He Turned Falling Socks into an Eight Figure Global Brand

How Nathan Yun did it: He Turned Falling Socks into an Eight Figure Global Brand

Nathan Yun is the co-founder of Paire. The idea started five years ago, in the middle of Covid, when he was doing the one-hour walks you were allowed during lockdown. He's not usually a walker, but during Covid he took every hour he could get — listening to business podcasts and thinking about business ideas. The problem kept announcing itself: "my socks will keep fall off my heels cause I'm a millennial so I wear ankle socks." He had to pull them up five times an hour. At some point the annoyance flipped into a question — "why don't we just make better socks."

Nathan was always passionate about sustainable fashion, and his best friend Rex is a specialist in materials and textiles. Together they had the idea of creating an apparel brand to fight fast fashion with better ethical and sustainable products — so that if people buy the product, they'd already be doing good for the planet. To prove the model, they needed one very simple product. Socks became the natural option: it was the problem reminding Nathan every time it slipped off, it's a very low-cost, very overlooked item, and a good stepping stone into the whole apparel industry.

Before scaling, they sent prototypes to friends and family for a first round of survey. The feedback was "overwhelmingly good that we didn't really trust it" — because friends and family always say good things. Real validation, Nathan says, "has to come from strangers." Three to six months in, after running customer surveys and selling to strangers, they had the real confidence to scale. Getting the first hundred customers was a grind: about half came from friends or friends of friends, Meta ads were extremely expensive and "wasn't worth it," and sales were so quiet that Nathan and Rex were second-doubting themselves. So they printed thousands of postcards, walked the streets of Brighton in Melbourne where they lived, and dropped them door to door as neighbours. It worked — and because they were down the block, they'd deliver an order within 10 minutes, which customers had never seen in Australia. His advice for the first 100 is to try everything: flyers, postcards, wholesale, forums, even posting on Reddit asking "have you heard of pair." It's not about scalability at that stage; "it's about getting meaningful feedback from strangers."

Paire's edge is product development. Most sock brands were doing fancy, colourful prints with cheap materials at 20 bucks; Paire made a conscious decision to go down the craftsmanship, technical, nerdy path to make the best socks in the world, with a basic design that's just extremely comfortable. Unlike most DTC brands, Paire doesn't just work with a factory — it starts from the yarn, weaves the fabric, then sends it to a clothing factory for the final garment. That makes the process much longer, but the whole idea of Paire is to create meaningful, purposeful materials for the right product. Nathan's example: nobody asked what the best material for socks actually is — it was always cotton, polyester or wool by default. Paire uses a blend of Merino wool and organic cotton because wool is antibacterial and insulating while cotton is moisture absorbent, so feet stay dry all day and don't smell for days. On sourcing, his advice is to work with the makers directly, skip middleman agencies, visit factories in person — "you need to do 99% of that work" instead of hoping to do it all from home.

On pricing, Paire sat in a gap. Fast fashion sells 5 dollar or even two dollar socks; hiking brands sell Merino wool blends at $50 or $70; so Paire found a sweet spot of 20 to 24 dollars at the very beginning, paired with education that wool socks and organic cotton are very different from polyester and conventional cotton. The growth unlocks were big PR moments (a broad sheet article in year one, The Current Affair, and Shark Tank last year) plus new products — two years after socks they launched underwear and t-shirts, and Paire is now "more of an underwear company because we sell 60% underwear." For Shark Tank, Nathan over-prepared, repeating the script for three days straight, then made one huge pivot a week before recording: instead of leading with numbers, they turned the stage into a sales channel, going product to product, because "you should always lead with the story... and then you can go into the numbers." They didn't take the offer, but did an extra 50 k that week. Now Paire has opened its first physical store — Nathan's reflection is that "DTC doesn't really make sense. It just means direct to consumer. It doesn't mean online" — and that first store recouped its investment in 10 months. His one brutal lesson: if he could go back, he might not want to know the challenges ahead. "Ignorance is bliss sometimes." Enjoy the journey.

What you'll hear

• Why start with socks — the slipping-ankle-sock problem on Covid walks, and why "the least interesting item in fashion" was the right first product to prove a sustainable apparel model
• Real validation comes from strangers — why overwhelmingly good feedback from friends and family wasn't trustworthy, and what changed three to six months in
• The first 100 customers playbook — friends and family, expensive Meta ads, and thousands of hand-delivered postcards on the streets of Brighton
• Engineering the fabric, not just the product — how Paire starts from the yarn and why Merino wool plus organic cotton beats default cotton or polyester
• Pricing in the gap — sitting between 5 dollar fast-fashion socks and $50–$70 hiking socks, landing at 20 to 24 dollars with education
• The Shark Tank pivot — over-preparing, then dropping the numbers to turn the stage into a sales channel and lead with the story
• Why DTC doesn't mean online — the reflection that led Paire to open a physical store that paid back in 10 months

Key claims from this episode

Quotes from this episode

Themes Nathan returns to

• Boring products, iconic brands — Nathan keeps returning to the idea that the least interesting item in fashion can build a great brand if you go deep on it
• Validation from strangers — friends and family always say good things; the real signal is selling to people who don't know you
• Try everything scrappy — postcards, forums, Reddit, wholesale; the early days are about unscalable things that get meaningful feedback
• Materials as the moat — engineering fabric from the yarn up, because no one bothered redeveloping materials in apparel
• Lead with story, then numbers — the Shark Tank pivot and his general pitch philosophy of betting on the problem and the person
• DTC is just a business — stripping away buzzwords, a consumer brand is a retail business, and people still love visiting a store