Socks, Slack Socks
From a small budget, a surprise hit for stylish feet. Early and later versions. A little nostalgia. The world is changeable.
Say you’re a small software company with big plans and limited dollars to achieve them. How do you use your marketing dollars most effectively, with originality and style and chutzpah, bypassing conventions and hitting a mark somewhere between business and casual, corporate and community, with maybe a dash of aspirational cool mixed in?
The answer we came up with: socks. It seems lightly laughable now, so consider the benefits of socks as a signature marketing item.
Socks served as an essential every-day item of clothing for most of the world, and certainly the working world. You could show them off if you wanted, sitting at a conference table. You could keep them private. They could be a bit of a secret — you knew about them but everyone else around you didn’t need to know about them. They kept your feet warm and dry. They required no sizing and so minimal inventory. They weren’t gendered into Male and Female options.
In short, socks were easy to do as swag and we could order as few as 500 in our first order. Plus, they had some novelty at the time because they were pretty underdone. Plus, plus, our emerging logo (that wasn't a logo but was the background for our app icon) looked like a stylish and bright tartan that offered a hip version of a more traditional stocking option.
So we decided to do socks. It was one of the marketing projects I started and carried on with and it proved to be a good one because eventually the socks even got made and became very popular and had to be remade many, many times over.
A Tour of How to Get Socks Made
I’ll just say it: getting the socks made in the first place proved to be a challenge. It was anything but a straight line from A to B. Here’s how that started, by email excerpt.
From: James Sherrett
Date: Wed, Aug 28, 2013 at 6:42 PM
Subject: Buy socks
To: dane@sotmclub.com
I'd like to know how many pairs I need to buy and what the price range is for custom socks. We have a custom tartan pattern and I'd like to get some nice, men's dress socks made with that tartan pattern. Like Happy Socks but with our pattern.
How do I learn more?
Best,
James
That inquiry kicked off a thread of emails that (no joke) is exactly 99 messages long and runs from August 28, 2013 to June 18, 2014. A Wayne Gretzky of correspondence.
It’s full of attached design files with mock ups of early Slack logo ideas, colour swatches and sock ideas. Also, many apologies from both sides for taking so long to get back to the other party. The team at Sock of the Month Club were flexible to work with and kept bringing us back on to track when we threatened to get off track, or when we did get off track.
We learned that the design of our socks was very hard to execute, and we were very picky on how it got executed. But we considered the design of the socks to be the essential and cool part of their appeal. And we weren’t going to become less picky.
So we pushed on into uncharted territory for Sock of the Month Club. Seven colours are easy to layer over each other on a screen. But getting them woven together from seven separate threads in a sock proved more challenging. Doing colour matching of the threads to referenced Pantone colours was a guessing game for us. Did that blue look more LIGHT TURK 2 or BERMUDA BLUE? And the green, more TEAL GREEN 124, TEAL 110 or DUCK 60?
Fortunately for me, an ace designer named Cory Bujnowicz had joined the Slack team by that time. When he introduced Cory to the team, Stewart hesitated slightly over his last name. He tried one way, then a second, then asked Cory: how do you say it? Boo-noh-vits. We each repeated Cory’s last name. We hoped we had it right. Now there were 4 of us in the Vancouver office.
Cory stickhandled the sock design process cleanly and had patience for all the small details I had overlooked, like packaging and the cardboard sleeve the socks came folded into. Once we had the overall design of the sock set, the following design choices we had to make were what colour the toe, heel and top collar should be. We went with pink (hot! pink!).
On May 16, 2014 we announced the socks on Twitter.
Immediately, people wanted to know how they could get their hands on a pair. People wanted to buy them.
For a project that had taken a long time and perhaps caused Stewart to question my ability to get things done just a wee bit, the responses felt rewarding and like validation for our instinct of what would work. The 500 original pairs of socks we had ordered flew out the door (or stayed inside the door until they went home to the feet of employees). On May 20, I wrote to the sock team to ask about ordering 1,000 pairs. By the time we placed the order a week later, we needed 3,000 pairs.
The Socks Game
Demand for Slack socks tracked pretty well with overall demand for Slack and for our momentum in the press and among tech nerds. More people wanted to try Slack. More people wrote about Slack. More people wanted to wear Slack socks.
