John and Mark X. Cronin are the father-son team that created John’s Crazy Socks, a social enterprise with a mission to spread happiness. They bootstrapped their business into the world’s largest sock store with multi-million dollar revenue and have been named EY’s Entrepreneurs of the Year.
John is not only a business owner, but he has Down syndrome. John and Mark show what people with differing abilities can do – more than half of their colleagues have differing abilities.
They are fierce advocates for inclusion, having testified twice before the U.S. Congress and spoken at the United Nations. They are sought after keynote speakers, have recorded two TEDx Talks and are frequent guests on network television.
Their Giving Back program has raised over $650,000 for their charity partners.
What you will learn
- Why inclusion and community are so important in business
- Unpacking the challenges faced during rapid business growth
- Discover why adaptability and resilience are critical during tough times
- The value of quick action and continuous learning in entrepreneurial endeavors
- covering the five pillars of John’s Crazy Socks
- The impact John’s Crazy Socks has had on their charity partnerships
- Rediscovering the joy of connecting with others and the gratification of making a difference
- Plus loads more!
Transcript
Jeff Bullas
00:00:06 – 00:01:28
Hi everyone and welcome to The Jeff Bullas Show. Today I have with me, John and Mark X Cronin. Now, what does X stand for? Xavier. But he is called Mark X Cronin and his son is to the left of me, that’s John. And Mark, dad is on the right of me. Welcome the show guys and I’m just gonna introduce you a little bit about John and Mark. They are a father and son team that created John’s Crazy Socks. Don’t know where John came from, but I had, I could take a wild guess. A social enterprise with a mission to spread happiness. And we’re gonna have some fun and a bit of laughter here today. They bootstrapped their business into the world’s largest sock store with a multimillion dollar revenue. They’ve been named EY’s, Ernst Young’s Entrepreneurs of the year. John is not only a business owner but he has Down syndrome and that makes him really good looking. John and Mark show what people with differing abilities can do more than half their colleagues of differing abilities. They are fierce advocates for inclusion, having testified twice before the US Congress and spoken at the United Nations. They are sought after keynote speakers, have recorded two TEDxTalks and are frequent guests on network television. And Mark’s feeling a bit tired. I think it’s maybe too late in the day for him, but it’s okay.
Mark X. Cronin
00:01:28 – 00:01:33
No, we’re just getting started, right?
Jeff Bullas
00:01:34 – 00:02:13
They create unique custom experiences to develop a workplace culture that leads to an engaged workforce. And they show their gratitude through their Giving Back program and they raised over $650,000 for their charity partners. Couple of highlights we’ve got are the founders of John’s Crazy Socks, a multimillion-dollar sock company on a mission to spread happiness. That’s a lot of socks, guys, they’ve been named Ernst Young’s Entrepreneurs of the Year. They advocate for inclusion and they’ve raised a lot of money for their charity partners. Welcome to the show guys, it’s an absolute pleasure to have you here and they’re dialing in from just outside New York. Welcome to the show.
John X. Cronin
00:02:14 – 00:02:20
Wow. Thank you, Jeff, I really appreciate it. Thank you. I have it on your podcast.
Mark X. Cronin
00:02:21 – 00:02:24
Thank you for having us on, Jeff, it’s so happy to be talking to you.
Jeff Bullas
00:02:24 – 00:02:41
An absolute pleasure. And so we’re gonna have a little chat about how all this started, maybe they lost their socks, their socks went to like there’s a thing called, do you guys have like a, have you heard of a sock heaven? All socks seem to turn up mismatched and go somewhere.
Mark X. Cronin
00:02:41 – 00:02:51
Well, that’s a conspiracy that we’re working to promote, you know, because if people lose their socks, they gotta get more, you know.
Jeff Bullas
00:02:52 – 00:02:58
So, maybe there’s an anti-christmas sock stealer that works on your behalf. Is that right?
Mark X. Cronin
00:02:58 – 00:03:04
We hire minions to sneak into people’s houses and only steal one pair of socks.
John X. Cronin
00:03:05 – 00:03:06
I love minions, I love that movie.
Mark X. Cronin
00:03:06 – 00:03:07
Oh yes, I know.
Jeff Bullas
00:03:09 – 00:03:14
So, guys, how did this all start? Was it over a bourbon about seven years ago?
Mark X. Cronin
00:03:14 – 00:03:37
Well, close. It’s yes, it was seven years ago back in the and it started in the fall and our story began in a small log cabin in the bush. No, it started here on suburban Long Island outside New York City. And where were you, John?
John X. Cronin
00:03:37 – 00:03:44
I was in Huntington High School. That could be my last year at school.
Mark X. Cronin
00:03:44 – 00:04:16
So you had already mentioned, Jeff, that John has Down syndrome. In the United States, if you have a disability, you can stay in the public school system until you either graduate high school or turn 21. So John was gonna be turning 21 and that meant at the end of that school year, they were gonna say get out and he had to figure out what would come next. So like everybody else, John, you were trying to figure out what to do.
John X. Cronin
00:04:16 – 00:04:29
I was looking around and I looked at school background at work. I can’t find it, I’m sorry, I don’t like it.
