At A Glance

Mary Gui’s journey to entrepreneurship led her to create Sock Candy, a brand where each sock is treated as a work of art. Her path is filled with intriguing detours, from launching a must-have sock line to promoting arthritis treatments. This article explores how she combined her creative energy and business acumen to build a brand making waves in the fashion industry.

Who is Mary?

Meet Mary Gui, Founder of Sock Candy!

About Sock Candy

Featured in publications like Vogue, Allure, and PopSugar, Sock Candy is a fashion-sock brand that encourages customers to embrace their personal style. The brainchild of former influencer and lifetime fashion aficionado Mary Gui, the brand takes sheer fabric and creates elegant, unique prints that elevate any outfit.

Mary’s Journey

When she was seven, Mary came to the U.S. with her mother, who raised her with traditional Asian expectations. She was taught to pursue success at all costs but by only following a few career paths, like attending business school, medical school, or law school. In the end, Mary chose to go to business school. 

After graduating with a degree in marketing, she went straight into advertising and worked with large agencies for five years, but her job didn’t interest her. Often, she worked with boring companies like arthritis medication. During her experience, she learned marketing, advertising, collaboration, management, and communication skills. In her role, Mary was responsible for being the middleman between the client and the creative team to ensure the team’s work aligned with the client’s direction.

Eventually, Mary quit her job and decided to pursue a career in fashion blogging, following her childhood passion. From a young age, she loved fashion, which was innate to her. As a teenager, , Mary dressed in her mother’s vintage clothes from the ‘80s and styled fun outfits. On Instagram, she slowly grew an Instagram following and cultivated her brand for a few years. With moderate success, she worked with multiple fashion brands, created sponsored posts, and made a living for herself. 

Crafting the Company

Then, she came up with the idea for Sock Candy. A quirk of Mary’s was styling socks with sandals and heels, and she became known for her unique fashion sense. Mary felt like there was a gap in the marketplace for fashionable and affordable elegant socks. The only options consumers had were socks with tacky patterns or extremely expensive socks. 

Mary crafted her brand in hopes of creating fashionable, elegant, but still quirky and affordable socks. She could sell premium socks at $18 per pair, placing her brand at a good tier in the market. Over time, the company began to garner a following due to its line of sheer socks. The fashion brand sells socks with intricate embroidery that others aren’t doing at the same level.

“With our embroidered prints, there aren’t really any brands doing that to the level of detail that we do,” she says. “We treat every pair of socks like they’re a dress, a full-clothing piece. We think of [our products] with the same level of detail. We take the same thoughtful process to design a print for a sock as other brands would take to designing a dress.”

Becoming a Business Owner from Unconventional Beginnings

When she launched Sock Candy, it was natural for her because it was a founder-lead brand. Mary says that her experience as an influencer prepared her to create her business. As an influencer, she grew more comfortable taking photos, styling outfits, and working with other brands through collaborations and sponsorships. In the beginning, Mary modeled her products and used items from her personal collection to add flair, but her brand is now expanding into hiring models. Mary finds new ways to apply her unique background and knowledge as her brand grows.

Overall, Mary loves that in E-Commerce, the reach is limitless. Companies aren’t limited to one physical location that requires the team to make in-person sales. As long as they have a good idea for a brand and get the word out there, anyone can reach customers from diverse backgrounds and communities to build their brand.

“You can drive millions of people, hundreds of thousands of people to your site. I think I also love that it’s an even playing ground… You don’t need tons and tons of capital to put something online to sell as long as you have a good idea,” she says.

The Sock Candy Team

Sock Candy operates with a very lean team. Mary, a full-time employee, and a part-time employee, handle the company's operational aspects. The three fulfill orders in-house and work on-site in an office five days a week. Mary also hires freelancers who help with designs, Google advertising, photography, and other tasks the team needs extra help with.

The team follows a hybrid schedule. For instance, Mary’s full-time employee works in fulfillment four days a week, and on the fifth day, she handles social media content that can be completed from home. Mary says the schedule works well for her team, and everyone enjoys it.

The CX Philosophy at Sock Candy

One of the priorities for the Sock Candy team is that the customer journey is a seamless and easy experience, especially in an online format. To ensure this, the team must thoroughly explain the ordering process so customers can understand it. Because the company has more than 60 SKUs, Mary thinks a lot about the best formats to categorize products to make it easier for customers to find what they want.

Last year, the team added a search function to their website to make products easy to find. If a potential customer sees a product on the brand’s Instagram page, Mary wants to simplify finding items rather than scrolling on the site. 

“A big part of it is just making it super easy for customers to find what they’re looking for but, at the same time, have that ability to discover other items,” she says. “Everything is grouped in a way that I feel makes the easiest for people to discover [our products].”

