Dane Jensen – Founder of Sock Club

How does Dane make money online?

Dane is the founder of Sock Club, an e-commerce business which makes and sells socks.

You can see examples of their socks in this video:

Making and selling custom socks accounts for 90% of revenue, while a monthly subscription service accounts for the other 10%, according to Dane in an October 2019 interview.

How much money does Dane make?

Dane shared in that same interview that the business did more than $12 million in revenue in 2018 and they were on track to beat that in 2019.

It’s unclear how much Dane pays himself out of the business.

Expenses are likely substantial, given that Sock Club apparently has 30+ employees and they design and manufacture all their socks in the United States.

But Dane told Starter Story that business has always been profitable:

Sock Club was completely bootstrapped and has always been profitable (excluding the cost of our time). We did everything we could ourselves. We packed socks for shipments. I designed, wrote the copy and built our website.

How did Dane get started?

Dane wrote about the origin of the business on his personal blog:

Early 2011, I was reading a Forbes article about small businesses that made it. They mentioned Black Socks, which is a sock subscription service that delivers Italian black socks once a month. I thought that was boring and that I could do better. I also enjoy web development. So, I built a website. It was just a front at first. My brother was the only member and he complained a lot about not receiving socks. There was a form to sign up but it led to a page that said “Sorry, unfortunately we aren’t shipping socks yet but we’ll contact you when we start.” I did the bare minimum SEO: put ‘Sock of the Month Club’ in some title and h1 tags. 

Then I lost interest and moved on to other projects. I would randomly check on it’s traffic. Eventually people started trying to sign up. About four people a month. I pitched the idea of actually starting this business to my friend Noah. He’s a laid back guy and said let’s do it. That’s how it started. We launched Sock of the Month Club in 2012.

As per Dane’s LinkedIn, he has a BSc in Mathematics from Brown University, and before Sock Club he was running a business called Cam.ly Cameras. Looks like that business didn’t go far, but as it was another physical product business the experience probably helped him launch Sock Club.

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What type of online business does Dane have?

According to our framework Sock Club is a physical product business and would be considered a Level 5 online business.

• Learn more about physical product businesses and see other examples