Sock Redesigns 👩‍🎨🧦🤩

This has been a very exciting year so far for all of us at Friday Sock Co. - we’re growing as a company and as individuals! We’ve done many exciting things and this growth has allowed us to travel again to the factories in Italy where our socks are made, hire more awesome people, hold our first annual team summit, and partner with Canadian Down Syndrome Society to create a truly one-of-a-kind mismatched sock. You may be asking yourself what more could we possibly accomplish before winter rolls around? The answer, multiple sock redesigns.

I know you’re wondering, why redesign when they’re already so fun!?🔥 So I took it upon myself to find those answers for you. I sat down with one of our sock designers, Tamara, to get down to the nitty gritty details of sock redesign!

First question up (you guessed it), why do we redesign a sock?

We redesign in order to keep getting better. We always want to offer our customers the best we have; whether that be with a more detailed icon, new colour, or to respond to customer feedback.

Question 2, what was the process of these sock redesigns?

For a bit of context it was actually a pretty major project that took 5-6 months.

We go through a big process of review which includes analytics from sales, customer requests, and looking at what is coming and how that will fit in with current offerings. If we let some designs go, then that leaves room for new designs. But, we don’t want to mess with much loved original designs. So, it’s a thoughtful process of what will be best for our customers. We want to make sure we’re offering a variety of colours, styles, themes etc., so it has to be looked at as a whole as well as on an individual basis. Something else we do in our design process is start from the knit pattern vs starting from a graphic. We certainly know the graphic we’re going for, but we’re always improving our ability to work within the constraints of knitting patterns which influences how we can improve detail and creativity in the design.

Question 3, has this changed your design strategy going forward vs what you did in the past?

In the past few years we have grown the team to be able to gather more information from our customers, which informs our design. Maddy in the store chats with people coming in and has a pulse on what people are asking for. We also have a behind the scenes team that are listening to comments on social and software that can analyze things that we couldn’t before. Every year we also gain experience which helps us innovate. We also just really really really love design and coming up with new ideas. We’re always exploring ways we can push design boundaries.

Question 4, what does the future of Friday designs look like?

We are continuing to create individual designs but we have (now more than ever) been able to create collections based on both much loved themes (perhaps dogs…) and new materials (perhaps wool…). We want to just keep getting better and better.

There you have it folks, the ins and outs of the sock redesign process. Now that that’s out of the way, let’s get to what you’re really here for. The sock redesigns themselves, you’ll be able to see firsthand some of the stuff Tamara touched on above.

Red Plaid Socks

This one is a classic! The redesign was purely functional. With our current experience we now know a better way of placing the stitches so that it prevents threads from coming out.