How to Mark Your White Nike Socks So Your Brothers Don't Take the,
Athletic Socks that Give a Foot Bragging Rights
It took Winston Robson, 15, nearly a solid day of lawn-mowing and a little bit of luck to buy one of his most prized possessions: a pair of $60 limited-edition socks.
The socks, marked No. 36 of 150 pairs made, aren't woven from spun gold, signed by anyone famous or capable of special powers (unless you count sweat-wicking). But they arrived in a black box designed to mimic Dom Pérignon's, and are polyester-blend Nike Elite basketball crew socks that were then custom printed by a 23-year-old entrepreneur in Florida to look like corks.
"If you're wearing really nice LeBrons with some white socks, the socks take away from how cool the shoe looks," said Winston, the quarterback for the Bentonville High School junior varsity team in Arkansas, referring to the Miami Heat player LeBron James's sneakers. "Customized socks just make the shoe pop."
In the last year, he said, he has spent some $250 on six pairs of elaborately patterned crew socks, which he washes himself because his mother refuses to launder to his specifications ("on cold, cold water, the shortest possible cycle, the tiniest bit of soap and with white T-shirts so they don't fade").
Winston's spending is modest compared with playing the sock market on eBay: $300 for a pair of the same cork Rock'Em Apparel socks that Winston owns; $250 for limited-edition Think Pink Breast Cancer Nike Elites; and $117.50 for Nike Elites with a multicolored triangular pattern, a product of the Sock Game, a company that specializes in custom Nike Elites and is run by a California-based graphic designer and father of two boys, ages 14 and 11, with veto power over any uncool designs.
Athletic socks, once the most forgettable item of clothing, have become hugely coveted and a huge, nearly $3 billion business, said Matt Powell, the chief retail analyst with the market research firm SportsOneSource. After years of near-static demand (exactly how many six-packs of white socks does one need?), sales grew by 34 percent in 2012 over 2011, he said, and are up 28 percent to date this year.
His figures don't include flourishing newcomers like Stance, which shares founders with the hipster headphone-maker Skullcandy, and Strideline, whose cityscape designs have been posted approvingly on Instagram by the rapper Snoop Lion (formerly known as Snoop Dogg) and worn by the Seattle Seahawks player Marshawn Lynch during a January division playoff game. Nor do they include the dozens of scrappy Instagram-dependent start-ups like Rock 'Em, whose designs, usually involving Nike Elites, aren't sold in stores but command some of the highest prices.
Nike has no relationship with these companies, and so far cannot stop them from buying its socks retail and then embellishing, usually in patterns that deliberately complement an up-and-coming or just-released sneaker. "We put great value on our trademark rights and will take the necessary steps to enforce those where appropriate," Nike said in a statement.
The biggest consumers: middle- and high-school boys, fledgling sneakerheads who may or may not actually compete in basketball but who definitely compete in "I have a cool sock, and you don't," Mr. Powell said.
Parents, particularly of younger boys, are happy to indulge, because pricey socks generally are still cheaper than the premium sneakers they're reluctant to buy for fast-growing feet.
Jacqueline Maddron of Orlando, Fla., said that she feeds "the madness" by rewarding her son, Nicholas, 14, with $40 socks for good grades. He now has 5 pairs of those socks and some 30 other pairs that average about $20 a pair.
"This is the only thing my son is into," she said. "If socks are his vice, I can live with that."
The ascent of sock from afterthought to accessory that some boys build their outfits around began with Nike's introduction of its Elite basketball crew socks to the United States Olympic men's basketball team in 2007 and to other teams in 2008, followed by sales of the socks to the public in 2009. The socks, which go for about $14 a pair, feature an anatomically correct design for each foot and a logo practically visible from the cheap seats: four rectangles that shrink as they inch up the Achilles, topped with a broken vertical stripe.
The company may tout, as a spokesman did, its obsessive attention to athletes' needs, but, really, Nike got lucky, Mr. Powell said. "This is a grass-roots story," he said, noting that the sock was on the market for years before sales exploded. "Some cool kid in some high school somewhere started wearing them. Now wearing them marks you a player."
