GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. — The people at Bold Socks were selling funky socks before funky socks were cool. Or at least before they became mainstream.
“We've seen that this has gone from just a small niche business to what we see today,” says CEO and co-owner Ryan Roth. What they see today is a store on Division Avenu in downtown Grand Rapids that opens during the holidays and a full-time online store where you can design your own funky socks.
As with most other businesses these days, the pandemic hit one of the most important parts of business at Bold Socks: Weddings, “a really big piece of our business,” Roth notes. “And because of the ways that this season changed for most people that weren't either able to have a wedding or they had to reschedule their wedding, that definitely affected our business.”
But Roth also notes that a lot of customers who would normally shop in their store are shopping on the Bold Socks website. Thanks to that, “certainly we we've seen a decline, but not nearly as bad as we were thinking.”
You can even design your own socks, both in the store and online. “One of the fun things with our custom print socks, for example, is if somebody has an idea, let's create it, let's do something fun together.”
One of the lines Bold Socks features is what they call Statement Socks. When you buy from that line, each pair sold contributes 100 days of filtered water through 20 Liters, a non-profit that works to provide clean water to areas in Africa.