How Bombas pairs scaling impact and profit

DAVID HEATH: Every step along the way, including the day you are filming in front of the sharks, they say, “Just because you are here filming in front of the sharks does not necessarily mean that you are going to air.”

JEFF BERMAN: That’s David Heath on getting picked for the hit TV show Shark Tank with his then-nascent sock company, Bombas. And here’s his business partner, Randy Goldberg.

RANDY GOLDBERG: They give you no guarantees. If we call you and you do all the work, you may not film. If you film, you may not air.

HEATH: So you cannot bank on it at any moment. Until they call you and say, “Two weeks out, your episode is gonna air,” you have to act like business as usual.

BERMAN: They did get the call, though, and they held a watch party for their episode.

GOLDBERG: So the moment comes. We’re elated. We have friends and family around. We have a team in place. We think we’re ready. The episode begins, and then we’re watching it.

By the way, watching yourself on TV when they’re trying to make it look dramatic, and you’re sweating, it’s not the most comfortable experience, you know? So we’re watching this, then you start to get the texts, and then you start to get the calls, and the calls say, “The site is down.” It’s the last thing you want to hear in the biggest moment in the history of your company. You’re pouring everything into this process to get this thing on the air, to be on national TV, and then the site is down, and you just feel like you blew it.

BERMAN: Despite that rocky takeoff, Shark Tank helped launch Bombas into hyperspeed. The mission-driven company donates a pair of socks for every pair sold. That’s led to more than 140 million donations so far.

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BERMAN: I’m your host, Jeff Berman.

David Heath and Randy Goldberg are two of the co-founders of Bombas. Their story is full of lessons about how to design a product that stands out and scale, not just your profits, but your impact on your community.

BERMAN: David and Randy, welcome to Masters of Scale.

HEATH: Thank you for having us.

BERMAN: I’m thrilled to have you. Long-time wearer, first-time conversation.

GOLDBERG: And this is a long-time listener, first-time conversation.

Copy LinkThe inspiration behind Bombas

BERMAN: There we go. So, why socks?

HEATH: Randy and I were working together at a media company and scrolling on Facebook, as one does, back in 2011. I came across a post from the Salvation Army that said, “Socks are the number one most requested clothing item in homeless shelters.” And it kind of stopped me in my tracks, where I was like, “Wow, here’s an item of clothing I don’t spend more than a few seconds a day thinking about, and yet this is being perceived as a luxury item for 600,000 people living here in the U.S., and even more globally.” And I remember kind of thinking, “That’s pretty sad.” I walked over to Randy’s desk, and I was like, “Did you know this fact?” And obviously, he hadn’t. I watched a similar reaction.

GOLDBERG: And the reason socks are such an issue is because most organizations and shelters don’t accept used sock or underwear donations. And if you’re sleeping on the street…

HEATH: For hygiene reasons — obviously.

BERMAN: Even for socks.

GOLDBERG: For socks, yeah. I mean, foot hygiene is a big issue. If you’re sleeping on the street, a fresh pair of socks means a lot. Potentially, you’re walking more, or you don’t want to take your shoes off at night. You’re afraid they’re going to get stolen. All sorts of foot issues come up, and this is what we heard. Then we talked to organizations, and they said, “We have to buy socks, and our budgets are strapped as it is.” So we were like, “Wow, this makes so much sense. We really want to help.”

HEATH: So, we kind of drew the connection to Tom’s Shoes. I mean, at that time, I think they were in their fifth year of business, doing a couple hundred million in revenue, really pioneering that buy-one, give-one model. At the time, we were like, “Well, why don’t we see if we can create a fun little sock company?” We didn’t really think it would be much, but it could give a pair of socks to the homeless community for every pair we sold. And that was kind of the spark of the idea.

BERMAN: But this was before it was relatively easy to start an apparel company, where a lot of the logistics problems are solved — manufacturing, etc.

HEATH: E-commerce.

GOLDBERG: And the technology was prohibitively expensive at the time. But what’s interesting is, if you could afford e-commerce at that moment and you could afford to build a site, the marketing was basically free. Now, that’s totally flipped, right?

BERMAN: Because the social landscape was less crowded back then.

HEATH: Because they weren’t charging for it. I don’t think Facebook…

GOLDBERG: Whatever you posted, all your followers would see it.

HEATH: Facebook’s ad platform barely existed at the time.

Copy LinkDiscovering the value of high-quality socks

BERMAN: Before we get to marketing, how did you solve that? You have to have a product to sell. So you become obsessed with socks. But how do you even figure out how to start manufacturing socks?

