Celebrate 25 years of great socks!
Greetings, Dreamers,
Sock Dreams is turning 25 tomorrow, and we wanted to take this opportunity to look back at our humble beginnings, as well as how far we've come!
More Sock Dreams lore behind the cut
We started out in 2000 with nothing but a dream and a website, built by our Dreamer in Chief, Monique, AKA Niqkita, AKA Niq. From the very beginning, when Niq was the person answering emails, customer feedback has been essential to our business. Initially she ran the business out of her own home, until the operation grew big enough that it required its own building, and even a handful of employees.
In the beginning we retailed items produced by other manufacturers (and still do!), and in 2004 Niq started working with an American sock mill to design our debut brand: DreaM Stockings! The small, family-run mill knits socks on antique machines, and Niq collaborated with them to develop longer, wilder socks than they’d ever knit before. Some of those first creations are styles we still carry today: Ribbed M Stockings and M Stripes. It turned out that there was an enthusiastic audience for these unique designs, and thus began Sock Dreams’ journey as a manufacturer.
As the company grew, both in the number of employees and the number of styles we stocked, it moved from location to location. Our DreaM Stockings line expanded and evolved over the years, and in 2008, Dara, who manages our U.S product development, partnered us with another American mill to create our Dreamer Socks line. These socks were made on modern machines, with a high needle count, and she was able to work with the mill to customize them, to make socks with improved stretch.
For many people our Extraordinary Thigh Highs (the flagship style of our Dreamer Socks line) were the first thigh highs they’d found that comfortably fit their legs! The feedback we received from that first run of Extraordinaries proved that there was still room for improvement, though. With that feedback in mind, Dara, now a part-owner, continued to work with the mill over the years to improve their design and stretch. We’d still like to create even stretchier thigh highs, but have yet to find the technology in the US that can make that hope a reality.
We’d never heard of “slow fashion” when we launched our DreaM Stockings and Dreamer Socks lines, but we naturally fell into this niche clothing market. From the start we’ve been dedicated to domestic manufacturing, and have a strong preference for styles that will endure – both structurally and stylistically – over the years. You may have noticed from our minimalist packaging that we don’t like waste, and it’s the same ethos that inspired us to blog about mending techniques, like darning and needle felting, to help keep beloved socks in circulation. This might not be the best move business-wise, but we’ve always had priorities that go beyond the bottom line.
25 years is a long time for a small business to be around these days, and we couldn’t have done it without all of you! Not only have you literally kept the lights on through your patronage, but so much of what we do and love about our work has been made possible by our community of customers.
With that in mind, on the eve of our 25th birthday, we’d really like to celebrate all of you!
