From Mission to Millions: How Bombas Leveraged its Company Mission to Find Success

Up Next in Commerce Podcast with Randy Goldberg

It might go without saying, but Randy Goldberg said it anyway.

“I don’t think anybody ever really grows up dreaming of being in the sock business.”

Despite the fact that a career in socks wasn’t his lifelong ambition, Goldberg has made a name for himself and achieved incredible success thanks to his sock company, Bombas.

Prior to Bombas, Goldberg worked in branding and worked at agencies and media companies helping brandsto figure out where theybrands went astray and find ways to get them back on track. It was through this work that Goldberg met his eventual Bombas co-founder, Dave Heath. The two struck up a friendship and when Heath brought a problem to Goldberg’s attention, they saw an opportunity to build something of their own to address it.

“We were just having a regular day, and Dave was on Facebook, and he saw a campaign that the Salvation Army had been doing with Hanes,” Goldberg recalled. “The Salvation Army had a quote in there that said socks are the most requested clothing item in homeless shelters. We were having lunch, and Dave said, ‘I saw this quote, did you have any idea about socks and homeless shelters?’ And I said, ‘No, and I don’t even understand why.’ We started to call around to some shelters in New York, and we were talking to people and we just realized that there was a real problem here.”

Seeing the success that Tom’s had with their one-for-one model, and recognizing that the sock industry hadn’t been disrupted in decades, Goldberg and Heath saw an opportunity. They could create a business to give people something they didn’t even know they needed — better socks — and help to solve a major problem facing society at the same time.

Committing to a one-to-one model requires a lot of work upfront, though, including understanding the unit economics of your plan. It also creates a scenario in which you have to constantly decide which aspect of the business you lead with. At Bombas, what is offered isn’t just a chance to do good for the community, you are also purchasing exceedingly well-crafted and comfortable socks. So Goldberg says there is a constant debate as to where to start their marketing efforts, with the mission or with the product. Ultimately, most of the time one wins out over the other.

“I think the thing that works the most in marketing for prospects, people who haven’t heard about our company, is talking about comfort and, is talking about the quality of the product,” Goldberg said. “The mission definitely helps complete a sale, helps with the follow on sales, and our customers , people who’ve already made purchases, expect us to close the loop, report back on how we’re doing with the donations that we promise we would do on their behalf. That storytelling element helps us with both sides of it. It’s just about where we show up with the mission and where we show up with the product marketing, at what time in the [sales] life cycle.”

The people behind the product are just as important as the product itself, though. And Goldberg explained that creating a culture where employees are heavily invested in the overall success of the business is important not just for personal growth, but for the bottom line as well. Building that kind of workplace was even more important to Goldberg and Heath after a bad experience at their previous company.

“We knew no matter what company we started together, building a culture of transparency — , where people really understood the ‘why’ behind the business, the core values, the financial performance, what their ownership meant, and a culture of being able to ask questions –, that was hallmark from the beginning,” Goldberg said. “We just wanted to create the company that we would have loved to have worked at and centering our employees in the business, and thinking about them just as much as we do our bottom line. Our theory was that it would make the bottom line better [because] p. People would be more inclined to give something beyond their capacity or to continue to learn or to grow if they felt safe and supported at the company.”

As the employees and the company evolvesgrow, there are always going to be times when it’s necessary to scale up. Whether that means replatforming or bringing on an entire data team, Goldberg said that you need to always have your eyes toward the future. And one way to stay ahead of the game is to look at your peers.

Goldberg said that he has leaned heavily on other Ecommerce companies that have come before Bombas. He has turned to companies that are a couple of years ahead of him to see what mistakes they made or how they had success. He has asked questions of other founders and has found a community of people who are always willing to help those around them succeed.

“We’re a pretty open group,” Goldberg said about the D2C community. “We talked about transparency and communication as pillars of Bombas from the beginning. We want to help out other companies who are coming up behind us, and then we’ve looked to other direct to consumer companies, and other, generally, just good companies to try and help us out. You ask the question and you find that people are generally willing to say, ‘Yeah, this is how we did this, or connect with this person on our team.’ They know that at some point they’ll have a question for you.

“We want to ask the questions to the companies who are ahead of us. You don’t get the answer if you don’t ask the question. It’s just an important thing, and I’m not sure why this group of companies especially is more open or collaborative than other groups, but maybe it’s this generation of founders and the way that we grew up and the interest in community, and the expectation from customers that our company just can’t look the way it used to look or act the way it used to act, and it has to have more of a purpose. Maybe that just drives us all to be a little bit more open and a little bit more flexible and a little bit less guarded about some of the things that we’re doing.”

Whatever it is that has brought the community together, it is undeniable that they have collectively created an industry that has changed the way people shop. So even though Goldberg never dreamed of getting into the sock business, now that he is here, he plans to stick around for a while.

“We want our grandkids to be wearing Bombas,” he said.

To hear more from Goldberg, check out his episode of Up Next in Commerce.

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