Joe Nocito, international sales manager, Darn Tough Socks
Outdoor sock brand Darn Tough says it is in a period of intense growth and that it intends to push ahead with plans for international expansion. However, a strong commitment to its local community in Vermont remains at the core of its strategy.
Darn Tough Socks says no one ever outsourced production of apparel and footwear for the sake of quality. How did the model of outsourcing production become the norm?
I would presume it was heavily financially driven in many cases. We live in a global world. It’s not that all outsourcing is evil; it does help in developing economies where people need work, but in Darn Tough’s particular case, it affected the Cabot family, the founders, and their business, and they nearly lost their entire business due to their customers outsourcing. So this theory, that outsourcing is the future, is how the brand was born in 2004. The family felt there was a necessity to maintain a community and that helped them build this business in small-town Vermont.
The company famously went against the grain on outsourcing. Looking at the global outdoor apparel market now, more than 15 years on from that decision, what are the main reasons for being glad the company decided to make its products on home soil?
For the founders, it’s maintaining and helping the local community. But it goes two ways; without the local community, Darn Tough would not exist either. There is huge value in being able to work with your neighbours. There are maybe 2,000 people in Northfield, where the company headquarters are, but people commute from the surrounding towns, too. It’s a local population of tens of thousands, not hundreds of thousands. A second reason is quality; quality control is a huge aspect for us, especially coming to market with a product that we want to guarantee for life. For our product development team to be able to walk down the hallway to machines that are making our products and be able to see them live, that has tremendous value. Just having that high level control under one company roof is very important.
What are the specific aspects of running the business in this way that make you, if not regret the 2004 decision, look at rivals with a tiny bit of envy sometimes? What advantages do they have?
Well, there is financial gain, I suppose, but that’s not why we do what we do; it’s one part of it because if you run a business you have to make a profit. I have honestly never heard anybody talk about regrets. What you hear more is gratitude that we have this community around us to support growth and all our endeavours.
Why does Darn Tough use superfine merino wool in its socks and where does it source the wool?
Superfine merino is soft. With the machines we use, 168-needle knitting machines, we couldn’t really go much thicker. The Cabot family picked 168-needle machines as a sweet spot. We source the wool in the US and globally. We are working to make our wool supply chain 100% Responsible Wool Standard (RWS). We are at about 85% now. Like everyone else, we have had supply chain challenges these last two years and it has felt a bit like taking two steps forward, then half a step back. But when those issues subside, we should be able to do this. It will help because it will certify that the wool comes from proper sources, that the animals are treated ethically and so on. On non-mulesing, for example, we have always had this as a clause in our supply chain, but it was more a question to our vendors and a box that they would have to check. RWS will guarantee it for us. Compared to some of the larger apparel companies, we’re not big enough to be able to guarantee things down to the individual farm on our own. RWS will allow us to support our claims.
Australian industry body The Woolmark Company issued a statement in June this year welcoming the highly publicised challenges to the Sustainable Apparel Coalition over the Higg Materials Sustainability Index. It said the index was unable to represent a level playing field for all fibre types. As a champion of merino wool, what was Darn Tough’s reaction to that?
This, partly, is why we feel very comfortable with RWS. When we use non-merino wool, it’s Oeko-Tex certified and that carries a lot of weight for us, too.
Many brands have begun to emphasise the importance of product longevity. Few, however, offer a product lifetime guarantee. Why is that? How does your lifetime guarantee programme work?
I couldn’t answer why other people don’t do this, but I will say it’s extremely hard to make a product that is going to last a lifetime. Other apparel has many areas that could make a product fail and I’m sure that’s one of the things that keep brands away from this. In our programme, we try to make it as easy as possible. We work closely with retailers on this. The retailers will look at the socks a customer brings back and as long as there is no obvious sign of avoidable damage, from a campfire, say, or socks that have been chewed by a dog, they will look after the customer with a replacement pair and we will look after the retailer. It sometimes leads to a benefit for the retailer because it brings customers into the store and creates an opportunity to build a relationship and perhaps customers will buy something else when they are in the store anyway. It’s also possible for consumers in the US and in the UK to mail socks to us if anything is wrong with them, but it’s easiest and best to work with retailers. We receive warranty claims on sub-1% of the products we sell and there is no question that there are still socks out there from 2004, when Darn Tough launched. People are always telling us about socks that still look the same after many years.
You use nylon and elastane to reinforce the wool in your socks. Do you think this fibre combination will continue into the future or is the company looking at alternative fibres?
Yes, the fibre combination will continue in the short-term and longer-term too because durability is paramount. What we are doing is moving to use recycled instead of virgin nylon as much as we can. We have a couple of suppliers, one of which is Repreve. We have around 85% recycled nylon at the moment and we want to increase that. All of the nylon we use in our range of tactical socks for all branches of the US military, for example, comes from them because it has to be a US supplier [under the famous Berry Amendment]. Some of our other recycled nylon comes from Canada, but we are only 60 miles from Canada so it’s pretty local. For elastane, it depends upon the end use; some socks, such as running socks, need more stretch in some areas than others and to be more form-fitting. So, yes, this mix will continue into the future. However, our product development team is always testing new fibres and has recently looked at some plant-based products but in durability it’s difficult for them to match some of the synthetics.
The company talks about its home state, Vermont, as being beautiful but remote. What implications does this have for running and maintaining the specialist, fine-gauge knitting machinery you use?
The 168-needle knitting machines we use are from Lonati. They are beautiful, Italian knitting machines and Lonati technicians from Italy come help us when we install fresh sets of machines, working with and training our in-house technicians. Lonati also has a base in the south-east of the US, where there are a lot of older mills. All of our techs are part of the company and they are on the machine floor all of the time. They have the specialist tools and the know-how to be able to look after things. We’ve got an amazing team behind us.
Many brands run community support programmes. What is the special importance to Darn Tough of focusing on its own local community? What do you say to business contacts in the international market who wonder why advanced economies, including the US and most of Europe, need food banks in the 2020s?
It’s a tough question to answer. We want to be a good, local company and in 2021 we passed the milestone of donating 1 million meals to our local foodbank. Vermont is remote, and it’s not the most wealthy state. One in four Vermonters suffers from food insecurity. We pick particular days and have events such as GivingTuesday, the Tuesday after Thanksgiving, that are heavily linked to our e-commerce platform. All profits from online sales that day go to the Vermont Foodbank. More recently, we have added quarterly events, too. This is something that the Cabot family holds very dear. You have to fuel people if you want them to be their best selves, so that they can be great parents and great employees. The question we are asking ourselves is how to spiral this out to other countries we work in. We would like to do that and we plan to, but right now we don’t have direct-to-consumer business outside the US. We have been too focused on keeping everything else going because the last two years have been a time of extreme growth. People have been forced outside so they have bought new footwear and new socks. This is fortunate for us and we are thankful for it, but it means we took a step back on other, longer-term plans.