Mark X. Cronin
00:04:29 – 00:05:02
He couldn’t find anything he liked. And this is unfortunately a reality for too many people. I know this is true. It’s true in the US but I know it’s true in Australia and throughout Europe. There just are not enough good opportunities for people with different abilities. In the US, only one in five people with a disability is employed. It’s an awful situation. But John here, it’s like many people in your audience. John here is a natural entrepreneur.
John X. Cronin
00:05:02 – 00:05:05
Yeah, I am an entrepreneur.
Mark X. Cronin
00:05:06 – 00:05:09
If you didn’t see your job you wanted. What do you say?
John X. Cronin
00:05:09 – 00:05:20
I said I wanna make one, I wanna create one and I told my dad I wanna go into business with him. A nice father and son business together.
Mark X. Cronin
00:05:21 – 00:05:51
Which is very cool. I’ve run multiple businesses trying to work with me and I’m a lucky man. Yes, I have three sons and of those three sons, this is one I could work with. So, okay, we’re gonna go into business together and, you know, entrepreneurs have lots of ideas, not all of them are good ideas. So we had to figure out what we would do. What was one of your ideas?
John X. Cronin
00:05:51 – 00:06:08
One of them is a food truck. I got the idea from a movie called Chef and John Favreau. In the movie, it’s about a father and son owning a food truck.
Mark X. Cronin
00:06:08 – 00:06:24
So this sounded like a fun idea. I mean, you’ve eaten a truck. Everybody likes it. We’re trying to think what would we make? Where would we put that food truck? But we ran into a problem.
John X. Cronin
00:06:24 – 00:06:25
We can’t cook.
Mark X. Cronin
00:06:27 – 00:06:38
So it wasn’t gonna be a food truck. But then right before the US Thanksgiving at the end of November, yes, John had his eureka moment.
John X. Cronin
00:06:38 – 00:06:58
I did. I’m gonna sell crazy socks. Why socks? It’s fun. It’s colorful. It’s creative. It’s always let me be me. I have wanted crazy socks my whole life and we drive out a real, oh, look for socks.
Mark X. Cronin
00:06:58 – 00:07:47
We used to drive around looking for these socks for John. So we figured this, maybe he loved them that much. Surely other people would too and we could find those people. So at that point and, you know, and we’re speaking to you, if you’re thinking about that side hustle, starting a business, right? The traditional thing that people do is they stop everything and prepare a business plan and do the market research, the competitive analysis, your operational plan, financial forecast, that’s not what we did. We said let’s go to the lean startup, let’s get something up and running and customers will let us know. That’s the idea. So you already had the name.
John X. Cronin
00:07:47 – 00:07:50
I got my name, 12 websites. I have ideas.
Mark X. Cronin
00:07:50 – 00:08:57
He’s a tough partner. I suggested things like Lamar Murray Socks. So, no, it’s gonna be John’s. So he had the name, and we built a simple website on the Shopify platform. Many people will know that. Well, a little bit of inventory that was somewhat interesting because suppliers didn’t want to sell to us because we didn’t have any customers. They wanted us to show them we had customers before they would sell us any goods. Well, how could we get customers if we had no inventory? So we had to control some people. We’re bootstrapping. We once got asked by a student what bootstrapping means, it means you have no money and you’ve got to make do with what you have. So the only marketing we did was to set up a Facebook page and I would take out my cell phone and we made videos and who do you think was in those videos?
John X. Cronin
00:08:57 – 00:09:11
I am, dad, and I talked about socks and Chef. I have for you and your podcast. It is socks, socks and more socks.
Mark X. Cronin
00:09:12 – 00:09:23
And we noticed something even before we opened, people started sharing those videos. So we opened, you already said on Friday night.
John X. Cronin
00:09:24 – 00:09:25
On Friday night, December 15.
Mark X. Cronin
00:09:25 – 00:09:45
We didn’t know what to expect, but we got 42 orders the first day. Like a float of orders. And most of them were local. Which made sense, right? He’s in high school, it’s where we live, temporary office space.I know you do. So how do we deliver most of those orders?
John X. Cronin
00:09:45 – 00:10:05
We do home delivery. We get red boxes. I put a sock in the box. I love it out. I put in, I’ve been my life, then, you know, I wrote every package and I put candy and a bag of tons of Kisses.
Mark X. Cronin
00:10:05 – 00:10:17
Right? Every package got a note, a thank you note from John, tons of Kisses candy and we loaded up the car and drove around and you knocked on doors. Right, how the customers respond?
John X. Cronin
00:10:18 – 00:10:34
Customers love it and take pictures with me. Take a picture with the sock and share the picture on social media. I would, I get expressed.
Mark X. Cronin
00:10:34 – 00:11:17
We had customers ordering again, just to get socks in their drawer. We had a whole family to take photos and there were some funny nights, you know, the two of us. So there were some nights it’s after 10 o’clock at night and John is knocking at their door, you know, just draw what you saw. But at the end of that month, really two weeks we had shipped 452 orders and we knew we had something, we didn’t know how big it would grow. We didn’t know how fast it would grow. Seven years later. How many socks do we have and how many different socks?