HEATH: We knew we wanted to donate a lot, right? Given the model, we then realized, okay, in order to donate a lot, we had to sell a lot. In order to sell a lot, what product — like, what white space were we going to fill that was differentiated from what we were seeing out in the marketplace?

I think when we looked at the marketplace, we realized very quickly that 85% of all sock sales were dominated by low-cost, low-quality commodity-type brands. Think of 12 pairs of white socks in a plastic bag that you’re going to get at Costco, Target, Walmart, TJ Maxx, whatever. And then the other 15% was this hyper-niche, athletic, performance-focused category by brands that were super small but focused on running, cycling, basketball, skiing — you name it, right? Hyper-focused.

We went down to the local sporting goods store here in New York City, Paragon. We looked at the wall of socks, and we were like, “What differentiates an $18 pair of socks from the sub-$1-a-pair that you’re gonna get in this plastic bag?” And the more we started to test the product and wear it, we were like, “Whoa.” There’s actually a tremendous amount, as you might imagine. If someone’s running a marathon, right, they can’t have blisters. They’ve got to regulate their temperature, it’s got to be super cushiony, and have the support in all the right places.

And that’s where the second “aha” moment came. We were like, “Why should athletes be the only ones who are feeling comfortable and supported?” And having zero experience in the apparel manufacturing retail world, outside of a three-month stint I had at The Gap when I was 14, which doesn’t qualify me…

GOLDBERG: He’s a great salesman.

BERMAN: You learned how to fold a t-shirt.

HEATH: Yeah, I did a lot of t-shirts, which is ultimately why I quit.

I remember telling my dad over dinner, “I have this idea for a sock company.” And he was like, “Funny enough, your godfather was in the sock business.” Turns out he was the president and CEO of a company called Gold Toe.

BERMAN: Oh, sure, yeah.

HEATH: I mean, most people know it — it’s the one with the little gold toe on the sock. He was that in the late ’80s, early ’90s, and then started a private-label sock manufacturing company, which he grew to like a couple hundred million in revenue. He had brands like Tommy Hilfiger, Calvin Klein. He was doing all the socks for the big department store brands — they just licensed that product out. So, we met with him, and he was like, “Tell me what you want to make, and I will help connect you to the best factories in the world.”

And so, that was certainly one of those luck moments, right?

BERMAN: Or providence.

Copy LinkOvercoming skepticism from industry experts

GOLDBERG: But, let’s also be honest — yeah, he said, “Don’t do it.”

BERMAN: Why?

GOLDBERG: He said, “You’re looking to do something nobody wants — good socks. They want cheap socks. They’re sold by the dozen, pennies per dozen. You’re talking about all these high-end features and bringing these niche ideas into a mass product.” He was jaded by years of experience, and he’s the first of many people — let’s be honest — who told us, “Don’t do it.”

But we said, “All right, make the introduction. Like, we hear you, Steve, but respectfully, we’re excited about this.”

BERMAN: What kept you going in the face of someone so experienced saying, “This is a terrible idea?”

HEATH: I mean, I think it’s just the entrepreneurial drive, right? We were, I think, more motivated by creating something. And we had this mission underlying it too, which I think was a big factor. We were like, “If we get this right, this could actually help a lot of people.”

GOLDBERG: And we didn’t have much to lose at the time either, you know?

BERMAN: Yeah. It was a trust-your-gut moment: “We feel this, we’re gonna keep going.”

HEATH: Yeah, this wasn’t something that we were like, “Oh my God, we need to quit our jobs tomorrow and raise $50 million to go.” We were like, “We can go at this at a snail’s pace, and if it turns into something, it turns into something. And if it’s not, then it’s a fun project that I get to work on with one of my best friends and see where it goes.”

BERMAN: So what was the inflection point from your godfather saying, “Don’t do it, you’re gonna regret it,” to getting to the starting line, to actually having a product in market?

GOLDBERG: It took two years, yeah, because we were obsessed. We would test, for example, 137 different tension levels on a calf sock so it would stay up and not fall down but wouldn’t leave a mark on your leg. We just got really into the details. And we knew at that point that putting on a good pair of socks could change the way you felt for the day.

BERMAN: You’d bootstrapped this. You were spending your own money.

HEATH: Yeah, barely any. I mean, you know.

Copy LinkTesting the market through crowdfunding

BERMAN: And so when you get that sock where the tension level is right, the padding is right, the feel is right, and you’re like, “Okay, we’ve got this good enough, we’re ready to go,” what happens then? How do you actually get the product to market?

