Happy Socks happily launches new underwear line

By

Olivier Guyot

Published
Jun 6, 2014

After five years of work on their sock brand, Happy Socks owners Viktor Tell and Mikael Söderlindh are applying their colorful, designer creativity to another product. This fall Happy Socks is bringing out its first underwear models.

"It is true that we said that the brand was exclusively a sock brand, but after five, almost six years now, we wanted to test another product," explained the two founders. "Underwear and socks work well together. And just like with the socks when we launched the brand, we felt there was room in the market. There is funny underwear out there, classic briefs but no brands with our approach. Even though we were told that boxer shorts are not a simple product to sell, we wanted to do it."

Still, the entrepreneurs are limiting the risk by bringing out three types of underwear: boxers, briefs and panties for women. Of course, all of them glow in the brand's distinctive style, with six different prints and fifteen colors. And of course, Happy Socks is offering matching socks and underwear. The women's panties are priced at 12.95 euros, the boxer shorts at 19.95 euros and the sock-boxer boxed set at 29.90 euros.

The brand intends to promote this match-match concept in stores through attractive visual merchandising. 60% of the brand's 200 retail outlets in France will test sales of the underwear line.

Happy Socks will also be selling the new collection in its own stores, which now numbers 22. The brand plans to open another five this year, including a store in Venice, near Los Angeles in the next few weeks.

The brand is also repeating its pop-up strategy in business and cultural capitals around the globe. "Last year, that worked very well and it was very profitable for the pop-ups located in prime areas," said Mikael Söderlindh. “On the other hand, any secondary locations were not as efficient. We will are going to set up some forty pop-ups with our distributors but aiming for the best locations. We will also try out sales in airports."

The brand's goal is to sell 14 to 15 million pairs of socks this year and over one million underwear items.