John X. Cronin
00:11:17 – 00:11:28
Oh, yeah, we have 4000 different kinds of socks. And, dad, guess what, it makes me, the world, love socks.
Mark X. Cronin
00:11:28 – 00:11:59
Nobody has the choices that John has. We’ve now shipped over 440,000 packages to 88 different countries. We’ve been able to create 34 jobs. 22 of those are held by people with different abilities. We are giving back program keeps, you know, raising money. So now we’re over $700,000 US of money donated to our charity partners. As you like to say.
John X. Cronin
00:11:59 – 00:12:02
I just said, we just got started.
Mark X. Cronin
00:12:02 – 00:12:28
And you know, we can share, you’re out there, you’re thinking of starting a business. You’re thinking, oh I could do a side hustle, you know, a commercial for another product. We’ll say just do it. Look at John. John had an idea. Let’s just let’s go and test it. Let’s go and see and that, you know, you got to take those first steps.
Jeff Bullas
00:12:29 – 00:12:35
You do. The best way to learn is to do. And that sounds like exactly what you did.
Mark X. Cronin
00:12:35 – 00:12:42
Yes, you learn by doing. But we learned a few things just by doing that first month. You know, one.
John X. Cronin
00:12:43 – 00:12:47
One, people want to buy socks. Two, people want to buy socks from me.
Mark X. Cronin
00:12:47 – 00:13:58
They related to John. They like the fact we had already pledged 5% of our earnings to the Special Olympics. They like that personal touch of the thank you note and the candy, there was something that caught us by surprise. We didn’t anticipate, we had a very emotional response from many families, from many customers because they saw a young man with Down syndrome starting his own business. If we didn’t try that, we wouldn’t have learned that and you learn by doing. So we learned that this young man, this old guy, we could sell. So, thank you very much. It’s a and you’re never ready, you know, it’s never perfect and you’re gonna make mistakes. It’s not a question of will you, it’s when, I mean, even that first weekend, we had some incredible boneheaded things or troubles were written. So like we knew we were gonna open on that Friday. What time were we gonna open?
John X. Cronin
00:13:58 – 00:14:03
Are we going to open at 10 in the morning except the website crash, that was my dad’s fault.
Mark X. Cronin
00:14:03 – 00:15:01
Our website crashed because our webmaster was me at the time. There’s something up in the code. So we opened that afternoon. Then the next night, by the end of that Saturday, we only had a little bit of inventory. We were selling through our inventory. Where are we gonna get more socks on a Saturday night? Well, there used to be these big stores in the US, they’ve gone bankrupt, called Kmart. We drove to every Kmart in our county and bought all the socks we could just so we would have some inventory to sell, you know, you gotta figure it out or the candy. We were using Hershey’s Kisses when we started, you know, the little chocolate pieces and everybody loved that until we reached the springtime. And we got an email from a woman in Florida. You want to send chocolates to the south in a warm weather.
Jeff Bullas
00:15:01 – 00:15:06
That’s exactly what I thought. Chocolate melting.
Mark X. Cronin
00:15:07 – 00:15:41
You know, there are things, you know, you’re down in Sydney when we first started, we said we’re only gonna sell in the US because we saw how much the postage was to send elsewhere. Well, we got such a demand that now we ship around the world. Australia is actually the third most common site, you know, after the US, Canada, then it’s Australia. It’s gonna ship products to, well, you only learn that by doing.
Jeff Bullas
00:15:42 – 00:16:16
So what are some of the challenges along the way? So you realize you’ve got something and then you start growing and some of the challenges were getting supply sock stock. So, how, what were some of the challenges along the way that you learned like you started on Shopify, are you still there today? I’m sure you had logistics challenges. Tell us some of the challenges you had along the way as you started to grow apart from socks being stained with chocolate.
Mark X. Cronin
00:16:17 – 00:26:15
Well, let’s talk about three distinct issues. One, we opened in December and then we started to grow the business. In January of 2017, we learned firsthand, nobody buys anything in January because they spent all their money at the holidays. So we slumped down, but we’re growing nicely. We’re adding different things. We’re connecting with people. We grew sixfold from January to February. Then the first weekend in March, we had a pop up shop. We ran that to test that idea that went well. And that afternoon, John and I were driving out to a restaurant. The meatball. Something like that. And all of a sudden, if you know Shopify, you can put your app on your phone and the default setting, you get a little cha-ching sound every time you get a sale. Well, we had grown the business so we were doing 35-40 orders a day. We’re driving out that Saturday afternoon and all of a sudden, cha-ching, it’s just as the kids would say the phone is blowing up. What’s going on? Where are all these orders coming from? And I’m looking at our Shopify statistics, I’m looking at our Google analytics. What is happening here? Next thing I know we have over 1000 orders in one day. It turned out somebody had done an interview with us, an email interview and then they put out a video. They didn’t shoot anything. They just took images and created a slideshow video. Well, the last time I looked at that video, it had over 20 million views. People all say, oh, I wanna go viral. What would you ask for, you may get it. We exploded and that almost put us out of business because it was so overwhelming. We were scrambling to constantly replace our inventory. It was hilarious. Tractor trailers were showing, we were in this old house that had been converted to office space. Tractor trailers are showing up when it’s in a where’s your loading dock? And they’re unloading 30 boxes. And I’m just putting up the stuff on our site based on a packing slip, but we’re looking for space where we’re gonna put this. So we boom up, but then we hit the summer and nobody’s buying socks. And so it was tough dealing with that. One of the issues that confronted us there. And it took us a couple of years to really do well, we do our own fulfillment, to manage that inventory and to get that accurate all the time, particularly during the surgeries. That’s tough. We got the scars to prove it. We do it really well now. That didn’t happen overnight, you know, you have to learn how to do that and you have to get the right systems in, you gotta get the right processes in. The other thing we mentioned was bootstrapping. Well, that’s all wonderful. And our first two years, we had fantastic growth. We had a couple of viral experiences. We were very fortunate with media coverage.