HEATH: So we knew that we wanted to be a digital brand, and we knew that we wanted to try to get some validation in the market in the most capital-efficient type of way. And, 10 years ago, maybe a little bit longer, 12 years ago, it was kind of at the high point of crowdfunding, right? Like, everyone was like, “Oh wow, there’s this new model. You can go on Kickstarter or Indiegogo, put up a three-minute video, and people may or may not buy your product sight unseen, but there’s no commitment to making it unless you hit a certain milestone.” And we were like, “We’re good storytellers. We knew that.” So, we were like, “Why don’t we put this out into the world, see if we can tell our story, and see if people will care within a pretty low risk?”

I think it cost us like $4,000 to produce a video. I think we had a goal of $15,000 in 30 days. In 30 days, we did over $20,000 in our first day.

BERMAN: Amazing.

HEATH: $150,000 in our first 30 days. And I think at that moment, we were like, “Okay, way more people seem to be interested in this than we thought.”

BERMAN: Was that terrifying on some level?

HEATH: No, it was exciting.

GOLDBERG: We’ve been working on this for a long time. What would have been terrifying is if we had actually just hit our goal, and we had to manufacture $15,000 worth of socks and it didn’t feel like a win. This felt like a very big vote of confidence.

HEATH: I think another part of our product validation story that gave us a lot of confidence in the product we were actually producing was that Randy and I would go to our local gym and be that weird sock guy at the gym interrupting people’s workouts. We’d be like, “Hey, take your headphones out. I saw you wearing these Nike socks. Can I give you a pair of these? Tell me what you think.” And they’d be like, “Alright, bro.” But then the next day, they’d come back up to you and say, “Yo, those things are amazing. Where can I get more?”

And you’re like, “That’s a validating proof point.” This guy doesn’t owe me anything. He doesn’t know me, but he wants more of this product now that I’ve given it to him. So I think validating that we knew the product was gonna be good, then going out to a digital audience that wasn’t going to touch and feel it but would resonate with the mission and the product story — we knew that once we sent the product to those people, they were gonna love it.

Copy LinkPreparing for Shark Tank

BERMAN: So, at some point, Shark Tank comes into the picture. Why Shark Tank?

HEATH: We got an email from Shark Tank that said, “Hey, do you want to try out for Shark Tank?”

BERMAN: They discovered you through Indiegogo?

GOLDBERG: They actually sent an email. It was from a producer with a Gmail account, unrelated to the show. We thought it was a prank, at first. You know…

HEATH: It’s like [email protected]. You’re like, “I’m waiting for this person to ask me for my banking information.”

BERMAN: Right, right. So, you get the email, you validate that it’s actually Shark Tank, you come out to LA, and you get on set. What happens?

GOLDBERG: It’s a pretty wild process. I mean, the legal alone is daunting. But for us, once we decided that we wanted to do it, and that we thought it would be good for us and good for our brand, we treated it like a full-time job. And it’s actually a pretty good process for a young business to go through because they don’t tell you what they’re going to ask you. They can ask you any question about your business on national television, and you have to have a good answer prepared.

So we knew we had to sit down and answer every question that we were maybe avoiding answering at that time about our business. And then we just did all the research. We looked at every single episode, we compiled a list of questions. I mean, we treated it like we were gonna win Shark Tank, like it was a game show, and the prize was not embarrassing yourself on national TV.

BERMAN: Did you think you would actually raise money? Or did you think, “This is incredible marketing exposure for us, and if we raise, fine?”

HEATH: We were looking for both. I mean, I think we were open, right? We obviously saw that the sharks all had tremendous success in what they did. We had a hierarchy of sharks that we thought were better fits for us than others ending up with Daymond, who built a billion-dollar apparel brand, New York-based, obviously was our number one choice. It’s who we ended up with.

But we had a strategy for every single shark, every type of offer. I mean, it was a very exciting proposition, but we still operated the business like it wasn’t going to happen, right? We said, “We need to continue to fundraise, or we need to continue to market and build this brand.” Because every step along the way, including the day that you are filming in front of the sharks, they’re like, “Just because you are here filming in front of the sharks and just because you get a deal, does not necessarily mean that you are going to air.”

So, like you cannot bank. At any moment, until they call you and say, two weeks out, your episode is going to air, you have to act like business as usual.

BERMAN: Right, so how big was the response after the Shark Tank episode?

