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Every winter in New York City you'll spot lone gloves on the sidewalk or subway platform. That always makes me sad, as I know the person who lost it will undoubtedly throw the other one away. Single gloves aren't much good.
Socks are the same; once you've got a hole in one, the other is rendered useless. But Danish company URU Design has come up with an interesting way to get around this, and it involves selling socks in odd numbers:
Solosocks have been successfully Kickstarted, with USD $19,500 pledged on a $14,637 goal and 35 days left to pledge. A 7-pack runs $38, and URU Design reckons that seven of their socks will last a long as six pairs of regular socks, after you factor in the 2-for-1 waste rate of regular socks.
There's one thing I can't figure out, having no background in textiles. As you can see, the patterns of the sets only sort-of match:
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Enter a caption (optional)Why on Earth would they do this? This is probably my industrial designer bias, but I feel that anytime you add differentiation to a line of mass-produced items, you are adding complexity, a greater chance of error and a potential sourcing headache. Would it not be more cost-effective to have all of the socks in a set be identical?
The only possible reason I can think of why they might make each slightly different is that if the socks wear and become faded at different rates, swapping in a replacement would not be as visually obvious, as they already don't quite match. Do you think that's it, or do the textile-savvy among you have a better explanation?
I’m a lapsed industrial designer. I was born in NYC and figured I’d die there, but a few years ago I abandoned New York to live on a farm in the countryside with my wife. We have six dogs.
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Thinking Outside the Socks: URU Design's Unusual, Sustainable Solution to Sock Waste
See also: Little Miss Matched. A sock line aimed at 7-year-old girls, sold in packs of three, and intentionally mis-matched. The patterns look like they "belong" but they're clearly not the same. This is basically the identical idea but for grown-ass men [with too much disposable Kickstarter money].
Yah, why do they have to match anyway?
Oh, you're one of those people. ;)
find a brand of sock that you like, buy ten pairs, done.
the miss match patterns doesn't really matter for socks like this. Socks are knitted on fully automatic knitting machines. As the color of the yarn is the same for all combinations it's just a matter of setting up a different knitting program. but the sock factories I've seen often have hundreds of knitting machines so the probably just set up one machine for each pattern and the make the combinations manually when packaging...
"Would it not be more cost-effective to have all of the socks in a set be identical?"
Exactly. The issue isn't the pattern. The issue is the quantity. Get 50 pairs of the same sock, lose one, and you can continually rotate/mix/match the remaining 49.
Exactly. The issue is not the pattern. The issue is the quantity of a single pattern.