How cofounders Dave Heath and Randy Goldberg help people get back on their feet
Socks and underwear were the gifts that most of us, as kids, least looked forward to finding under the Christmas tree. The apparel brand Bombas was born, however, because Dave Heath and Randy Goldberg, who were then employees at the digital media startup UrbanDaddy, realized just how much some people need those very items.
“One day,” Goldberg recalls, “Dave walks over to my desk and says, ‘Hey, did you know that socks are the most requested clothing item in homeless shelters?’ We were curious about it, so we called The Bowery Mission, a shelter in New York City, and they said, ‘People aren’t allowed to donate used socks for hygiene reasons.’ This adds up to hygiene issues, major foot trauma; a fresh pair of socks is really meaningful.”
In response, the entrepreneurial duo started Bombas, which makes high-quality socks (plus underwear and T-shirts) and, for each garment sold, donates an equivalent unused item to an unhoused person. Nine years on, they’ve donated more than 75 million items through more than 3,500 giving partners. “It’s the Christmas present nobody wants,” Goldberg says, “but what an opportunity to turn that into something that people really want for Christmas.”
The Bombas business model:
Dave Heath: “It’s never really a balance [between giving and profit], because it was built into the unit economics from day one. When we built out the financial model, we said, ‘We’re going to donate a pair for every pair we sell. We’ve got to price the product accordingly. We’ve got to source the product accordingly. We’ve got to make this work, rather than just saying, We’ll sell a bunch, and then figure out how to donate a bunch.’”
Randy Goldberg: “It’s like learning a language: The earlier you do it in life, the more natural it seems to everyone who you’re speaking to. Building in the giving model from the beginning is the key to success, because there’s a lot of places along the way in building any business that you’re asked to make sacrifices. That’s one thing we’ve never been willing to do, because it’s who we are.”
How Bombas helps the unhoused:
DH: “We refer to the people in the homeless community that we serve as our non-paying customers, because we always think about them through a similar lens that we do our paying customers. At first, we said, ‘We want all of the people in the homeless community to experience the same level of comfort and joy that our paying customers do.’ We used to hand out the same exact socks that we sold, and we oftentimes heard from people on the street, ‘Hey, do you have just a black sock?’ I asked why, and they said, ‘It shows less dirt, and it’s easier to cover up from a wear-and-tear perspective.’ That got us thinking, OK, maybe the product that we sold to our customers isn’t best designed for the people who are experiencing street homelessness. We ended up reinforcing the seams for greater durability, and we added an antimicrobial treatment, which we don’t put on the consumer product, because it tends to wash out after a few wash-and-dry cycles, but they’re not washing their clothes as frequently.”
RG: “What does one pair of socks or one pair of underwear mean to someone? Well, it can mean the opening of trust in somebody who’s working at a shelter. And then that trust could lead to somebody accepting help and resources and getting their life into a better direction. Take that one idea and multiply it by 75 million—think about the impact of that.”
Bombas cofounders’ advice for new companies:
RG: “It’s very important to have a deep understanding of who you are as a company, which sounds super-basic, but if you can’t articulate it well internally, you’ll never be able to get it right externally, and no one will really understand you.”
DH: “The best advice I would give is, focus on the things you have 100 percent control over, and then do your best at the things you don’t. At least at the end of the day, you’ll say, ‘I know we make a great product. I know we treat our customers well, and I know we treat our employees well.’ With that, it’s easy to go to sleep at the end of the night.”