By the end of the second year, we had phenomenal growth and we had made on paper, we had made a profit. And I’m sitting there with my accountant and I say, if we did so well, how come I have no money? He says, well, Mark, let’s go look in your warehouse at the infrastructure. You look at your inventory. And that’s when we went looking for money, looking for investment. Well, it’s never good to look for money when you need money. And banks came in and we connected through some advisors with a good, we were told by a good investment bank they were gonna help us. Bankers are coming in. They’re looking at us, going through our books and saying, wow, this is great. We love this story, we love the growth, we love the fact you’re making a profit. We’re not gonna give you any money. You’re a startup. We had potential investors coming in. What they wanted to do was buy us and shut us down. By the end of that third year, 2019, we had run out of money. I let people go. We do 50% of our sales during the holidays. We had no inventory. I couldn’t buy inventory. We were for all intent and purposes bankrupt. I remember meeting with a bankruptcy law firm with them saying, oh, you have to declare bankruptcy. All you have to do is give us $50,000 upfront. Well, mate, if I’ve got $50,000 I’m not talking to you, you know, now we were very fortunate, after kissing a lot of toads, we found our prints, we found the right partner, a third generation family business that manufactured socks and has been doing it for 60 years. They did it for department stores and brand names. So we were a good fit and we shared values. But that was tough, you know, so those were three, you know, things dealing with the surges of, you know, I remember the first time we were on national television, there’s a show in the US, Boxing Friends, they had called us up, we appeared on a Sunday morning. We got 3300 orders in three hours. What business wouldn’t want that until you see what that means, you know, how are we gonna do this? You get these challenges, you just have to find a way to take a breath. Remember what your purpose is and what your values are because when you’re spinning upside down, your purpose will give you your north star, keep you moving in the right direction. Your value will give you some structure. You have to make sure you tap into your team and the supporters, you have to find a way or just keep fighting to find a way. If you’re out there, you think I’m starting a business, you know, part of what I’d say is stop thinking, just go, if you wanna know everything you’re gonna have to learn and everything you’re gonna have to go through and you can’t imagine it all. And if somebody told you everything, you would never do it. It could be overwhelming, right? We have an aesthetic of ready fire A. Don’t overthink, take action. I’m not suggesting you do things willy-nilly. Yes, you have to be thoughtful but don’t overthink. I’ll share an example. We’ll talk about the sock of the month. So it’s May of 2017 and we’re finding out, oh, boy, the weather’s getting warm. Nobody’s buying socks, after that big surge, things would come down. What can we do? Well, we had an idea. There’s no original ideas. Why don’t we create a sock of the month subscription? And we sat down with our small team and within a week we had that up and running. About four months later, one of our suppliers who also sells directly to the public to consumers so they’re also competitors. They introduced the sock of the month and I got to talk to him about it. And I asked him, you know, when did you start developing this? What were your thoughts behind it? And they tell me, oh, we’ve been working on this for more than a year and a half. So, what the hell have you been doing? Well, you know, we had to get the committees set up and the committees had to review things and we had to do this and that like, oh my God, we were four months in, we had real revenue, real experiences and we were on our third iteration because we had learned things that we’d only learn by doing. Don’t take the year and a half, get going.
Jeff Bullas
00:26:16 – 00:26:28
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Business plans quite often about overthinking things and,look, you gotta know what you’re doing. You have an idea, but then you’ve just gotta go, let’s go. And that’s the only way you really learn.
Mark X. Cronin
00:26:28 – 00:26:30
Let’s go and figure this out.
Jeff Bullas
00:26:30 – 00:26:46
We learn as we go. Yeah. So question. So the inspiration for sock design, does it come from inside the company? How do you do your sock design? How do you choose your sock designs?
Mark X. Cronin
00:26:47 – 00:27:14
Yes. It comes from all over. When we started, it was just the two of us and we were only selling other people’s socks. So we would sit down with catalogs and pick out and we started going to trade shows, but very early on, we started designing some of our own socks. What were the first pair we designed?
John X. Cronin
00:27:14 – 00:27:14
Down syndrome awareness socks.
Mark X. Cronin
00:27:15 – 00:27:32
Down syndrome awareness socks. And that happened because we had learned that people celebrate World Down Syndrome Day by wearing crazy socks. You would have thought we knew that ahead of time, we’re not.
Jeff Bullas
00:27:33 – 00:27:34
I thought you would have nailed that.
