Socks Don’t Match? How About a Subscription?

http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2009/03/19/socks-dont-match-how-about-a-subscription/

by peter123 • 17 years ago

15 20 17 years ago

blogs.wsj.com

mdasen• 17 years ago

This is why people don't have money. 40,000 people in Europe pay $7.42 a pair of socks?

1. Collect socks

2. Figure out how to get people to pay 5x retail for something readily available everywhere.

3. Profit

who has time to shop for new ones?

Hmm, it is time consuming. I mean, the whole grabbing a package takes forever.

There is nothing that is less satisfying to me than going to a store to buy socks.

Yeah, it's just so difficult and disappointing. I guess she's got a really hard life what with her sock problems.

The article compares them to Netflix, but Netflix is different - they're offering a service at lower cost with greater variety. This company is offering less variety at higher cost. This is why people have trouble with their finances - they start spending money they don't need to be spending on services and products they don't need. Yeah, everyone needs socks, but they don't need a service to sell them socks at way above retail. How hard would it be to bookmark socks you like on Amazon and order them when you need them? Or go down to the local store and purchase them?

JacobAldridge• 17 years ago

In most ways, I agree with you, and the comparison to Netflix as a value discussion makes no sense.

Clearly, though and if we trust those numbers, this is a service with a demand. Part of that may be the value it delivers - I mean, if I'm earning $2M pa that's about $1000 / hr, so going to the store or even jumping onto Amazon isn't going to pay off for a while. Even hiring an assistant to buy socks regularly mightn't be worth it.

There would still be a cheaper way, and using hourly rate math is fraught with danger, but this is pitching itself as a premium service. I'm guessing they're nice socks, and it's hassle free. So I'm putting it down as yet another idea I wish I'd had / implemented.

patio11• 17 years ago

This is why people don't have money.

I think the point of items like this is not "I am going to spend the rent check on socks" but rather "I have money which is more than sufficient for my needs, but my life is stressful and I have very little time, and I will willingly trade money for time or stress relief, even in doses that seem smaller than some people might appreciate."

My business is built on charging people $30 for something they could do for free. Of course, its only free if you think the extra hour of your life it costs you was valueless. My customers don't.

I paid $3.50 this morning for a coffee and pastry when I could have brewed my own darn coffee and packed a pastry from home for a third of the price. Is that rational? Eh. $2.50 saved a day times twenty work days a month is about $50. That's sort of below my feel-burning-urge-to-change-habits line these days, particularly since the equivalent amount of mental effort of my business would have much better returns.

BvS• 17 years ago

What about buying socks when you are at a clothes shop anyway. Even if its only every two years, you could easily buy 20 pairs at once since you are hardly running the risk that they will be out of fashion next season.

Even rich people go to buy clothes themselves at last once every other year, don't they? Seems like less time in contrast to fill out an online form.

ryanwaggoner• 17 years ago

I know a lot of people will think this is ridiculous, but I would pay for something like this. I hate shopping and I seem to perpetually be short on socks and underwear. Unfortunately, I never remember when I'm actually somewhere that sells them.

Actually, I take it back. Socks are consumables, but they're not perishable, so it would seem to make more sense to just buy 100 pairs every five years or something.

profgubler• 17 years ago

I love this idea even though it is expensive. I would never pay these rates, but I think they are missing out on revenue gold. If all the socks you get are the same, like the article says you gather a lot of socks. But if you throw in variety to the sock it is inevitable that people will lose one.

This makes it so that your customers become life long customers as they would always have to replace the mismatched socks. This eliminates customers dropping out after 4 years.

jwilliams• 17 years ago

I've been doing something like this for a couple of years -- Picked a popular/long-lived brand of sock, and that's all I buy. No more pairing, no more pairs lost due to losing one, or one getting a hole.

brandnewlow2• 17 years ago

Solution: Stop caring if your socks match.

moe• 17 years ago

Amen!

I never even started caring and whenever someone asks me about it I can only shake my head. I mean seriously... When I'm going to a place where I know I might take my shoes off in front of strangers then I'll spend the extra minute finding a matching pair. But normally the places where I take my shoes off are the places where people already know that I'm in denial with that part of "etiquette" and who somehow managed to get over it.

jrockway• 17 years ago

That's one solution, but it always bothers me when I know I am wearing socks that don't match. So, I buy big bags of identical socks every so often. $20 lasts for about two years, and since I only own one type of sock, it's not possible to have non-matching socks.

Personally, I think my idea is a lot better than a "subscription".

brandnewlow2• 17 years ago

That's pretty close to what I do as well.

tocomment• 17 years ago

I really hate matching socks, it seems like such a waste of time. Every time I do laundry I think to myself "There has got to be a way to make the socks match themselves". I mean the dryer is already moving the socks around, and probably bringing every sock by every other sock. Can't there be a way to make like socks attract, stick together?

Alas, 29 years and I still haven't thought of anything :-(

josefresco• 17 years ago

Solution, have all your socks be .... wait for it ... THE SAME

I work off 1 big package of socks at a time. Matching them is easy because they're all the same.

Genius.

randallsquared• 17 years ago

I try to do this, but when I go to buy socks, they never have the kind I bought last time. Instead they'll have pointlessly changed the design, or the color will be slightly darker or lighter, or they'll have changed from sizes of 6-8, 9-11, 12+ to new improved sizes of 7-12 or something, meaning I have to either have socks that fit less well or change brands, which means they don't match any longer... it's all pretty annoying. Lots of cheap, interchangeable goods are like this: if you don't buy them every week, every time you go to the store all the options are different.

smokey_the_bear• 17 years ago

Amazon has something like this. I noticed it as an option for buying iced tea bags, I could select to automatically repeat my order every n months. Don't know what other products they offer it for.

37signals story about it - http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/512-amazons-delivery-subs...

nike• 17 years ago

I vaguely remember hearing a speech by the founder in Switzerland around 2002. If I remember right, he had a single employee and was making ~1M CHF annual revenue at the time. He was so confident of his product that he listed his competitors on his own website - and he would mark each one that went out of business.

Socks Don’t Match? How About a Subscription?

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