HEATH: The first weekend we did like 300,000 in sales …

GOLDBERG: And our website crashed.

Copy LinkManaging sales and inventory post-Shark Tank

HEATH: Up until that point, from August, including the Indiegogo, through September when the episode aired — so, roughly 13 months — we’d done about $900,000 in sales, all organically, bootstrapped, with some press here and there. And then, night of, weekend of, we did $300,000 in sales. Two months after, collectively, $2 million in sales. They re-aired our episode on Black Friday that same year and…

GOLDBERG: Our site crashed again.

HEATH: Two weeks before Christmas, we completely sold out of every piece of inventory that we had.

BERMAN: So, how did you end up solving the inventory problem? I mean, this is incredible demand, but it’s not linear. It’s not consistent.

GOLDBERG: You know, at the time, you think these things are gonna sink you. Your site crashes in the biggest moment for your company, and you think, “We blew it.” You run out of inventory, you think, “We blew it.” But you work your way through everything like every other problem.

We had to get smarter about inventory planning. Raising money was a part of that — having funding to be able to buy more product. Also, having a strategy for our product early on, where everything was sort of core, and we weren’t yet designing seasonal product, allowed us to buy more inventory. If we could afford it, we could buy it, and we knew we could sell it. If one color sold out, we were pretty good at selling the next color.

There was a lot working in our favor that we didn’t know when we entered the category, but it really helped us with that piece of it.

BERMAN: Still ahead, we talk about how Bombas has kept to its core values amid rapid growth and how they built a nationwide network of giving partners. Stay with us.

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BERMAN: Welcome back to Masters of Scale. You can find this conversation and more on the Masters of Scale YouTube channel.

Copy LinkBuilding a nationwide network of giving partners

You had to figure out distribution two times — because you’re distributing to your customer who’s purchasing the product, but you’re also distributing to customers to whom you’re donating the product. So, can you talk about how you all developed those systems and made that work?

GOLDBERG: When we first started, we had the idea, and we said, “Okay, we’ve got to make the best socks in the history of feet so that we can donate as many products as we possibly can.” We set a goal to donate a million pairs of socks in 10 years. We’re over 140 million items donated now. But in the beginning, we didn’t know how to make a sock, and we didn’t know how to donate a sock either.

The making part we figured out — it took us a couple of years. The donating part, I mean, listen, we just Googled it. That was our strategy. This was the beginning of, “Who’s donating socks?” We found an organization in Ohio called Hannah’s Socks — still one of our giving partners. It was started by a girl, I think she was seven at the time, and she was serving dinner at Thanksgiving at a homeless shelter, and she saw somebody who was wearing tinfoil around his feet. She asked her mother, “Why is that man wearing that?” She’s seven, right?

So she started an organization where she was donating socks to shelters in her local area. We called this organization, and in the same way that we kind of thought Shark Tank was a prank, they were like, “Wait, you just want to give us all the socks?” We were like, “Yes, can you take them, please?”

That was our first giving partner. We would send them socks when we made sales. We created a schedule; we’d send them product. Eventually, we started talking about the needs of the community and how we could change the product to make it more technical and specific to serve the needs of people facing homelessness.

BERMAN: What are the different needs?

GOLDBERG: So, we added an antimicrobial treatment to prevent the growth of fungus. We used darker colors to show less visible wear. And we reinforced the seam — on our core socks for our paying customers, we tend to use a seamless toe, which is really light but less durable over time than reinforcing the seam. So, things like that — the same base yarns.

We were trying to make really smart products for our non-paying customers and doing research — market research — having conversations with that customer the same way we do with our paying customers. We adjusted and adapted those products over time based on the conversations we were having with this organization. Then we started to add more organizations. Eventually, we said, “Our customers are in all 50 states. We need to be donating in all 50 states.”

So, we started to add giving partners everywhere across the country. And then we started to let people apply to be a giving partner. Organically, over the years, we built up an infrastructure of giving, and we have a pretty advanced network of 4,000 partners across all 50 states. Our same fulfillment partner that we send to our customers is sending product to our giving partners in shelters all over the country. And we have this logistical expertise that we’ve built up for donating product as just a natural extension of how we’ve run the business.

BERMAN: Wow. And how many socks donated to date?

GOLDBERG: 140 million items. So that includes socks, underwear, slippers, and t-shirts.

HEATH: But socks are the bulk of it. But over the last three years, we’ve introduced other products.

BERMAN: Yeah, incredible. I mean, 140 million…

HEATH: It’s like a hard number to wrap your head around.

