It’s been 10 years since film producer Cash Warren and his longtime buddies Alan Stuart and David Ehrenberg reached into their wallets and slapped down $1,500 each to start a sock company.
Fast forward to today, and their brand, Pair of Thieves, has expanded into other essentials such as T-shirts, underwear and loungewear and is on track to hit $100 million in sales this year, a whopping 225 percent increase from 2019. And that’s without any outside investors, venture capitalists or private equity players.
Looking ahead to the next decade, Pair of Thieves is seeking collaboration partners to help it move into other categories and is also eyeing expanding into women’s and kids’.
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The Los Angeles-based founders were in New York City last week to celebrate their anniversary and kick off their Power of 10 campaign, a charitable initiative for underserved groups and minorities, through which Pair of Thieves will donate 100,000 pairs of socks — 10,000 to 10 charities across the U.S.
This campaign serves as an extension of Pair of Thieves’ Good Fits program where the company has donated product and funds to causes such as mental health awareness and children living in poverty. In addition to its longtime partner, Baby2Baby, a nonprofit that provides essentials to needy kids, the other recipient organizations are: Ali Forney Center, ECLI-VIBES, Knock Knock Give a Sock, North Brooklyn Angels, Harlan County Public School District, Operation Showers of Appreciation, Children First Fund, Lighthouse of Hope Foundation, The Village Diaper Bank, and Partnership With Native Americans.
In addition, the company hosted a pop-up activation in Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village on Friday where passersby could receive a complementary pair of socks and hopefully drive additional donations to the charities.
“At Pair of Thieves, we believe that all people deserve access to basics,” Stuart said. “Shortly after starting this company, we uncovered a simple truth: that socks are one of the most essential needs for marginalized communities, but least donated. This one statistic sparked our giveback program and inspired an entire company to ask ‘What else can we do?’”
Since its founding, Stuart said, Pair of Thieves has donated 4 million pairs of socks and “hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Trevor Project around pride and $100,000 to mental health for teens,” Warren added. “As the brand scaled, so did our giving, but it’s something that we were reluctant to talk about when we first started the business. A lot of brands out there get backlash for maybe doing it in the wrong way or not up to the standards that other people want. We just wanted to do it and now it’s time to really start talking about it. We didn’t want it to feel like a marketing push. We wanted the brand to stand on its own.”
And it has done just that.
Despite being in a highly competitive category, Pair of Thieves has managed to break through in large part because of its unique positioning in the market — the premium choice at the mass market level offering “flair” to an otherwise staid category with its colorful, graphic designs, Stuart said.
The company started with 16 styles of socks and then added underwear, a category that has grown to become its largest volume product, representing some 55-60 percent of sales, Warren said. “At the time, socks was that impulse buy that could bring flair to a guy’s otherwise boring wardrobe. And then we said, if we can disrupt the sock category by smashing a performance sock and a casual sock together, can we do the same thing for underwear? And that quickly became the pivot there.”
Today, Pair of Thieves is carried in all Target stores, where it ranks as the second largest brand of men’s underwear, they said, as well as 4,000 Walmart stores, double the number of doors from 2023. It is also carried at other higher-price stores such as Macy’s, Men’s Wearhouse, Dick’s Sporting Goods, Nordstrom Rack and others. All told, the brand is carried in close to 7,000 doors. “The cool thing is that the products are the same no matter what door you’re walking into,” said Warren. “So if you’re buying a three-pack of Quick Dry, it’s $24.99 no matter where you are.”
Dick’s, which tested Pair of Thieves product in 50 doors earlier this year, is now rolling it out to 300 stores, and in a handful of its House of Sport experiential units, has tasked the company with creating a space where Pair of Thieves will be sold alongside other complementary brands.
But it also represents a challenge for the trio since up until now, Pair of Thieves hasn’t “done a great job with partnerships or collabs,” Warren said. So they’re looking for other like-minded brands to work with for these locations, in apparel as well as hard goods.
