Premium items are a big market but typically focused on items where customization is about putting the customer’s logo on a standard product - often a polo or t-shirt, mug, pen, umbrella or other similar items. Samuel Moses saw an opportunity to add value to premium items by offering not only customization but also creativity to the product. About 90% of the company’s business comes from the premium products and incentives business. The result was Sockrates, an automated sock business where customers can create unique products and get them produced in record time. <h3><b>Automating Everything</b></h3> The demand for Sockrates products has grown so fast that Mr. Moses needed to scale up his company’s processes to handle the volume. “From when a lead comes in, to how we get back to the clients and then how we send them the designs, to how we then process the order and then how it then goes to the factory, how we quality control, check it and then how we deliver, this has to be a very streamlined process,” said Mr. Moses. “There's a lot of tech involved with that. At the end of the day, the actual design work is a manual process, but everything around that manual process is automated. “The way that we onboard the client is automated. The way that we get the final design to the factory is automated, so that's how we’re able to do 200 - 300 orders a month. I noticed just from the invoicing, if you're doing a manual invoice processing, it slows you down so much that you're spending all your time creating invoices and you don’t have time to do things like customer service, and making sure that all the orders are being produced correctly, and that the designs are proper for the client. “The client doesn't necessarily see all of the back end technology, but we have put a lot of investment in having many processes in place to let us go from the start of an order to the end of an order very smoothly,” he explained. <figure> <img src="https://insidefashionlive.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/How-It-Works-Sockrates-1024x578.png" alt="" loading="lazy" srcset="https://insidefashionlive.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/How-It-Works-Sockrates-1024x578.png 1024w, https://insidefashionlive.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/How-It-Works-Sockrates-300x169.png 300w, https://insidefashionlive.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/How-It-Works-Sockrates-768x434.png 768w, https://insidefashionlive.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/How-It-Works-Sockrates-750x424.png 750w, https://insidefashionlive.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/How-It-Works-Sockrates.png 1140w" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" width="1024" height="578"><figcaption>Sockrates has completely digitized its process so that it can achieve record fast turnaround times.</figcaption></figure> <h3><b>Maximizing SaaS Software </b></h3> While many companies believe they need to develop proprietary software to automate their business, Sockrates has taken an off-the-shelf platform and then pushed it to the maximum of its capabilities. “We use Salesforce and it’s the kind of tool where they give you a blank slate, and you can create what you want from it. In the very early days we were just using it as a basic CRM and we’ve taken it to a fully inclusive system that processes orders and where the factory can log in and get the orders and they can upload the samples for us to review and approve. And through to invoicing and automated emails. The entire company in a way, you could say runs off Salesforce. “We've invested quite a bit of resources to create a Salesforce that everybody on our team can use and everybody can benefit from. The ultimate benefit is to the client because they're getting a process that is super streamlined. There's very little error rate because it doesn't rely on memory or manual entry. “There's no touchpoint with the client that doesn't go through Salesforce even to the end where we ask them if they're happy with the product. Everybody's going through the same experience every time regardless of where they are in the world. Regardless of whether the order is for 100 pairs or 20,000 pairs, everybody's going through that same experience. The system is taking you through an experience and it's doing it very systematically.” This has enabled Sockrates to handle 200-300 orders per month seamlessly from order placement to delivery. <h3><b>Identifying a Profitable Niche</b></h3> Leveraging his previous experience in menswear led Mr. Moses to see an opportunity in socks. “We had a few very high end menswear stores in Toronto and we were selling neckwear to the Financial District of Toronto, which is a very nice demographic. And I noticed that there was a specific type of customer that was coming in and that valued that product and was willing to pay for a product that was very high end. But I also wanted to offer products that anyone could afford. So we started bringing in the socks into the store. And I think we became the number one seller of socks in downtown Toronto. At Christmas we decorated a tree with socks and it held about 700 to 1000 socks. We'd have to replenish that tree multiple times a day. There were lineups to get the socks. It was unbelievable. I noticed that the people buying went from grandchildren to grandparents, from the janitor to the CEO, from the wife to the husband to the boyfriend, girlfriend. Everybody was buying this product. <blockquote> “As an owner and as a founder something I constantly struggle with is should I be selling more products? Or should I just be focusing more on my niche? We've decided to stay focused on our niche and be experts in our niche. It's been working out for us so far, and we sleep at night, because we know that we know what we're doing." <footer> <cite>Samuel Moses, Founder, Sockrates</cite> </footer></blockquote> Then people started to come to me and say ‘I need 500 pairs, I want to give them out to my customers. I’d like to use my own design. Can you do it?’ ‘ I said, I guess so, why not?’ Customers liked the ability to create their own branded socks. Everybody wants to have their own brand. So then we started to go into online digital marketing. The business has boomed quite a bit over the years and we've transitioned out of retail. <h3><b>Maintaining a Personal Touch</b></h3> Despite his heavy investment in automation, Mr. Moses still maintains a few critical personal touchpoints. “I had this idea of building a portal, and everybody could do everything in the portal. Everybody could communicate through the portal. We got a lot of pushback internally, because our team felt that we already removed our phone communication, and now you want to take away the email aspect. At that point anybody could just replicate what we were doing. So our team wanted to keep those relationships real and I agreed with them. And so we didn't do the portal, even though I was definitely leaning towards the portal, because it would take a lot of headaches away from the process. We're still going back and forth with the client one-to-one, it's just backed by technology to make sure that when the client asks for something, that the requests are being handled efficiently,” said Mr. Moses. <h3><b>What’s Next?</b></h3> “As an owner and as a founder something I constantly struggle with is should I be selling more products? Or should I just be focusing more on my niche? We've decided to stay focused on our niche and be experts in our niche. It's been working out for us so far, and we sleep at night, because we know that we know what we're doing,” he said.