BERMAN: It is. I mean, and an extraordinary thing. Think about all the lives that have been changed by that decision and by the focus on that. It’s extraordinary. So, thank you.

One of the challenges that we talk about a lot is, especially in the gravel road phase — you start out at dirt road, and hopefully, you get to paved road — in that gravel road phase, companies literally create, you call them departments, but in a lot of companies, they call them divisions. It’s kind of a terrible word, right? And managing culture consistency, keeping those values front of mind, is really hard in that phase.

Copy LinkPrioritizing core values as you scale

You all seem to have done an incredible job of that, with your values deeply infused in your company as you’ve scaled. How have you kept that front and center for your team?

GOLDBERG: Well, I think we talk about it and prioritize it, and we don’t always get it right, either. We survey the company every year and ask how we’re doing on these things. We work on the areas where we need to improve. We have to shift and be honest about that.

We’re not 15 people sitting around one table anymore, and you have to adapt things. But you have to decide what those core values are — like Dave was talking about, right? What are the things that you’re just unwilling to compromise on? How do those shift over time, and what makes sense for a company at your scale? What can you actually do? How do you serve the good of the company and make people — you know, it’s the balance of having people come to you a little bit with the things that you believe in, and also listening to where people are and what the world looks like, and how people want a company to serve them in their careers. It’s finding that balance and being open with people and listening.

It’s not rocket science, right? It’s just making sure that it’s an important thing that you talk about. We sit around at our executive meetings, and we talk about these things.

HEATH: I’ll just say from day one, our core values have meant a lot. It’s 75% of our interview process. Every person who’s interviewed is given a core value to test the person against, and so it becomes this filter.

I think, naturally, our brand and what we stand for attract a certain type of person, yeah. But then this becomes the filter by which we say, “Are these people legitimately here because they want to be a part of this?” Everybody shows up saying, “I want to give back.” But the people that we have working for us they all participate in volunteer activities every single month, and part of the work that they’re doing, they see the value end-to-end of how their work contributes to actually helping people.

So, this has become this kind of filtering mechanism that has inevitably built this very like-minded community of people who, similar to the four co-founders, share the same values in the types of places that they want to work.

Copy LinkExpanding beyond socks cautiously

BERMAN: You did expand beyond socks, and it’s not always easy for companies that are in a single product line to expand. How did you make that decision?

HEATH: I think it was a series of a number of bad decisions leading up to that decision.

GOLDBERG: I think our heart was in the right place.

HEATH: Yeah. I think in year three, we had done $5 million in sales, and I remember talking to one of our mentors, and we were like, “We’re unstoppable. We went from a million to 2 million to 5 million.” We’re like, “Oh my God, this is unstoppable! We’re gonna start producing underwear, and sweatpants, and sweatshirts.”

And they were like, “Most of the best brands stuck with one product. Nike started with running sneakers. Under Armour started with base layers. Lululemon with yoga pants. Most of these brands became $100+ million brands before they ever expanded into another product category.” And they’re like, “If your core product is growing at like 300% year-over-year, why are you going to add complexity to your business? Stay focused and just — you’ve got so much demand there. Wait until you start to see that demand dwindle before you would add anything additional.” That was great advice.

Fast forward to year five, $100 million of revenue. We’re like, “Oh my God, we’re even more unstoppable than we thought.” And we started very rapidly making other products — underwear, t-shirts, pants, sweatshirts — and we had made the product because we were like, “Well, of course people love our brand. They love what we do. If we make it, they’ll buy it,” type of thing.

We went through this process, and we produced sweatpants and sweatshirts first. Underwear development takes a lot longer; it’s a much more complicated of a product. We ended up launching this product, and we hadn’t thought through things like, “What are we going to donate?” and “How are we going to talk about sweatpants and sweatshirts?” They aren’t even in the top ten of the most requested items in homeless shelters.

We were like, “We just ran so fast to make something.” This added complexity to the warehouse and all this other stuff. So we made the hard decision — we were like, “Look, we’ve already made it, we’ll sell it, and then we’re gonna pull it and go back to focusing on socks.”

We had one season where we sold sweatpants and sweatshirts, and then we didn’t end up launching underwear until year eight. And I think by that point, we were $275 million in top-line sales in socks, and we were like, “Okay, we now feel comfortable to start planting the seeds and intentionally keeping those businesses small to begin with, not trying to make them 20% of the business on day one. We were like, it’s going to be 2% of the business. We’re gonna learn, and we’re gonna take the same amount of time that we took to perfect the sock with a much larger customer base now, to get the feedback and just go slow.”

