Our roles as news conveyors and chroniclers help us geek out on a number of topics, including lauding the longevity that particular products have enjoyed. For those with similar interests in tracing the history of consumer offerings, we suggest combining a penchant for investigating apparel items with an affinity for looking at promotional goods to arrive at socks.
Thanks to fascinating annals, the footwear goodies have acquired admirable status as more than just necessary purchases to protect tootsies. While end-users will likely always take pride in showing off grand-scale buys like houses, cars and even technology products, promotional socks have become compact means to make their personal tastes known, and nonprofits and fundraiser organizations have begun to attract attention to their causes and concerns through increasingly snazzy options.
The Chronicle of Philanthropy took a recent look at the efforts that entities have stitched together to give promotional socks added sway. Nobody has ever had to sell us on the importance of the advertising tools, so we commend the individuals involved in bolstering the socks’ reach for their linking a fashion must (for most of us, at least) with their esteemed initiatives. When we consider socks, we see them as examples of branding gold, as suppliers and distributors, equally well-versed in tending to intricate requests, have no problem taking a concept and placing affiliated images on the foot protectors.
From watching enough Comedy Central reruns of “Scrubs,” we have seen plenty of commercials for the World Wildlife Fund for Nature, and the Chronicle of Philanthropy gives kudos to the organization for making last year’s holiday season a chance to champion promotional socks. Rolling out designs featuring a giraffe, pandas and sloths (whoever chose the final animals was certainly not a lazy worker), the fund enjoyed a fruitful donations period, offering the socks as tokens of appreciation.
Animal-bearing socks are nothing new, of course, but using them as a thank-you gift helps with brand awareness, making them an especially vital component of an organization’s identity, as so many companies and businesses are struggling to attract financial contributions. Radio stations are great examples, with the aforementioned article noting how New Hampshire Public Radio (NHPR) made waves by using landscape scenes to adorn promotional socks, with 75 percent of last year’s station donors asking for the footwear items when making premium requests. The Sock of the Month Club has also proven helpful to NHPR’s contemporaries by placing local themes on their coveted handiwork.
You know that thing where it's so hot outside that you turn your air conditioner on full blast and try to remember what sweater weather feels like? These are the socks for that. Shop The Fika at https://t.co/6n2lW4cG6P. pic.twitter.com/wwYanPgHpS
— Sock Club (@SockClub) July 1, 2018
As more and more companies add promotional socks to their offerings and others outside the promotional products world realize how their missions can benefit from the addition of the goods, expect enhanced admiration to go to those who can mesh their logos, emblems, symbols, slogans and mission statements with a well-conceived design. In other words, those who want to excel need to pull their socks up and find some good mates to make their concepts and end-users’ preferences a noteworthy pair.