Added Jake Lefferts, 13, a basketball player from Maplewood, N.J., whose team won its suburban-league championship two years ago: "All the good basketball teams have the cool socks. It's like we know who's good, but the socks reinforce that they are."
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Though competitors have scrambled to block Nike, the company's share of the so-called "single crew sock market" keeps climbing. It's currently about 59 percent, more than five times that of No. 2, Jordan, with about 11 percent (and which Nike now owns), Mr. Powell said. The original five options have expanded to dozens, plus iterations called Hyperelite and Platinum Elite, not to mention athlete tie-ins and the inevitable limited editions for occasions like Black History Month.
It's "wholly consumer driven," said Yale Schalk, the managing editor of CounterKicks, a sneaker breaking-news site whose sock coverage, he said, exploded last year.
When new Nike colors are released, said Jennifer Dickson, the socks and footwear-accessories buyer for the 475-unit Sports Authority chain, "certain stores sell out as soon as they hit the floor." Ms. Dickson said that more expensive socks won prime store real estate 18 months ago and that demand isn't slowing.
"I still sell more than I did a year ago," she said. Of competitors' offerings, she said, "nothing else reaches that level."
On eBay, there's even a brisk business in "worn once" — also not by anyone famous — "and washed" Nike socks in the rarer colorways, with some pairs selling for twice their original price. ("It's crazy — I was going to throw them out," said one purveyor, Charles Henry of Richmond, Va.)
Nike's dominance of the sock drawer and its steady stream of limited-edition sneakers mean that enterprising designers rarely bother with any socks but Elites.
Rob Starkman, who alternately refers to himself as the "captain" of the Orlando-based Rock 'Em Apparel and "the Walter White of dye mixing" (a "Breaking Bad" reference), said that he can't work with Adidas or Under Armour socks because they "don't have a comparable product."
Mr. Starkman, a 6-foot-10 former University of Central Florida broadcast journalism major who dropped out during his senior year to chase sock-market supremacy, explained: "In the sneaker culture you have to match everything. If you're wearing Under Armour underwear with a Nike shoe, someone will know. So it just doesn't make sense to do an Adidas design on a Nike sock."
Nor is it worth doing staid colors in the smaller sizes. The flashier and brighter the colors, the better. At Strideline, cotton-candy pink, one of the original six colors offered in 2009, remains a Top 5 seller.
"We initially picked it because we wanted to include girls in our market," said Riley Goodman, a co-founder. "But it's all middle-school boys saying, 'O.K., I'm man enough to wear pink.' "
But high schoolers, Mr. Goodman said, "are over the flashiest colors."
A peek in the laundry basket of the basketball-playing Nycz (pronounced Nice) brothers of West Lafayette, Ind., bears out Mr. Goodman's theory. Tyler, 16, rarely wears the blue and orange Nike Elites he calls his flashiest pair, while Charlie, 14, still favors fuchsia, lime green and a purple pair that his girlfriend at the time gave him for his 13th birthday.
His father, Patrick Nycz, said that he and the girl's mother were amused that a teenage boy would be delighted with a present of socks. But Charlie ignored both of them. "I'm known for having a lot of socks, and she knew that I really liked them," Charlie said of the girl.
Patrick Nycz said that anyone who sorts the laundry incorrectly hears about it swiftly. "It's 'Those black ones are obviously mine, and the fuchsia ones are obviously Charlie's,' " Mr. Nycz said, quoting Tyler and drawing out the "obviouslys."
For anyone to whom it's not obvious, the brothers have taken to writing their names inside the socks.
"We bought most of them with our own money," Tyler said. "It's not like my brother is going to take them, but I guess I hope if I lose a sock somewhere, maybe someone will know to give it back to me."
How to Mark Your White Nike Socks So Your Brothers Don't Take the,
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/29/fashion/athletic-socks-that-give-a-foot-bragging-rights.html
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