Mark X. Cronin
00:27:35 – 00:30:05
But so we went looking for somebody who sold Down syndrome themed socks. Nobody did. My partner here. This is simple. What do you say? He designed the World’s First Down Syndrome theme sock. Then, okay, we had to go find somebody who would make that for us. And we did that and we called up the National Down Syndrome Society and said we’re gonna sell this sock and we’re gonna give you money from every pair because anybody buying it, they’re gonna want to support this cause. And they said that sounds great, who are you? You know, so we started designing some things like that and then all of our, everybody in the company helps pick out socks, our customers tell us, plus now we study, you know, trends and ideas, you know, the industry trends to see what’s out there. So there’s no one source, we still sell other people socks. We are now developing, fully developing our own line called J’s Socks, kind of looks like a J and John starts with J. So because we’re now we continue to sell directly to consumers. We’re still on the Shopify platform, we expanded. So we sell to other businesses, B2B, that’s mainly custom socks, you know, here’s an example: people and companies started calling us up saying, could you make socks for us? And we did that for about two years and then we’re very smart people. We said, huh, what do you think would happen if we actually marketed those services? So we do that. We are now looking at selling our fulfillment services as well. This year we started selling into the wholesale channel. So we are Hallmark stores carrying us, mom-and-pop stores. We’re in 850 Coles Stores here in the US and to really do the wholesale, we’re developing our own line of socks. So we have those three channels going.
Jeff Bullas
00:30:06 – 00:30:10
So what are your top selling socks? Do you have any examples you can show us?
Mark X. Cronin
00:30:11 – 00:31:54
Oh, we didn’t bring any samples. It’s kind of an interesting thing. Our best selling socks tend to be Down syndrome and the Autism related socks. But most I won’t say most but many businesses you can apply the 80-20 rule, 20% of their products account for 80% of revenue. In a hospital, 20% of patients account for 80% of hospital bed days. In a law firm, 20% of clients will account for 80% of your revenue. We don’t have that because people can personalize what they get. We don’t have any hero products. We don’t have any one or two products that just everybody buys. It’s all distributed because, you know, well, here’s a way to think about it and we’re looking at ways how we can, you know, promote this and it’s the holidays. Say you wanna go, come to our store, you wanna get something for somebody. So your nephew is very active in sports and, oh, well, we have athletic socks and maybe your wife or she likes the wine. So we have wine themed socks. And you’ve got a niece who’s into animals. Oh, we have pet rescue socks. And you’ve got, you know, your brother who fancies himself, a mathematician. Well, we got a math theme, so you can get something for everybody. It’s kind of, oh, John has that, you know, we’ve got everything.
Jeff Bullas
00:31:55 – 00:32:28
Yeah. Tell us a little bit about, because in e-commerce especially and this obviously you did struggle with it, but now you sound like you’ve cracked the code, logistics, especially e-commerce stores, fulfillment. Tell us a bit about that. I know that you were doing it a pretty well hand, you know, delivering by hand initially when you were smaller. That’s the sort of things you gotta do. But, so what’s the journey been like in fulfillment? And also the other thing that quite often you learn in business is that even though it’s boring is routines and systems are very, very important.
Mark X. Cronin
00:32:29 – 00:39:59
Absolutely. Yeah. You know, we can talk about our social mission and our marketing, but at its core, you got to deliver the goods. So, for an e-commerce business, we’ve got to have a great website, your website can make or break you. We’ve got to have a good selection. The products have to be good. We have over 30,005 star reviews and the service has to be good. So we do the same day shipping, order comes in today, it’s going out today. What did it take to get there? Well, we made the decision early on. We wanted to do our own fulfillment. Many people outsource it. We wanted to do our own thing for two reasons. One, we’re looking to create jobs so that we can hire people with different abilities. Two, it allows us to personalize the packaging and the service we provide. My own view, three PLs or a third party logistics firm that you could outsource to. They’re very good if you have very neat and straightforward packaging, but if you want to do something creative or different, they’re gonna struggle. So we do our own, there it takes a couple of things. You’re right, you have to have the right processes and systems. So, in the beginning we managed our inventory entirely on Shopify and that is a short term solution. Yes, we use Shopify underneath our website, but eventually we needed to add a true ERP or system underneath and into an enterprise system underneath to manage our inventory and to talk back and forth with Shopify, we needed to evolve the physical layout in our warehouse. So, you know, when we started and, you know, again, you, you don’t start at the end. You start in the beginning. When we started, we were in that house and we had this small room that was our warehouse. We had wire racks and we just laid everything out on these wire racks, but you had to know the socks. So we’ve given tablets so people could look at pictures. We had one comical thing. Somebody had ordered some Alexander Hamilton Socks. People may know the musical Hamilton. He was, I guess you’d call him a founding father in the US. We sent him the socks. I got an email back. This guy was very upset. We made a mistake. We didn’t send him Alexander Hamilton Socks. We sent him Thomas Jefferson socks. Jefferson was an early president and was also a founding father, but as he wrote in a multi page email, everybody knows Hamilton and Jefferson were mortal enemies. How could you make this mistake? And I’m thinking holy crap, we gotta teach everybody American history to work it. We move to larger warehouse space, we get racks, we lay things out in bins and originally we organized based on supplier and alphabetically and then that evolves. So now everything is address based so that if you look at a pick slip, it tells you the aisle, the rack and the bin number, you don’t even have to know what you’re picking, it tells you where to go. So the logistics are, that’s important and you have to be able to get that done and we had some ugly times, but now we’ve gotten it. So our error rate is less than 0.2 of 1% which is extraordinarily good. And we do better shipping than Amazon because it’s