Not liking the choices he faced, John turned to his father and said, “I want to go into business with you.” John had worked with Mark before and he thought the best way to find a job he would love was to create one. To Mark, this seemed like a great plan.
The two would-be partners needed to come up with an idea for their business. John’s first suggestion? A fun store. “I wanted something fun and creative.” Though neither of them could figure out what a fun store would actually sell.
Next, John suggested a food truck. He had seen the movie Chef starring Jon Favreau, about a father-son food truck business. The two started cooking up plans on what they could serve when they ran into a problem. John explained, “We can’t cook.”
With his food truck initiative gone, John hit his Eureka moment. “Let’s sell socks.” John suggested they sell crazy socks. He even had the name for the business and some drawings of the website. Asked why socks, John says, “I wore crazy socks my entire life. They are fun, colorful and creative. They let me be me.”
Mark adds, “John had worn crazy socks his entire life, that was his thing. We would drive around looking for them. It seemed as if John loved fun socks so much, others would too.”
John and Mark set out to build their business. They built a website in Shopify, an e-commerce platform. They convinced some suppliers to sell them some inventory. They opened bank accounts and filed with the State of New York. The only marketing they did was to set up a Facebook page and shoot some low-fi videos with John talking about his socks. That’s when John came up with his catchphrase: “socks, socks and more socks.” And they committed to donating 5 percent of earnings to the Special Olympics.
The partners intended to open their business at 10 a.m. but their website crashed that morning, so they opened at 3 p.m. They waited to see what would happen.
Fortunately, they did not need to wait long. Orders began streaming in. Almost all of them were local people that knew the pair in Huntington. And the customers came because they loved John’s videos.
