Sock brand Bombas is in year five and it’s go time as the direct-to-consumer brand tests its first wholesale distribution deal, which was inked with Nordstrom.
David Heath, cofounder and chief executive officer, said the company’s at “an incredible stage,” ending last year with about $50 million in revenue.
“We’ve got very large aspirations over the next five to 10 years to be a brand that is doing $500 [million] to $1 billion in annual revenue,” Heath said.
The label, named after the Latin word for bumblebee, has built a line of technical socks designed with factors such as foot support, no slouching or no-show sock lines in mind. It’s also philanthropic, donating one pair of socks for each pair bought to a homeless shelter and recently crossed the 9 million mark in donations. Some may remember the company’s appearance on “Shark Tank” in 2014 when it nabbed a $200,000 investment from Daymond John.
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The landscape of digitally native brands that have managed scale eventually turned to wholesale, Heath said of the reasons for diversifying the business. He pointed to the likes of Bonobos, BaubleBar, Casper and Allbirds, all of which have made similar moves. All are also sold at Nordstrom.
The Seattle retailer’s brand built around customer service fit well with Bombas, Heath went on to say. After all, customer service e-mails and phone calls were all routed to him during the first nine months of the business.
Bombas tested at Nordstrom last month with men’s product before rolling out women’s this month, with the brand in the retailer’s top 30 doors selling best-selling styles.
The online store continues to grow at a rate of more than 100 percent year-over-year, although the future will probably involve more diversified distribution, Heath said.
“We’re taking a very thoughtful and, again, data-driven approach to how we continue to roll out our wholesale strategy,” Heath said. “We see it as being complementary and not cannibalistic to our business. So we’re monitoring sell-through and looking at what our online lifts are from the expansion and putting an equal amount of weight into customer awareness….Because we’re not dependent on wholesale, it gives us a little more flexibility in who the partners are that we want to roll out to and the speed and depth to which we want to roll that out.”
The retailer does not have the exclusive to sell Bombas, meaning the sock maker will evaluate opportunities with retailers as they come, Heath said.
To actually get to the longer-term goal of anywhere from $500 million to $1 billion in revenue could mean any number of tactics, Heath said, ranging from the potential for company-owned retail, international expansion and product category growth. It’s any number of levers the company could potentially pull to grow.
“We’ve been celebrating and focusing on the tremendous growth we’ve had in a single channel of distribution and by being really capital-conscious and focusing on not getting too big to quickly from a resources perspective and keeping our headcount low,” Heath said.
The company, with a worker count of about 50, sees wholesale as the next strategic move on its way to growing revenue. Anything else, such as pop-ups or other pushes into retail or product diversification, is not something for the near term, especially when the flagship online store is doing more than $100,000 a day in sales versus what Heath estimated would likely be around $1,000 to $2,000 a day at a physical pop-up location.
“It’s very, very easy to get distracted by a small project that lives in the physical world,” Heath said, specifically speaking to pop-ups. “I’ve seen other brands compromise their core business.”
For now, Bombas will keep its focus on taking one step at a time.