sales, which for me was like, oh, my God, this is like amazing. And it was also interesting because I started to see us penetrate the market because in 2022, we were still doing those in-person markets. Right. And I started to people would come up to us and say, oh, I've seen your ads on Instagram. So it was to the point where it was getting enough penetration where live customers were being like, oh, I've seen these on Instagram. And then they purchase on the spot because as a new brand, they might see something on Instagram and think, oh, well, this looks really amazing.

14:47But like, how do I know if it'll actually look like that in person? Right. There's that like disbelief. What's the quality? Do the colors actually look like that? Do the prints look like that? And so they'll see and then they see it in person. They're like, oh, my God, it looks exactly the same as it does online. And then they purchased right there. So I started to have like I would have like several people at a market come up to me and recognize the brand from the ads. And so that's how I knew that it was working. Can you recommend who that freelancer was? Yes. We can link her in the show notes as well.

15:15Yes, absolutely. Yes. Okay. Well, make sure we'll put that link in the show notes so that if you want to learn how to do meta ads, business besties, you can figure that one out. Okay, business besties. I want to just pause for a second. I've got Natalie here on the Female Founder World team. And I want to ask, Nat, are you ready for the holidays? Honestly, no. And I feel like it's coming up so quickly. It's coming up so quickly. And that's why I wanted to take a second to chat about this season's presenting sponsor, Vistaprint. It's honestly the best place to start holiday shopping. And right now, Vistaprint is giving all female Founderboard listeners an early holiday gift, up to 50 % off holiday cards, wall calendars, and more.

15:56Oh, wow. 50 % is a pretty good deal. How do you even have time, though, for all this holiday shopping? I know. Honestly, like I'm usually pretty disorganized, but I've been quite on it this year. And we've also been sending out these really cute thank you packs to different founders who have been on the podcast, speakers who have been at the events. We've printed really cute like little fleece blankets. We have embroidered caps and also stuff for my family as well because, you know, everyone's going to be wearing the female founder world merch. Oh, of course. You got to bring the family into it.

16:28And I personally love a branded tote bag, but I also didn't know that they did embroidery. That's pretty cool. The embroidered caps are particularly cute. Oh, I love that. Highly recommend. So everyone go and get your holiday shopping buttoned up with up to 50 % off custom holiday cards, wall calendars, and more at vistaprint.com. Use the code HOLIDAY50 at checkout. Okay, let's get back into the show. You also started dabbling in wholesale around the same time, because right up until this point, you are D2C, which I think is really smart, getting to know your customer, figuring out what it is that they like, optimizing your messaging, and then you kind of go into wholesale.

17:07How did you approach that? Yes. So I started wholesale by joining FAIR. We love FAIR. We love, love FAIR. Before FAIR, I think I had joined another platform and it just was like nothing was happening. So I, to be honest, when I first joined FAIR, I was very skeptical. I was like, okay, like, because, you know, to join any platform, you have to put in the time and resource, right? To sort of upload yourself. And I was like, okay, I don't know if it's worth it. Do you do it all yourself? Yes. I mean, it's very easy. They have a Shopify integration. So as long as you're on Shopify, it's just all sort of automatically synced.

17:43So I joined FAIR. So I will say one great tip about FAIR is I joined during the summertime in FAIR, right in time for FAIR's summer market. It's a virtual market. I think it's in July. And I think I joined like in June. This was not on purpose. I just joined and then found out there was a market. And the great thing about the fair market is that they will match your promotion. So let's say for the market, you offer 5 % off. Yeah. Fair will match the other 5%. So retailers actually are then getting 10 % off. And it is actually a huge market, like actually probably bigger than like any in-person trade show at this point.

18:23Retailers will wait until that time to shop because they know they're getting a discount. And so I joined and then the market happened. and I got orders from this market. And I was like, oh my God, like FAIR is amazing. So I do think that if you haven't joined, try to time yourself around that market because it is a great way to get yourself that exposure, that awareness, plus you offer the discount. I did the minimum discount, which is 5 % because I was like, I'm not gonna offer that much. So it was 10 % total. And ever since then, like FAIR has been a game changer for us in terms of those smaller wholesale accounts.

