Hank and John Green‘s Awesome Socks Club is back in business.
Well, to be clear, it was never out of business. It was just closed to new customers because it was worried about balancing supply with demand, Hank explained today in a series of tweets.
Hank and older brother John—both OG YouTubers and the co-founders of VidCon, DFTBA Records, etcetera—started Awesome Socks Club in November 2020. It’s a subscription service that costs $13.75 per month, and in exchange for that $13.75, you get one pair of socks designed by an independent artist.
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From that, we created the Awesome Socks Club, a monthly subscription that sends you a pair of socks designed by a different independent artist every month, with 100% of after tax profit going to charity. https://t.co/BoiRFkR4ZK pic.twitter.com/ZxR9XQ6Lsa
— Hank Green (@hankgreen) October 31, 2022
As Hank puts it, the ideas behind the business were “1. Socks are necessary. 2. Great socks can be delightful. 3. When you buy socks, there’s no intrinsic reason why the profit needs to go to some random rich person.”
Awesome Socks Club promises 100% of its after-tax profits go to charitable causes.
In 2021 alone, more than 40,000 people signed up for the club. That was apparently more than the service expected, and it was worried about making “more socks than we’d sell,” Hank said. So, around a year ago, “we shut it down so that we could match inventory and not create any extra waste.”
Now, Awesome Socks Club is finally reopening to new subscribers (plus offering five bucks off their first month).
Profits from the service are currently being donated to help “decrease maternal and child mortality in Sierra Leone,” Hank said, “but as we grow, we’re starting to look toward other projects as well.”
Hank and John also run the Awesome Coffee Club, which launched in March 2022, costs $22 per month, and also donates 100% of profits to charity.