Having this amazing core business that was incredibly profitable, still growing like crazy, gave us confidence and the leeway to be able to say, “We’re gonna go really slow at this other thing.” So, we’ve developed these other products, and today, socks are still like 80% of the business. Funny enough, our footwear business is our second-largest category, despite launching a little bit after our underwear — it’s like 15% of the business.

And we’re just trying to follow where the customer is telling us they want to go.

BERMAN: Yeah, there’s a high share of foot here.

HEATH: We’re still producing underwear and tees, but we’ve very quickly validated through the consumer that that’s actually what they want from us. So, we’re going further down that direction.

Copy LinkUnderstanding and addressing homelessness

BERMAN: Yeah, on homelessness, which is obviously a human rights issue, a public health issue, and a public safety issue. I mean, we have a lot of work to do in this country to address homelessness. What have you learned? And where are the opportunities to do more beyond what you guys do? Because you all do a lot, but where can we make real change on that front in this country?

GOLDBERG: Listen, I think that a lot of that starts with getting a little bit smarter on an individual basis and trying to find some compassion. A lot of the people who are experiencing homelessness in this country are experiencing it for less than a year — 90% of people — it’s transitional, you don’t have the support network. Something unexpected happens, maybe you’re couch surfing, maybe you spend a couple of nights in a shelter.

I don’t want to blanket over everybody’s experience; each experience is very personal. But we meet a lot of people when we volunteer. We have a lot of giving partners who share a lot of information, and we talk and interview a lot of people who have lived experience with homelessness, and they all say the same thing: Let’s start with a little bit of compassion, understanding that I’m a human and that I’m in a situation that I don’t want to be in.

Of course, we are all confronted with ideas of what homelessness looks like to us, and I think a lot of those are misleading. And in the same way that you don’t want one example of something to color an entire issue, I would say the same. This is about people — and people in this country — and it’s really a lot of other issues showing up in this one word, right? This is about, like you said, mental health. This is about the healthcare system. This is about wage increases. This is about the housing market. There are so many related and complicated things. It’s a very nuanced, very tough topic.

We all have some sort of experience with it. These are people who live close to us in all of our communities, and I think there’s some responsibility to try and have a perspective and be a little bit smarter on it because it’s a representation of a lot of the things that we all care about.

The thing that I’ve learned the most in talking to people is human connections matter. People understanding that there’s somebody who is thinking about them or cares about them more than what’s expected matters. The organizations that are working in this every day are doing incredible work. They’re strapped; they don’t make a lot of money. They’re out there just trying to help people, and just a little bit of extra care and a little bit of shifting perspective, potentially in a conversation that you’re having because you’ve learned a little bit more, or because you’ve had a personal interaction with somebody, if that happens millions of times over, it can make a difference.

In the same way that us donating a product seems like a small thing, if I give somebody a pair of socks, you’re like, “You’re not giving them a home.” We hear people say things like that to us all the time, right? Like, “How about homes? They’re the most requested thing in homeless shelters.”

Okay? Like, we understand, but you’ve had tons of conversations with somebody where it’s an opportunity to start a connection, an opportunity to establish trust. That’s what our giving partners love. They’re giving somebody something free of charge. There’s no bureaucracy, there are no strings attached, and they’re using that as an opportunity to say, “I care about you. I’m here to help you,” and it’s an amazing thing.

You can talk to any of the organizations that we work with, and they’ll say this. I think there’s a personal version of that where you’re just trying to have a little bit more understanding about something that we all have to think through and try and help solve. I don’t have all the answers. We’re not pretending to be a political organization where we’re influencing things on that level. We’re just trying to continue to make new products for people who don’t often get new things or don’t have a lot of choice and show them that there’s a company out here that’s thinking about a small part of something that seems important to them.

BERMAN: Guys, thanks for being here.

GOLDBERG: Thank you so much. Thanks for having us.

HEATH: Thank you.

BERMAN: With more than 140 million socks, underwear, and shirts donated, it’s undeniable that Bombas has scaled not only its business but its impact on communities in need. For some leaders, there might be a temptation to cut corners on core values for the sake of blitzscaling. But for the Bombas founders, their commitment to the company’s social mission has helped accelerate their growth — a reminder for all of us that when you set your foundation properly, you can do good and do well at the same time and at extraordinary scale.

I’m Jeff Berman. Thank you for listening.