going out the same day and Jeff Bezos over in Amazon, he’s not putting a candy and thank you note in there is he? But here’s what it allows us to do, on any given day, we can test them. So for example, we’ve introduced a new line of athletic socks. Well, let’s see how customers will respond. So this is what we do. We take a pair, we say the next 100 orders we send out, put a pair of socks in a free pair of socks in with a little note from John. I want you to try my new socks and see if we get a response, see how customers respond to buy more. We can do that because we got our own warehouse or here’s something else, every package sketch that thank you note and candy. But we now segment our packaging. So if it’s your first order, you get one note. If it’s your second order, you get a different note. If it’s your third or fourth order, you get a different package. If it’s your fifth or more order you get yet a different package. No three PLs are gonna be able to do that or here’s, you know, here’s another thing. One day one of our packers comes to us and says, you know, we sell socks for diabetics. And these are, you know, high, they’re medical grade compression socks and we’re sending them candy. We’re sending diabetics candy. What’s wrong with this picture? So now we have a supply of sugar free candy. So if you order those diabetic socks, we’ll send you sugar free candy. If you order from a US military base, we have a different package that we send you to say thank you for your service. So you’ve got to have the systems in place and the processes in place and then to measure and track what you’re doing to make sure that your logistics are working and when you do that, then you can start playing with it and adding special features that would differentiate you in the marketplace and it’s all of a whole for us and we’ve got our purpose. What’s our mission? Spread happiness. We’ve got five pillars on which we built the business and one of those is making it personal. So we’re always looking at ways to create connections and personal relationships with our customers. We’re not just chasing transactions and we’re always looking for ways to personalize things. Doing our own fulfillment allows us to do that.
Jeff Bullas
00:40:00 – 00:40:03
So what are your five pillars you’ve built the business on?
Mark X. Cronin
00:40:04 – 00:40:05
Well, one.
John X. Cronin
00:40:05 – 00:40:13
It is and hope, give it back, you have, make it personal and make it a great place to work.
Mark X. Cronin
00:40:13 – 00:45:39
So number five is to make it a great place to work. If we wanna spread happiness, we have to start at home. Our colleagues have to be happy working with us and we have little phases to it. It’s one to offer people a mission worthy of their commitment, something bigger than ourselves, something other than we’re gonna go make money and we wanna make money. Believe me, we, you know, we like to live indoors. You have to offer people something they can feel proud about. Two, make sure everybody knows what his or her job is, why his or her job matters. There’s no cog in the machinery, there’s no make work job. Everybody is contributing to that mission. Three, put people in a position to succeed. Don’t ask them to do what they can do. We don’t ask you to do our finances, right? But nobody gives a better tour than John. Four, recognize what people do. So you got a team of people working on your podcast. It runs very smoothly. You’re well prepared. You are a good podcast. You like it. When somebody comes to you and says, hey, Jeff, you and your team, you guys did a great job. That was a great interview you did. We all like hearing that. Sometimes, it’s as simple as saying thank you to the last piece. Stay the hell out of the way, let people do their jobs. So that makes it a great place to work. Making it personal. We already touched on some things. It’s, you know, if you get a package from us, you’re gonna get our branded packaging. So it’s bright and colorful on the outside, you open it up, you get your socks, you get a thank you note from John. On the other side of that is the story of John’s Crazy Socks. The bottom of that is a discount for your next order. You’re gonna get some candy and on the packing slip, you’re gonna see the name and the picture of the person who packed your order. You’re not just getting socks, you’re getting a dose of happiness and it’s even to this day if we get an order between our office and home, what are you doing? Still doing home deliveries. You know, you make that personal connection, fun products you can love, we gotta be on brand but it’s what I already mentioned, you gotta deliver the goods. We can’t be, oh, you know, we’re a small business so that’s an excuse. Never. It can’t be. Well, look, we hire people with different abilities. You know, that gives us an excuse. Never. You gotta deliver the goods. Number two giving back. We don’t think it’s enough to just sell stuff you gotta give back, you gotta connect and we don’t wait until the end of the year to see how much money did we make and, you know, it’s not the old patriarchal model of who I decide I’m gonna give money to. It’s right up front. Here’s the commitment. So you as a consumer, if you’re buying from us, you know what you’re supporting, you know, the commitment we’re making. And then, but most of all, let’s show what people with different abilities can do. So we start with John. You have Down syndrome. We don’t hide you in the back. You’re the face of the business. We hire people more than half our colleagues have a different ability. We want to show the world. So we create content for our Facebook and Instagram and TikTok and YouTube. We host tours. We’ve had more than 2000 people physically come through our facility. We’ve had people from around the world. We’ve had people from Melbourne come and take a tour of our offices. We host work groups from high schools and social service agencies. So people with different abilities can get a little taste of work and see other people work. We take on speaking engagements. That’s why we’re so grateful that you have us on your podcast, Jeff, but we’ve traveled across the US, spoken to 5000 people at a Microsoft conference in Las Vegas or Ernst Young, 3000 people in New York. And just to stand up and show, look at what people with different abilities can do. We do advocacy work. You mentioned we have testified twice before the US Congress. We have to add, we were not subpoenaed and spoken at the United Nations, people will listen to us because of the business and that creates an obligation on our part to speak up for those that can’t speak up for themselves and all that rolls up to the business. So we are the world’s largest sock. But at the end of the day, we’re not really a sock store. The socks become the physical manifestation for the mission and the story that we tell.
