Vidushi Kanoria and Aayush Goenka
Founders Soxytoes
Market for socks growing at 11%
Founded by sock-preneurs Vidushi Kanoria and Aayush Goenka in 2018, Soxytoes is an online brand promising to disrupt a category as sober and boring as a pair of socks. The founders talk to Paulami Chatterjee on how the pandemic spiked a lot of their plans, how they are bouncing back, and that too with new categories in the pipeline.
What are the price points for each product category?
The price points vary between ₹199-249.
What has the growth story been at Soxytoes in the last three years (excluding 2020)?
The global market for socks is 26 billion pairs of which India's share is only 2 per cent - quite dis-proportional to its population size. This creates a massive opportunity and is the reason why the Indian sock market is growing at 11 per cent -- much faster than the world average of 4 per cent.
Even today, most of the socks available in the Indian market, including on e-commerce, are of poor quality and unhealthy to wear, very often fakes of leading sports brands.
Our experience during the previous two years has shown that the Indian consumer is evolving and wants to move towards a better quality and better designed product. Therefore, our core USPs - viz noticeable designs and product innovation - have resonated with the consumer psyche.
We have grown from sales of zero to half a million units/annum in the past 3 years. We have shown a strong growth in 2020 as well, thanks to increased e-commerce demand and expansion into the masks category.
Pre-Covid about 50 per cent of our sales were through e-commerce and 50 per cent through brick-and-mortar channels including kiosks, pop-ups and resellers. In fact, we had a very encouraging response to our pop-ups at events like Lil Flea and Comicon and at malls like Select City walk and Quest. Although the Covid situation has forced us to exit brick and mortar channels in 2020, this will for sure again be a focus area post-Covid. We are now expanding into footwear and sleepwear categories.
What was the impact of Covid in terms of sales, staff cutdown etc?
In terms of sales, the lockdown has significantly impacted the demand for socks in brick-and-mortar channel, although e-commerce demand has remained robust. To ensure business viability during peak Covid months, we leveraged on our core USPs - viz noticeable designs and product innovation - to produce a line of face masks, which did well for us.
We started as a team of 3 committed sock-preneurs, and since then our core team size has increased to 8. We have kept ourselves lean from inception, and have outsourced our warehousing, logistics, tech and other such functions. Although product development and sampling is in-house, our bulk manufacturing is largely outsourced.
What is your retail presence like?
We are an e-commerce first brand, retailing through our own website (www.soxytoes.com) and all major e-commerce portals.
Which are your major markets?
India, Australia, Sweden, UK, US.
What was the inspiration behind founding of the brand?
While innovation has in some way or the other tweaked our clothes, our shoes our watches, our ankle-hugging friends have remained neglected. This made us realise that socks needed a revolution too. Thus was born the idea of 'noticeable' socks - a transformational, orbit-shifting innovation, which set out to disrupt this previously sober and perhaps boring category. We started talking about socks 2.0. Better quality, eye-popping designs injected with a lot of new tricks up our sleeves. That's what we're promising to deliver.
Which are the categories the brand is into? Which category sells the most?
We are into accessories (socks and masks for men, women and children). Socks sell the most.
What is the breakup of your product categories (salewise) for the export market?
Socks is our major category. We currently export 10 per cent of our production.
What are the steps towards brand building?
We use digital platforms including Facebook, Instagram and Google.
What is the USP of your products?
Our socks and masks are noticeable, quirky, highest in class quality. Besides our bestselling casual and corporate socks, our innovative products like Perfomax high performance athletic socks, Com-Feet-able socks designed for comfort, Diabetic Care socks for diabetics, Compression Therapy socks for aching legs and for long journeys and Infused! Socks with the wellness of natural aloe vera and energising mint oils have been highly appreciated by the market.
Who are your target audience?
Millennials in the age group 18-40.
Which other product categories do you plan to move into the future?
We will be launching footwear and sleepwear categories over the next couple of months.
Where are your manufacturing facilities based at? If working with vendors, where are the vendors based at?
Our product development and sampling is based out of Noida and our bulk manufacturing is largely outsourced from Noida and Delhi, though we work with few vendors in other parts of north and south India.
How does your supply chain network work? What regions of the world is part of your supply chain?
Our product development and sampling is in-house and our bulk manufacturing is largely outsourced. Outsourcing is largely on contract manufacturing basis, so as to ensure conformity of raw material and production processes to our nominated sources and our specifications. We source from socially audited suppliers and believe in sustainability. We are proudly Indian -- the raw materials used by our supplier partners are of Indian origin and are sourced from leading textile mills.
Our warehouse and logistics is also completely outsourced. Our inventory and order management platform are integrated, and we aggregate orders from all channels onto that platform for fulfilment by our warehousing partner.
All these operations are managed from within India, though we work with the Amazon warehouses in the UK and US and with a distributor partner in Australia.
How is the supply chain expected to change with increasing digitisation, AI, VR etc? And how is this going to impact the business of sourcing?
Our efforts in coming months and years would be to integrate the vertical supply chain, to build-in the capacity to quickly respond to changing customer needs and to cater to product lines which can be customised for the individual user, on a Do-It-Yourself model. This means gradually transforming our business infrastructure and processes, and carefully choosing our team and partners based on their capability to evolve with the changing industry environment. Already we have identified many innovative and disruptive technologies which will help us move towards these goals.
Sustainability and circularity are the buzzwords today. How do you incorporate them into your product lines? What are your long-term sustainability goals?
We source from socially audited suppliers and believe in sustainability. We have started producing a line of organic and fair-trade cotton and bamboo socks, and are currently selling these to the US, UK, Sweden and Australia. However, we hope to shortly launch these lines in India as well. It is our long-term goal to source 100 per cent of our production in sustainable fibres from fair-trade certified factories.
This article was first published in the February 2021 edition of the print magazine.
Published on: 23/03/2021
DISCLAIMER: All views and opinions expressed in this column are solely of the interviewee, and they do not reflect in any way the opinion of Fibre2Fashion.com.
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