19:00I definitely like wouldn't recommend fair for like trying to get into like an anthropology or anything like that. It's mainly like brick and mortar local boutiques. But through fair, like we're in more than 250 brick and mortar stores at this point. And I would say like 80 percent of those are from fair. Yeah. And, you know, we haven't done much. Like I don't know exactly how fair like in terms of the algorithm. It's sort of like Google. I think it's like Google search. basically. It's an algorithm. The more orders you get, the more visibility you get. I do think like keywords matter in terms of what you're naming your products because, you know, retailers will be searching like socks or gifts or yada, yada.

19:42It's like Google search basically. But I have found that the algorithm now just continues to do wonders for us, I think, because retailers order. I also think getting reorders matters unfair as well. So we have an 80 % reorder rate, which is so amazing yes because like ultimately fair that's what you want yeah right totally that's what you want that means you're selling exactly ultimately fair wants to recommend brands to retailers that they think the retailer will add to their cart and the way that they figured that out is through uh how other retailers interact with you so do they like do they do they reorder from you if they go to your your page do they add something to their cart it's like your your image quality it's like the keyword thing matters but it's an algorithm like the more the better you perform the better you're going to exactly exactly because they'll they'll prioritize you in their algorithm so it's one of those things where it's like there are some ways i think to game it a little bit in the beginning if you're not getting those organic orders through fair where you can bring outside retailers to fair and start getting that traction um we actually have a retail boot camp program where there is a module on fair it's really interesting because it's one of those things where like once you figure it out it does seem to be like a self-sustaining system yeah because they're not you know there's no showroom fee yeah like the traditional showroom you have to pay a fee every month of course they take a commission yeah but in terms of like going to a physical trade show which costs so much yeah travel costs the trade show you know fair does the two big ones a year yeah and it's free one thing that i've heard people kind of mention that i think is important to keep in mind is like fair owns the relationship with the stores and so at any point if they increase their commission or if they made any big changes which you just have to assume that they're not but um it's the same as meta right it's the same as like building a business on all of these platforms that we're all building a business on we're so beholden to them and just hoping that they don't you know make any big changes that aren't in our in our favor and it's the same way with brands that we're selling on etsy and then etsy made changes and um so that's something to keep in mind but it does seem to be one of those things where if you figure it out it can like really really work in favor of businesses yeah and it's it's actually very interesting too because i've actually had a few retailers who initially ordered directly through us and then well so if someone orders directly through you then they order again on fair you can get that zero percent commission because fair will honor that but i've actually noticed a lot of the smaller retailers prefer fair because it's it's like just shopping yeah instead of that email manual back and forth oh i want this style is this available fair you can just immediately because what you're seeing on there is what's available what's in stock there's no email back and forth exchange which i so good for small teams well exactly so on both sides i think there is is it's easier exactly yeah yeah um you also launched into urban outfitters.com around the same time very exciting and then 2023 was a really big year you guys expanded to 40 products is that right 40 SKUs?

22:46Yes. Yes. We have a lot of SKUs now. Now I think we have 60. How do you like, how do you figure out the manufacturing piece of it? This sounds very complicated to me to have that many products. Yeah. So, so I think for, for us it's because it's a sock company, right? Like we want to give options, you know, and because the whole idea of the brand is every print is unique and different and every print is a look like every print is a statement. So not everyone is going going to want the exact same statement, you know, like that's why like so we have like, you know, florals, pets, you know, plan. It's like anything that you could think of.

23:23So for me, and so one part of the brand that I think is maybe unique compared to other fashion brands is we always keep a style in the collection unless it doesn't do well. OK, so rather than, you know, retiring styles. So like if a sheer style sells well, we're never going to take it away from the collection because to me, I'm like, why, why would we take it away if it's selling well? So we're always just continuing to build onto the collection. Um, in terms of manufacturing, yes, I would say that having a good partnership is so, so important. Um, my manufacturer has just been absolutely absolutely amazing.

