The Evolution of a Sock

One quick scroll through our product pages and you can easily see we have the most awesome socks in the world – but ever wonder how they actually get there?  We’re going to give you a little sneak peak into the world of sock creation.  Remember our Design-a-Sock contest winner from earlier this year – the amazing octopus sock?! We’ve been working tirelessly on getting it produced and ready to sell since the voting ended.  Here’s how it all went down…

We received the hand-drawn sketch as one of our contest entries, and of course immediately fell in love with it!  Then we scanned it in and posted it to Facebook to see if all of our Facebook fans loved it just as much as we did.   With 455 votes, the octopus design took 1st place, and Gaige collected his prize money.

 

 

To get this sock design produced, our talented graphic designers duplicated the design electronically.  They create views from all angles of the sock.  Next, we pulled out our huge yarn book and assigned colors to the design.

 

Then we sent off all of our artwork to the manufacturers and patiently (and not so patiently at times) waited to receive samples.  About a month later, we received our first sample!  As excited as we were, we knew there was still a ton of work to be done on this particular sock.  Everyone in the office tries on the samples (many different leg sizes!), but unfortunately, because of all the details in the tentacles, they were too tight on everyone!

We revised the artwork, tried to minimize the details, and off it went again to the manufacturer!  When we received the 2nd sample, it was again too tight!  We knew we’d lose the awesomeness of the design if we minimized it even more, so we made the executive decision to make it a crew sock.

It actually worked out well here since we then decided to make it for both men and women!  Of course, that added extra work since the colors were a little too feminine for most men (think bright, cheery colors), so we toned it down a bit and sent it off for a final time.

Our 3rd samples were amazing!  We gave the manufacturers the green light and should be receiving a whole stash of octopus socks at the end of the month!

 

 

Can’t wait to get these socks on our site!  They’ll be released soon, along with the rest of our Fall 2012 launches!  Stay tuned 🙂