Hello there, consumers and consumerettes! Thanks for visiting my benevolent brand's website.
I'm stoked to tell you about it. As you may already know, Good Toes is not just a sock company. We're a brand on a mission. Sure, socks are the product we sell, but our company's real goal is to “Empower women in developing countries to break the cycle of poverty.” And before you get skeptical or overthink our business model, this is not slave labor repackaged as a benevolent good.
Let me tell you how we got started. So my dude Geoff and I were hiking through Peru right out of college (go Bulldogs) and one day Geoff's feet got cold, so we stopped into this ramshackle shop where they happened to be selling socks. Perfect, right? Geoff put some on and he was like, “Wow. These are the softest socks I've ever worn.”
So we asked the woman who was selling them if she'd introduce us to some local sock weavers and boom, just like that—after some pricing negotiation, exclusivity contracts, and bringing on Geoff's dad as an angel investor —Good Toes was born.
We decided right then and there to make it our brand mission to help rural-dwelling Peruvian women take charge of their lives, while also netting straight millions for ourselves and our early investors.
When we saw where these women lived, our first thought was, “This will make for a solid brand narrative,” and our second thought was, “We can help these women command their own destinies.” So we set out to meet the locals and shoot some candid shots for our website. There we were, just a couple of broad-shouldered finance majors on a mission to orchestrate an authentic founder's story by discovering a hand-weaving technique that we already knew about (but that no one had brought to the States yet, at least not at scale).
Now, this is true: our Super Weavers (what we call our contract employees) don't make so much that they can afford to quit working for us. That would be uncool from a business standpoint, obviously. But our operation is vastly different from the “sweatshop” labor practices people made such a stink about in the '90s and early aughts, and then kinda stopped caring about. We pay these women better than nothing, which is what they would make if we didn't come to town, we assume. And before you push back on any of this, I'm pretty sure there's a strong, Libertarian counterpoint to whatever you're thinking right now.
OK, flash forward two months: we got a second investor, Geoff's dad's friend, to bankroll all of the design work and stuff. We found a sick branding agency to help—the kind of place with Eames chairs and nitro coffee on tap—because we knew that the logo would be visible on the easy-pull tab of every sock (little billboards!) so we needed it to be breakthrough. The agency people told us that some blocky serif font with tight kerning would be the way to look timelessly modern. Perfect.
After massaging out the kinks and getting a provisional patent on the easy-pull tab, we were all poised for success when, out of absolutely nowhere, Geoff's brother questioned the whole operation at our soft launch party. He was all, “waaah, you pay these women barely more than slave wages” and, “the ripple effect on the local economy is unpredictable” blah blah blah. And we were like, “OK, you were an art history major, LOL” but also, like, “Oh no, dude!” (because we thought it might scare off our investors and kill the business). But Geoff's dad and Geoff's dad's friend didn't give a shit at all. So our site went live the next day.
OK, I hope this illuminated what we're all about at Good Toes, and you should really buy our socks! Their blend of style and comfort will have you ready to hit the town or hit the links, plus you'll really feel really awesome about contributing to the welfare of our Super Weaver women. We make them all include a picture of themselves with every pair of socks they hand-weave. Very humanizing for everyone involved. They love it.