24:05And they are so willing to partner with me. And, you know, I bet look at these numbers. You're growing so quickly. Yeah, that's probably why as well. But to be honest, I find that in terms of increasing the number of styles and SKUs, you know, we kind of have such a good process now that like it's not it doesn't it's not as extensive, I think, as from the outside looking in you know like the process is is very streamlined at this point how did you find your manufacturer is it the same one you started with it is the same one i started with and unusual is it yeah most people i feel like will start testing with someone and it's how they get their first 10 or 20 and then they end up needing someone else to scale oh interesting yeah so the way i found my manufacturer is also very interesting so before i even launched the brand I had started an Instagram account for the brand.

24:56Like I said, I was obsessed with Instagram and I was, I started posting inspo photos. So basically my former blog photos where I was sharing socks, not my own brand because we had no product yet, but I would just start posting inspiration because I was like, I'm going to start building a following now of people that love socks, you know? Um, and so at that time, obviously we had like very little followers. So I would check every single person that started following, I would go to their profile and see who they were. and one day I saw that the owner of this sock manufacturing company followed the account.

25:30And so I DM'd him and that was how I found my manufacturer. Oh, wow. Yes. That's what I'm saying. I DM'd him, then we got on a call. He is actually American and he had worked in sock manufacturing for a long time and then decided to branch out and start his own manufacturing company. So he's American. So we got on the phone. So even though my factories are in China, he's American. And so I just felt like this was, you know, he understood all the things that I was saying in terms of like how, you know, business and like what I was looking for. And yeah, that's how we started. Wow. And they're, you know, they're still my partners to this day and I have no plans on getting someone else.

26:13Yeah. So you ended 2023 with$720 ,000 in sales. Amazing. And then this year you've already had some really huge wins. Can you talk me through, I guess, what you've been focused on this year in the business and what's been working? Yeah. So one of the biggest things that we've been focusing on this year is expanding into new product categories. Yeah. So, you know, we're known for our sheer socks and we were getting a lot of requests for sheer tights, which is very technically challenging. because people are like, oh my God, we love the dragon socks. Can you make a tights version of that? You know, not understanding that it's very complex.

26:54We already have so many colors and prints that like to translate that into a sheer tights version would just take a lot of maneuvering. Yeah, so we actually did figure it out and we launched dragon tights for the first time in July. And people are buying them, even in the middle of summer. Yeah, so that's one focus. And then, you know, we've just been continuing to the D to C side at this point. I think it's sort of running itself this year. I would say a bigger focus has been really trying to amp up that wholesale even more. You know, we started out 100 percent D to C. Now we're 70 percent D to C, 30 percent wholesale.

27:34So the wholesale piece is starting to sort of increase more and more. And I am really seeing the value in that because I do think that it's it's always good to have a balance. because to your point, you don't want to ever rely on one platform, right? So D2C, we're relying so much on meta ads, even organic Instagram. They change your algorithm all the time. Like sometimes your posts get hundreds of likes. Sometimes they're just not showing it to anyone and nobody knows why. So you don't want to ever rely on one platform, which is why I decided, you know, we need to have more wholesale and really try and identify a big wholesale partner, you know?

28:09and so this year I decided that I wanted to go after QVC and you know part of the reason for that is we have a very wide age range of customers so we have like 25 all the way up to 65 plus and you know I've interviewed some of our customers our most loyal customers and some of them are older and they're buying it as gifts but they're like buying like 10 pairs at a time because they just think it's like the most amazing gift so that's that's when I thought okay like like QVC is actually would be a great audience for that market. Yeah. So I went after QVC and I actually went to a conference. It's called the Women in Retail Leadership Conference.

28:54This is such a good tip, by the way. Yes. This is like the industry. I don't know, like almost don't want to share it basically. But it's called Women in Retail Leadership. And I actually know about this because I met another female founder and she told me about it. And she said that was how she got on QVC. So like the whole female founders sharing, it's amazing. There's no way I would have found out about it. Yeah, so it's called the Women in Retail Leadership. And it's basically, you know, a lot of high level executives and retail companies like QVC are part of this group. And they go to this yearly conference in April every year.