Darn Tough Socks Celebrates 20th Anniversary With New Marketing Campaign

“The dog ate my homework” is just one of the excuses teachers get when their students don’t finish their assignments on time.

The warranty department of Darn Tough, a Northfield, Vt.-based sock manufacturer, has also heard every excuse in the book when customers sought replacements under the company’s lifetime guarantee policy. As it details on its website: “As long as there’s enough of your sock remaining that you can send it back to us and we can tell it was once a Darn Tough sock, we’ll cover it. Even if there are more holes than sock left.”

Now, in honor of its 20th anniversary, Darn Tough has extended that warranty to cover more than just holey socks — it’s also covering life’s misadventures.

In a tongue-in-cheek commercial released last week, Darn Tough showed videos of its socks burning up in a campfire, being eaten by a dog and snatched by a falcon to use as nesting material. The campaign was inspired by real-life stories that the Darn Tough warranty department receives every year. The tag line for the commercials is “Darn it. Life is tough. Our socks are tougher.”

Ric Cabot, chief executive officer of Darn Tough Vermont, said that despite the warranty, less than 1 percent of its socks are returned. And those that do come back are recycled and catalogued by style and gender to study for future improvements.

As the story goes, Cabot’s father bought and renovated a vacant mill in Vermont in 1978 to create Cabot Hosiery Mills. He soon lined up a slew of corporate clients, knitting socks for a variety of customers in the fashion industry including Gap, Old Navy and T.J. Maxx. But when that business moved offshore in the early 2000s, Cabot Mills found itself on the verge of closing down.

“The business dried up as all our customers went to China,” Ric Cabot said. They were forced to lay off employees and even took third mortgages on their homes to keep the lights on. In a desperate attempt to save the family business, he came up with the idea for a new sock brand that could be made from merino wool, manufactured in Vermont and backed by a lifetime guarantee. He called it Darn Tough.”

The first socks under that name were knit in 2004 and the company handed out 3,500 pairs at the Vermont City Marathon. “It was a Hail Mary with no marketing, backed by a promise: If you can wear out our socks, we’ll replace them for free,” the company says on its website.

The Hail Mary worked, and today, Darn Tough is a leading brand at outdoor and sporting goods retailers such as REI and Paragon Sports and it exports to countries around the globe. In fact, its 1466 Hiker Micro Crew is the number-one sock in the U.S., according to Circana. “People love the foot-hugging feel,” Cabot said.

“When we started, everybody said nobody needed another sock brand,” he added. But unlike the leading brands at the time, Darn Tough started talking about how its socks were built, detailing the size of needles it used, the stitches per inch and other specifications. “We had to make a statement to break through, and we found that customers were hungry for an expert.”

Although its first sock was targeted to runners, the company now offers models for skiing, hunting, dress and lifestyle purposes. Offerings include everything from no-show to over-the-calf options for men, women and children, all manufactured the same way in Vermont, which he calls a “sock state.”

The business is 60 percent wholesale, 40 percent direct-to-consumer and Cabot said there are plans in the works to open the first pop-up in Burlington, Vt., later this year, as a test for opening flagships down the road.

Cabot believes that Darn Tough is successful not only for the durability of its products but because it was among the first to infuse fashion into socks targeted to specific outdoor purposes. “We introduced fashion into what had been a boring market,” he said. “We put stripes and animal motifs on our socks and it put us on the map.”

Last year, Cabot launched a new division called Wide Open, a sock designed to stretch to fit wide feet, ankles and calves. It started direct-to-consumer and will begin wholesaling in July, he said, adding that 800 retailers have already placed orders.

So where does Cabot see Darn Tough 20 years from now? “Well, my dad is 85 and he still works so I see myself still here. I love this business and I hope we’ll still be satisfying customers in 20 years. We have a lot of young people working here that are full of new ideas. And I have two kids, and maybe one of them will get involved later. This business gets into your blood.”