That project has also opened a conversation about where Pair of Thieves will go next. Already, women are purchasing the men’s products, they said, meaning that an extension into women’s seems a logical next choice. But that part of the market is especially competitive with brands such as Skims by Kim Kardashian among the most popular.
“I’ve known Kim forever,” said Warren. “I love what she’s doing with Skims and the new definition of sexy they’re bringing to the market. But we’re not crabs in a barrel, there’s enough to go around. It’s a giant category and there’s room for more than one winner. We pride ourselves on being affordable to everybody and being high quality but at a really affordable price.”
Looking to the future, Stuart said their goal for Pair of Thieves is to “build the next legacy brand” by continuing to “disrupt a commodity product.” Competitors such as Hanes or Fruit of the Loom “were built 150 years ago for our grandparents. This is for the next generation.”
Their target customer is an active guy from 18 to 34 who is at a “transitional moment in his life,” Warren said, moving from school to the workforce, and looking to “upgrade their basics.” Their pricing — a three-pack of 4-Way Stretch boxer briefs is $14.99, a pack of cushioned ankle socks are $12.99 or $14.99, lounge shorts are $24.99 and pocket Ts are $14.99, Pair of Thieves represents the top of the pyramid.
They look at competitors such as Tommy John and Happy Socks as “big brothers. Tommy John has done an amazing job and Happy Socks opened the door for wild socks for men,” Warren said. “But we’re at half the price point. We’re playing in the old space of mass market and disrupting there. We’re premium priced when you look at the incumbents — Hanes and Fruit. We appeal to the customer who wants to spend a buck or two more.”
Stuart admitted that when they were brainstorming about launching their company, he thought they should target high-end boutiques. “But Cash and David were on the opposite train and I give them all the credit in the world to be able to have that vision to stay elevated inside of mass because [the market] was begging for it.”
While they see a long runway for growth in the future, what they’re not looking into is opening their own stores. “We don’t think an underwear and sock store would be a big draw,” Warren said. “It’s oftentimes an add-on to what they’re already buying. And we’re not store operators — having a dot-com is hard enough.”
The way the business is structured, Stuart’s background is in design and advertising, Warren is a marketing guru and Ehrenberg has a background in business and had manufactured hard goods for the sporting goods industry. None had worked in apparel, but “the trifecta of us seems to work well,” Stuart said.
But it wasn’t always easy, and the trio has a buyer at Target to thank for getting the business rolling.
“We had this idea and a buyer at Target took a chance on us,” Warren said. Because the company was just getting off the ground, they never dreamed a retailer that big would even meet with them, let alone place an order.
At the time, the company was named Stateside, but just before launching, their lawyer told them that name was already registered to someone else and they had to find another name. They picked Pair of Thieves because that’s the term people use when they lose one of their socks in the dryer.
On top of that, they had lined up celebrity stylist Brad Goreski to be the face of the brand at launch, but when Warren’s wife, the actress and entrepreneur Jessica Alba, stopped using him, Goreski exited the business. “We hadn’t even shipped them yet and we had to call Target and say we have a new name and we don’t have Brad,” Warren said with a hearty laugh. But the buyer shrugged it off and went ahead with the 270-store test, and it worked out. “We were incredibly lucky,” Warren said.
In recent years, they’ve partnered with a couple of athletes, including the NBA’s Rob Dillingham and the NFL’s Shedeur Sanders as ambassadors of the brand, and on Monday, will introduce a new face, DeVonta Smith, a wide receiver for the Philadelphia Eagles, who will front the 4-Way Stretch franchise.
Another thing that sets the brand apart is that it steers clear of the more old-boy, locker room-inspired marketing, preferring to take the higher ground. Their only slightly off-color reference is to Swass, a term they use for their more-performance-skewed product that dries quickly and helps men not get “swamp ass.”
“We’ve always tried to take things lightly,” said Stuart. “You know, at the end of the day, it’s a commodity product and people really have no reason to follow us on TikTok or Instagram. But we try to bring magic in the mundane. If you’re buying underwear, why can’t that be fun?”
