Siblings are sometimes known to possess special communicative powers with one another, the kind that only strike the shared subconscious of two minds connected by blood and family.
And sometimes those powers are used to think about socks.
At least, that’s what the brother and sister team behind the Boston-based sock start-up Neon Bandits say about the moment three years ago when the two of them decided to ditch their careers in retail consulting and sports apparel marketing and morph into glowing sock merchants.
“My sister Sammy [and I] were both traveling independently when we came home from a trip [and] we said to each other that we [had] an idea for a business,” says co-founder Dan Cohen. “At the same time we both said ‘let’s make socks.’” [Ed note: He swears this is a true story.]
And after research into the space (and a desire to target millennials) and three years of preparation, they launched in early June. Cohen says he and his team set out to blend the worlds of athletic socks (“[they] can be loud, but are designed for athletic performance”), dress socks (“[they] can have funky patterns, but aren’t designed to be worn with shorts”), into a straight all-purpose lifestyle sock that mixes fashion with function.
“We’ve designed Neon Bandits to be worn as you live,” says Cohen.
That can mean a lot of things to a lot of different people, of course. Maybe to you that means skateboarding. Maybe that means showing off your pasty white legs at a backyard mixer on a hot summer day. Or maybe that means wearing some brightly colored socks while doing both of those at the same time.
At any rate, fans are drawn to Neon Bandit’s sports mesh-arch socks with reinforced heels, as they’re already being carried at places like Laced Boston, Boneyard Surf Shop in Martha’s Vineyard, and local e-commerce emporium of footwear needs, A Man Among Socks.
NEON BANDITS. FOR MORE INFORMATION, VISIT NEONBANDITS.COM
Dig Staff means this article was a collaborative effort. Teamwork, as we like to call it.