Another essential aspect of Sock Candy’s customer service approach is the post-purchase experience. The team responds to customer emails and requests in a timely manner, usually within 24 hours, even if the customer reaches out on the weekend. Mary says responding quickly if the customer has a shipping issue is important. In the time between when a customer reaches out and waits for their response, companies could lose customers if they wait too long. Because Sock Candy is a direct-to-consumer company, the customer is the team’s number one priority.

Handling Customer Requests

Mary handles the company's customer experience. The team doesn’t use macros or automation, but she says it’s very manageable, considering the company's low return rate due to the nature of socks. 

The most common issue the company receives relates to lost packaging. The company uses USPS for its shipments, and some packages get lost in transit, or customers don’t receive their orders. Mary says this is a pain point because the issue is outside Sock Candy’s control. Even so, the company does its best to manage customer concerns and ensure satisfaction.

The company’s go-to resolution took a while to figure out, but the team has found a way to streamline the process. The team works with a shipping insurance company called Shipsurance, and every package is automatically insured to the order amount. If a customer’s package gets lost in transit or they never receive it, they can reach out, and the team will file a claim with the insurance company. Customers appreciate Sock Candy’s streamlined process because it resolves their issues.

“Can you imagine spending $50 on something and then it was lost, and you don't get your money back? The customer is not going to be happy with that. That's why, for us, it's very important to have the shipping insurance and to be able to address it for the customer,” she says.

Going Above and Beyond for the Customer

Typically, Sock Candy offers USPS ground and USPS priority shipping for customers, which allows most packages to arrive within two to seven  business days. The company doesn’t usually provide UPS overnight or two-day shipping because Mary and her team fulfill everything in-house. If customers need their orders sooner, Mary creates custom shipping options for them and makes the extra trip to UPS to fulfill their requests. Fulfilling requests like these requires the team to constantly monitor their emails so they don’t miss customer inquiries.

Mary says that it’s helpful to have the ability to make exceptions for customers. It’s flattering that a customer would want Sock Candy products as soon as possible. With that in mind, why wouldn’t any business owner want to make it happen and do their best to help their customer’s issues? 

“It’s not about affecting [the company’s] bottom line. It’s more about the fact that these people have chosen your company, your product, to be the thing that they need tomorrow or in two days,” she says. “In a world where you can get anything, you can go on Amazon and order something prime. Why not do that? Because they’ve chosen your product. It’s very flattering, and you should try to make it happen if you can.”

Tech Stack

Shopify — Uses to operate the company as a whole

Fair — Manages the company’s wholesale orders . Sock Candy can be found in more than 200 stores throughout the country.

Instagram — Helps the brand gain traction and stay on top of fashion trends

Sock Candy’s Growth Strategies

Working Towards Customer Retention

Mary says that Sock Candy has about a 30% repeat customer rate. When it comes to socks, people are always looking for various new items. The team constantly brainstorms new styles because socks aren’t the product that gets re-purchased repeatedly; they’re more of a fashion item. The more styles the team debuts, the more customers return because they can build up their collection. 

On the other hand, Sock Candy’s styles are very unique and specific. The team releases 10 to 15 new brands every season, but not every customer will like every design. This is why the company’s repeat customer  rate isn’t as high as other companies might be, Mary says. 

Creating new designs and offering gifts helps with customer retention. During the holiday season, customers return and purchase pairs of socks for their friends and loved ones. Mary also says that keeping up with customer emails and reaching out to customers significantly encourages customers to return to the company.

“Returning customers is very important because I think a lot of customers may purchase three or four pairs at once, and then they may not return until next year. When they [return, they] see that, oh, we have 20 new styles. Let me look and see which ones I like. I feel like the cadence is maybe like a few months to a year when they will then return and buy something new,” she says.

Brainstorming New Designs

Mary lives and breathes fashion, which is handy when she creates new designs for the brand. Because she consumes fashion all the time, she stays hyper-aware of the latest trends and styles in the fashion world. Every season, she sits down and comes up with a list of potential concepts and new prints that her brand could use. Everything serves as inspiration. There’s never a lack of ideas.

Listening to customer feedback also helps the team come up with new styles. Sock Candy introduced tights because customers reached out and requested those styles, and now, more and more customers are asking for more sizing. When the brand first launched, they were one size fits all, but more recently, customers have asked for more variety, and the company listened. 

In the past, Mary has met with repeat customers over Zoom interviews and asked them about the types of prints they would like to see from the brand in the future. Sometimes, it can be challenging to develop new styles because the company has done it all, from flowers to butterflies and more. To help with this, Mary also looks at what’s trending on TikTok, wallpaper prints, and bedding fabric.