It has been a good few months since I came up with the idea of collectible socks, and a lot has changed in regards to the brand design since then too. In fact, the socks and the brand has had a complete overhaul.
Originally I wanted to create individual characters that take up the entirety of the sock design, so you would look down at your foot and it would look like… something. On paper this was a great idea, and after finding an incredibly talented and friendly designer from Dribbble called Teuku it was evident that the characters didn’t really come to life on the foot.
This was important to me because I wanted our customers to bond with the characters, and somehow build a relationship with them, just like many have a relationship with Mickey Mouse, Pikachu or Super Mario for example.
Each sock needed to fit a template that other customers could spot a mile away, and these individual designs just looked too… individual and not brand notable in my opinion, each one could look like completely different socks from completely different brands.
After weeks of brainstorming and coming up with more designs that didn’t tickle my fancy, I had an idea to create a mascot, and this mascot would become the face of Sockible, in hope I could use this character on all of our socks, and hopefully it will be memorable for our customers.
I wanted each sock design to be similar to the different socks and rarities that we release down the line, so customers could spot other customers with out socks due to the similarities.
So, I had to come up with some sketches that I could pitch to my designer so he could work his magic, because I am a terrible artist and have been my whole life, which is annoying because my creative brain always wants to draw things but I am just never happy with the outcome!
Teuku did in fact work his magic from my sketches and designed an incredible mascot which takes inspiration from retro cartoons which I use to watch as a child. Teuku has been incredible at taking my drafts and reworking them into his own style which you will see throughout this brands progression.
With a few tweaks and some changes our mascot was born, as of now it has no name, but I think it’s something I will get our eventual community to come up with.
Now this mascot needs to become the design, and by doing this the mascot needed to have different outfits, or be doing different things, for example I came up with a bunch of sketches that featured our mascot as a SuperSock, or a Samurai, or a Wizard or even riding a turtle (because that may be one of the charities we help in the future), which should give you an idea of what the sock designs would look like.
These designs (at this moment in time) would be duplicated across the sock a number of times, and the idea would be for our customers to try and collect all of the characters in a season/set.
The colour choice was very important too, I wanted to work with quite calm colours, so as of now we’re going for a coral green with a skin tone secondary. This gives off quite natural, calming vibes which should help give the message that we are building this to help charities and nature in some capacity.
Alongside the mascot design, and finding our colour palette, I have been looking at potential packaging for Sockible, and because it needs to be like opening a sealed pack of trading cards, the packaging needed to be sealable without any view-ability of the sock inside. Because we don’t want future customers trying to pick which sock they want as that would defeat the purpose of them being collectible.
I first had inspiration for the packaging when cleaning my son’s wet nappy… I know, that probably isn’t where you were thinking I’d get my inspiration from. But the Huggies wet wipes packaging felt like a large pack of Pokemon cards, so I got to work doodling over it and liked the outcome.
Yet, a part of me wasn’t satisfied with how the packaging held itself when placed on a desk or in a shop for example. So I then had inspiration from a packed of instant rice… good ol’ uncle bens came out of nowhere and I decided to look into stand up pouches.
Ordering samples off of Amazon alongside a big pack of Sharpies I designed the dream packaging for Sockible, and I fell in love with how it felt, how it looked and how it stood on display. It also felt a bit more premium compared to the plastic Huggies packaging which is always a bonus.
Socks could easily be placed inside and sealed manually with a heat sealer which is something i expect to do in the early years of founding Sockible. After knowing this is the route i wanted to go down I started contacting packaging manufacturers for samples and it solidified my choices and at this moment in time for 1,000ish units of custom made packaging that is fully recyclable it’s looking to cost between £0.60 – £0.80 per pack which is reasonable in my opinion, for now anyway.
As of writing this I have yet to finalise the design of the packaging, I am still in the Doodling stage, but I want it to look natural, yet appealing. I want customers to look at it with curiousity. The back of the design would show all of the rare characters you can collect alongside how we help charities with every purchase.
I also want to add a QR code on the back that takes you to a video of me personally saying thank you for your purchase, I like the idea of customers being able to meet the founder and learn about our mission, I think this builds trust and respect.
This is without me even look at the legalities and laws behind packaging, there’s no doubt issues that I will stumble upon, but for now I am happy with how the sock design is coming along and how I can package this into a beautiful product that many will hopefully enjoy.
I have started thinking about how I start to market this product, and it’s likely I will open up pre-orders before I am actually finished with the product, alongside documenting my journey like this and via YouTube. It would be silly to launch with 0 customers, so hopefully having a few pre-orders ready for launch will help kick things off, and also because with any product, quantity helps make the pre-unit price much cheaper, which is mandatory for this business to succeed.
