Chef Chris Cosentino, known for the offal dishes at Incanto, his San Francisco restaurant, recently entered a new field: designing socks.
Mr. Cosentino's socks, called Meat Feet, are patterned like mortadella, prosciutto and soppressata. "We put salami meat in a casing. Casings are kind of like socks," says Mr. Cosentino, who is working with quirky online retailer Betabrand. "How funny is that?"
There was a time when funny didn't sell socks. But these days, socks are emerging as tiny knitted transmitters of individual taste. A number of new sock brands—and small entrepreneurs like Mr. Cosentino—have emerged in the past few years, each promising to cater to a particular customer.
Upper-crust Anglophile? Try Nigel Knox Nifty Socks. Math nerd? Argoz may have the perfect argyle formula. Understated elegance? Etiquette Clothiers has socks of Italian combed cotton, cashmere and other blends. Antipast, a Japanese brand, and Maria La Rosa, an Italian label, offer highly detailed feminine socks for as much as $90 a pair. Ozonesocks.com offers a supply of special-interest socks, from endangered cats to pretty florals, for between $6 and $25. Happy Socks has flooded the market with stripes, dots and zigzags in every imaginable color.
F. Martin Ramin for The Wall Street Journal, Styling by Anne Cardenas
Patterns that were once for eccentrics or fanciers are now merely creative. Nine-year-old SockItToMe.com, a Portland, Ore., sock purveyor, expects to sell more than $5 million of socks this year, up more than 40% from $3.5 million in 2012, says founder and president Carrie Atkinson. The company's best-sellers now are "anything with a mustache—we can't keep them in stock," she says. Also popular: socks with jellyfish and corgis. "People want to express a little bit of their edginess or their quirkiness," says Ms. Atkinson.
Mass retailers are responding to the trend, too. On Gap.com this week, 30 different brightly patterned socks were available, including argyle, wide stripes and tiny anchors, along with eight types of plain crew and dress socks in solid colors.
Driven in part by the bold new offerings, sales of socks for men and women have been rising. Sock sales rose 5.6% to $4.22 billion for the 12-month period ended April 2013, according to NPD Group. Men in particular are rushing to buy the colorful, patterned socks offered by specialty stores. Sales of men's socks at specialty stores soared 39% in 2012.
Casual workplaces are one reason for this blossoming of sock personality. As people feel freer to express themselves at work, they are pushing the edge in their fashion choices.
Current fashion trends are also contributing to the interest in socks. For women, shorts, dresses and skirts with socks are a fashionable combination, though it carries schoolgirl connotations and works best for the under-30 set. The look can vary from a frilly pair of ankle socks paired with 1940s Mary Janes to funky over-the-knee socks, often with stripes, polka dots or other patterns.
Men's shorter pants lengths in recent seasons mean there is more ankle to show. What's more, ties—once the only place in his wardrobe where a man could reveal his inner pink polka dots—have virtually disappeared from many offices. That is allowing the ankle to take over as the ultimate revealer.
"When you're in business, everyone looks at your shoes," says Mr. Cosentino, whose Meat Feet will be launched on Betabrand.com in coming weeks. Nutty socks "create a question. And that creates a conversation." Or it ends one: Mr. Cosentino has a pair of "middle finger" socks that he says he wears "to meetings I don't want to go to."
Socks, it seems, are a relatively easy apparel market to enter: They don't break or spoil, have few sizes and don't demand a big investment from consumers. That was part of the appeal for Rick Peterson, who launched Nigel Knox Nifty Socks in 2011 after his job at an apparel company was eliminated. "I was in my 60s trying to find a job in a terrible economy," he says. "With a weak market out there, accessories were a place where I had a chance to gain some traction."
He introduced whimsical socks in patterns such as pink and lime stripes and skulls and crossbones. Now the socks are sold online and in 130 specialty stores. "The world," Mr. Peterson says, "didn't need another black dress sock."
Dan Soha, a San Francisco online entrepreneur and angel investor, launched Argoz socks in January 2012 after lamenting that he couldn't find good argyle socks. Before the launch of Argoz, he wrote an algorithm to study sock searches on Google,GOOG +0.38% looking for search terms that included words like "argyle" and "plaid." ("I'm always the biggest nerd in the room," he says.) In May 2011, a significant climb in searches for "socks" on Google gave him the gumption to launch Argoz.com. These days, sales are growing at 20% month-over-month, he says.
Sometimes it's almost hard to remember just what a nondescript no-man's land the sock market used to be. Happy Socks, launched in 2008, was born on a bleak day in Stockholm when Viktor Tell noticed his friends had donned colorful socks to lift the mood. "Back then, colorful socks existed but were hard to find," Mr. Tell, Happy Socks' co-founder and creative director, wrote in an email this week. Manufacturers initially balked at the Happy Socks concept. He says they sneered: "Kids' socks for grown-ups?"
No one says that anymore. For the closet comedian who wants to keep it under wraps at the office, Betabrand offers socks that look normal from the ankle up. Take off the shoes, and the joke is revealed: a cobra or a Rastafarian figure the company calls a "beardymon" on the foot. Betabrand also offers "sock insurance" with every pair it sells. Lose one sock, send in a sad-faced photo holding the remaining sock: the San Francisco company will replace it free of charge.
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