Over the next few iterations of the socks the colours grew more muted (Stewart’s first reaction on seeing them in person, “Too hot.”), the accent colours on the toe, heel and shank changed to the background colour NATURAL (from hot! pink!) and the threads were spun finer to be easier to weave. We started to have sizes to the socks so the smaller-footed and larger-footed among our fans had better-fitting options. We ordered more socks and spun our own threads to make them thinner prior to weaving and custom dyeing them the right colours.
The socks game became a very minor cottage industry at Slack that we did very little to nurture. We joked internally that if the software business ever tanked we could start the Slack Office Supply Company and just sell socks, but we really didn’t do much to move the socks. The socks moved themselves and the Slack Office Supply Company became a small sub-brand we used on the cardboard sock sleeves and a few coffee mugs soon thereafter. I hope someone in addition to those of us who worked at Slack found some fun in it.
How many socks did we end up ordering? Someone might know the exact number. I do not. It’s certainly in the range of 500,000. People would post photos of them wearing the socks. Large customers would get sent bundles of 50 socks. Larger orders would get a bale of bundles holding, 200 or 500 pairs of socks to hand out on launch days.
Some people started calling them ‘slocks’ as a portmanteau of Slack + socks but this was frowned on internally. People started to make sock puppets and post videos of small plays they put on. For corporate swag, the socks worked out very well.
There was also an internal face to the success of the socks. When a new employee joined Slack they got a pair as part of their welcome package on day 1. At the risk of overstating folks’ enthusiasm, pretty much every early new employee knew about the socks. Some joked they had joined for the socks.
Eventually I handed off socks to marketing professionals and they did a much better job with the project. I felt happy to see them well served by a teammate with more time and expertise for the sock game, but a bit sorry to see them go at the same time. I’ll let my bias for the originals show here. I still have a partial bundle of socks on the top shelf of my clothes closet that I dig into to share with friends.
WORK Socks
To coincide with the day Slack debuted on the New York Stock Exchange, June 20, 2019, new Slack socks showed up on each employee’s desk.
My $0.02 is they were not tartan or particularly stylish, and they looked to me like pretty much any company could have produced them. The only distinguishing characteristic to my eye was the inclusion of WORK on them – the stock ticker symbol Slack would trade under – and the date of our direct public offering. I hate to be the Debbie Downer here but sometimes originals are never exceeded.
The change in the sock design reflected an overall change in the identity of Slack too. As we grew, some of the distinct edges and independence and weirdness got sanded off. The freedom of the Glitch roots got crowded out by the conformity of B2B software. The app logo lost its tartan background. The logo changed from a weird coloured hash tag reminiscent of Slack’s origins in IRC (Internet Relay Chat) to what got nicknamed the 4-ducking circle.
Internally we talked about maturing and generally put a rosy tint on the changes. Many amazingly skilled and diligent folks joined the company with a mandate to make it more marketable, and they did very good work helping evolution happen. I can’t honestly complain about the changes. The best neighbourhoods get gentrified and some things are gained and some things are lost in the process. Marketing moved to SF.
Is it simple enough to say that capitalism eventually eats all its children? That we traded our weirdness for commercial acceptability? That we made a bargain, sometimes calculated and explicit, and sometimes generated by the sheer scale of growth we pursued?
I’m not sure I’ll be able to answer those questions knitted into the context of socks, but those are the questions conjured for me.
One of the effects that feels inevitable when growth is so highly valued is a streamlining and homogenization. So many new people get hired. Those people come with track records of success. Those track records are born from doing things an established and proven way. The new people bring along the established and proven way.
As we grew and become more indoctrinated with the established and proven ways, I came to appreciate them and learn to even enjoy them. They helped us grow faster than we could have grown otherwise. They removed risk. They prepared us for a larger future.
If we’d had to figure out each part of our business slowly and purposefully, from scratch, to ensure it reflected our values and culture and what we aspired to achieve, it would have taken forever and our story would very likely be very different now.
But still, I miss the originality of those first pairs of socks.
Up next:
Still my favorite socks to this day... Come to think of it James, got any more pairs laying around?!