Jeff Bullas
00:45:40 – 00:45:43
It’s the vehicle for the story.
Mark X. Cronin
00:45:43 – 00:46:48
Yeah. You know, those of you that are out there, you know, you’re thinking of starting that business. You gotta know why, right Simon San calls it know your why, you gotta know the purpose, not the why, the purpose, what’s motivating you to do this, what’s giving you the energy and the focus and the willingness to take on this risk, that will connect you with your customers in the hard times that will keep you going. For us, and we told you, we didn’t start by doing that business plan. Well, we’ve gone out and done that analysis. We have counted, there are exactly one gazillion sock companies. If all we’re doing is selling socks, we’re dead. What do you say? But because we’re not, we stand up.
Jeff Bullas
00:46:49 – 00:47:22
You do. And it is the story and your purpose and the five pillars. And it’s just such a great story and one of the reasons I wanted to have a chat with John and Mark, both of you. So now the thing I’m curious about is what sort of charity partners do you work with? You’ve talked about diabetes, I think, you’ve talked about obviously Down syndrome areas as well. What, how does the charity partner-side work?
Mark X. Cronin
00:47:23 – 00:49:58
Well, we started from day one donating 5% of our earnings to the Special Olympics and why the Special Olympics. John’s been doing the Special Olympics for 22 years, right? If there was no Special Olympics, there would be no John’s Crazy Socks. So we started there, we do focus on people with different abilities and a lot of that is on intellectual development disabilities. So once we started making Down syndrome socks, we called up and reached out to a local group and a national group. And we, so 10% of the sale of those products goes to those charity partners, Autism, we donate to the Autism Society of America. We work with a pet rescue group, the North Shore Animal League America. We make pet rescue socks, money goes to them. We work with the American Cancer Society and, you know, large charities and small charities. The amount of money we donate is not gonna close anybody’s budget gap. What we can do is collaborate and share and highlight the work that that organization does. So every place we go, you talk about the Special Olympics, we talk about the value of the Special Olympics. We do a lot in collaboration with them. Same thing with the National Down Syndrome Society. There’s a local hospital, Good Samaritan University Hospital. We do a lot with them. So that might mean, you know, they sell our socks in their gift shop, but we came down to introduce that and hand out socks. They’ve had a gingerbread contest for employees. John comes down and is a judge for that and we share what they do on our social media. So we introduce what they do to more of our customers. Those are some of the things we get to do with our charity partners. It’s money, but it’s also a celebration of what they do.
Jeff Bullas
00:49:59 – 00:50:19
Yeah, it’s, I think what you guys are doing is just amazing. And hats off to both of you and so the food truck, what was the, what were you going to do? What was that idea for? Just to go back a little bit on that. What sort of food were you gonna sell from the food truck? Was it gonna be hot dogs?
Mark X. Cronin
00:50:20 – 00:50:22
That’s what you wanted was hot dogs, right?
John X. Cronin
00:50:22 – 00:50:26
Yeah. I was thinking of a hot dog. I just came up with the idea from that movie.
Mark X. Cronin
00:50:27 – 00:52:05
We had lots of, we were going back and forth to lots of ideas and here’s a funny thing. Everybody we would mention is to tell us what we should make. Everybody had an opinion and after a while we wound up saying, listen, start your own food truck, you will figure out what we’re gonna make, if you want to do that food truck, you know, but that’s something again, you know, talking to your audience. I’m old, I’m 65 years old. I know lots of people who, oh, I had this idea. I was gonna do this. I was gonna do that and now they’re old and they haven’t done anything. I won’t say they haven’t done anything but they didn’t do that. Just go do it. Go do it, you know, what’s the worst thing that happens? You fail. Okay. So I learned something else. I, you know, I started multiple businesses back in 1994. I started New Gutenberg software. We made baseball informational software. We made software around poetry. Great products. We got great reviews. We lost every penny we had. But you know what? If we didn’t do that? There’d be no John’s Crazy Socks to do that, right? It’s, you just, people learn it.
Jeff Bullas
00:52:05 – 00:52:14
Yes. I think we need to understand that it varies between cultures and that it’s not failure. It’s just an opportunity to learn.
Mark X. Cronin
00:52:15 – 00:55:12
Yes. It’s tuition you pay, right? I spent a good portion of my 20s in school. You can learn a lot in school but you learn everywhere you go, you know, if I walk into a store, I’m observant all the time. How do they do this? What’s working? What’s not working? When I was a kid, you know, the first thing I did when I graduated high school, I grew up in New York and the East Coast of the US. First thing I did was hitchhike to Colorado. 3000 miles across the country. I wound up hitchhiking cross country three times. I traveled and hitchhiked around Europe, you know, knapsack on the back, staying at youth hostels, a car or a truck would pull over and you’d run to get in. I’d never worried about my safety, but you’d get in and now you look at that driver and you got to size up that driver and you gotta figure out how you’re gonna get along and that ride could be 10 minutes or 10 hours. And you were the entertainment. Well, it turns out if you do that maybe a few 100 times, you learn an awful lot. When I was doing it, I wasn’t going off saying, oh, I’m going off on a learning experience. No, it was all a great adventure. That was all, well, I gotta get from here to there and I have no money. That’s how I’m gonna do it. But look at what I learned and 40 some odd years later, those lessons are still paying off, you know, if you’re paying attention, you’ll learn all the time. If you’re on a job now, you should be soaking up and learning what works, what doesn’t work. But, you know, you wanna be, what, who’s in charge? What can you learn from that person that you wanna make sure you do? And what can you learn that you wanna make sure you never do? And how do you make it your own? I’m a big fan of both that guy Shakespeare and Bob Dylan, the two of them stole ideas all the time. Now, they made it their own, but we should emulate them. We should look for what we can take, you know, and oftentimes we can succeed by taking something out of one field and applying it in another and being successful with that.
Jeff Bullas
00:55:13 – 00:55:52
Yeah. And we only got to look at some of the biggest success stories in the last 20, 30 years, 40 years. And that’s Steve Jobs who took some concepts from some industries and repurposed it into the success that Apple is today. So just to wrap it up here, guys, I always ask this question at the end and see this is right on purpose ‘cause you’re all about happiness, alright so, what brings both of you the most happiness every day?
Mark X. Cronin
00:55:52 – 00:55:55
What do you say? You are the keys to happiness,
John X. Cronin
00:55:55 – 00:55:56
Gratitude over others.
Mark X. Cronin
00:55:56 – 00:56:45
Gratitude over others. For me, there is nothing better than a busy day at our place and seeing people working with energy and enthusiasm, you know, last week was a payday and we had a new employee and she got her first paycheck. Many of our colleagues, the first time they’ve ever received a paycheck, are with us. So we have a ceremony, we stop everything. We get everybody together to celebrate presenting the first paycheck. That’s so awesome, you know, yeah, that’s, you know, you took for others.
Jeff Bullas
00:56:46 – 00:56:50
Yeah. So it sounds like you get joy out of bringing other people happiness.
Mark X. Cronin
00:56:51 – 00:58:49
Yeah. You know happiness substitutes the word’s meaning, you know, I think we find our happiness is more profound when inline with purpose and meaning. When we’re doing what matters to us and that usually involves being connected and yes, seeing it in others, you know, we do a lot of speaking engagements and depend on the audience. You know, sometimes we’re talking to policymakers and businesses and we want to inspire them or show them how they can hire people with different abilities. So we’ll talk to entrepreneurs about purpose driven businesses, but we also will speak with parent groups or social service agencies and we want to offer encouragement. So we spoke, we were the keynote speakers, was it last Thursday night at an event in Pennsylvania. And afterwards a gentleman came up to me and he just looked at me and he was kind of tearing up and all he did was hug me. And I can just hug him back and, you know, the ability to connect to others like that. That’s pretty special. That’s pretty cool, we’re fortunate. So, yeah, you know, and at the end of the day we’re a couple knuckleheads, selling socks, you know, there’s nothing we spoke about. That’s rocket science. There’s nothing unusual but all we want to do.
John X. Cronin
00:58:50 – 00:58:51
Change the world.
Mark X. Cronin
00:58:51 – 00:58:52
Change the world.
Jeff Bullas
00:58:52 – 00:59:39
And spread happiness. Yeah. Well, thank you guys for sharing a story. And spreading happiness here today. And I look forward to sharing the story around the world as best I can and you’re inspiring me. And thank you very much for your stories. It’s been an absolute joy and I love the fact that when you talk about happiness we’re not talking about frivolous happiness. We’re talking about deep meaningful happiness. And the challenge with the word happiness is and I discovered this the other day is that it’s a suitcase, word, you open the suitcase and inside sits many different meanings for happiness.
Mark X. Cronin
00:59:40 – 00:59:45
Yeah. Thank you very much for having us on your podcast.
Jeff Bullas
00:59:45 – 01:00:13
It’s been an absolute pleasure and a real deep joy for me to actually connect and have a chat. And I love the fact that I learned so much by just having these conversations and this is our 201st podcast and I love doing this even, I look, I’d pay to do it effectively. So that’s what’s great.
Mark X. Cronin
01:00:14 – 01:00:16
Okay.
Jeff Bullas
01:00:16 – 01:00:28
So thank you guys. Thank you, John and Mark X. It’s been an absolute pleasure and I look forward to doing a tour of the sock warehouse one day.
Mark X. Cronin
01:00:28 – 01:00:34
It would be great. Alright, Jeff, thank you. Bye.