John's Crazy Socks - Spreading Happiness One Pair of Socks at a Time

You're listening to the science of C X. A podcast that hopes to inspire business owners and leaders to learn new techniques and turn prospects into customers, enter customers into raving fans. My name is steve Pappas. I'm known for my relentless pursuit of all things customer across my career. And also in my six startups, I've had to learn how to make decisions in business that customers really respond to. Let's spend some time together and help your business soar grow and accelerate. Well, welcome everybody to another episode of the science of C X. I'm steve Pappas, your host. There are companies out there that are just profitable. There are companies out there that are looking for the next exit. There are companies out there driven by venture capital and then there are social enterprises that are actually trying to do good in the world and they're trying to really take care of people and they're doing all the right things. And every once in a while I come across a company like this and I just have to have them on the show. We have to celebrate what they're doing because they're really hitting it out of the park. And I gotta tell you, we've got both Mark Cronin and john Cronin from john's crazy socks dot com today and it's an interesting story. It's a business that is really meant to do and make a difference. So help me welcome both john and Mark to the show today. Thanks guys for joining us. We really appreciate you coming on the show. We're excited to be here and thank you for the kind words about our business, but you get it, we're in it for the long haul, We're in it for impact, we're in it to create relationships and we get to have fun. Exactly, And not only that, I'm a customer, the minute I heard that I was going to be able to have john and Mark on the show, I had to buy some of their socks and I'll tell you there's some of my favorite socks in the drawer now, and I tell my wife, make sure both socks get washed. I don't want to end up with one of john's crazy socks and not the other because that would be terrible because what am I gonna do? I'm gonna just put a sock on one ft. So let me give a little bit of the bio here and let our listeners understand why it was so important for me to find time to get you guys on the show and I know you're busy and you're on a lot of shows and you're getting a lot of press out there, but I wanted to find the time that you could be here. So about john Cronin first, john is a 24 year old entrepreneur in every way, shape or form, who happens to have down syndrome, john is the co founder, but he's the chief happiness officer of john's crazy socks, which is a mission and his mission is to spread happiness and show what people with differing abilities can achieve And he's definitely driving things. He's a fierce advocate for people of differing abilities and has testified twice before the us Congress and spoken at the United Nations. It's absolutely amazing. Some of the things that John has accomplished so far in his 24 years, I haven't done anywhere near what he's done. John is a member of the board for the national Down syndrome Society and the athletes Congress for new york special olympics. Now his dad who's sitting next to him is Mark Cronin. Mark is also his co founder. Now along with jOHN of john's crazy socks. It's a social enterprise with a mission to really spread happiness. His leadership has demonstrated that pursuing social goals, demonstrating what people with differing abilities can achieve and giving back makes good business. So Mark, aside from just advocating for differently abled people, his advocacy work has seen him testified before Congress and the U. N. He's sought after to speak and he's spoken at events across us and Canada, he served as the chief operating officer for multiple healthcare management and technology firms, marked as an undergrad degree at Holy Cross and a masters in public policy. It really is amazing and I could go on and on for the next 20 minutes talking about the great things that both jOHn and Mark have done, but I'd rather you hear their words. So what I'd like to do is let's start by starting from where the idea came from uh to have john's crazy socks become a business and how did you execute on that? Well, it really was born out of necessity. You go back to the fall of 2016 and where were you John are going to be my last year school? So he's in his latest sort of school, like everybody else trying to figure out what do I do next. And the unfortunate reality is there aren't a lot of great options for people with different abilities and what were you looking at, john I look at job program and through, I don't like the option I don't like, but john here, he's a natural entrepreneur. I am, if he didn't see a job he liked, what were you going to do? I said, I want career where I want to make one and would you tell me, I said, I want to go into business with my dad, a nice father son being together, which is pretty cool. I've got three sons from the youngest, this is one I can work with that work that way. But then john like most entrepreneurs, he's got a lot of ideas and some of them are actually good ideas. So we had to come up with an idea for a business, what would we do? What was one of your ideas? One of them is a food truck. I kind of idea about the movie chef and john Farrow, the movie about our father's son bugging food truck. I'm gonna make all that. So this seems pretty cool and we're thinking, okay, we'll make, where would we put the food truck? Where could we go? But we ran into a problem. Yeah, you can't cook. That's just a small problem. Yeah. But then right before thanksgiving of 2000 and 16, john here had his Eureka moment. I did. I said to myself, Pretty socks watch sucks. It's fun. It's colorful. It's rare. I always make me be me. We used to drive around looking for these socks for john. So we figured if john loved these socks that much, Surely other people would too, that we could find our to john's credit. He didn't just say we should sell socks. You had the name, name website and he was very driven when I suggested different names like Marx, merry socks. Mark serious socks, you have nothing to do with. And I think there are a lot of people out there at that point. Okay, They have an idea what do you do traditionally, people would stop everything and prepare a business plan, do that. Market research, competitive analysis, operational plans, financial forecast. We didn't do any of that. We went to lean startup route. It was very simple. We said, we're going to get something up and running and we're going to test the idea. So like millions of others. We built a website on the Shopify platform. We went, got some inventory, Just a small amount of inventory. We were bootstrapping so you gotta make do with what you have. The only marketing we did was to set up a facebook page. I would take out my cell phone and would make videos And who was in those videos? I am, I'm talking about socks, socks, socks, more socks. And we noticed something. Those videos started to get shared. And what day did we open? We open on Friday, 9th 2016 and we didn't know what to expect, But we were very fortunate. We got a flood of orders the first day certainly felt like a flood of orders. We got 42 orders and we're on long island outside New York City. A town called Huntington's. Not surprisingly, most of the orders were local, right tom was in Huntington's high school. We lived there were in temporary office space there. So what do we do with those first orders? I got a red box like this and I heard something inside. You put the socks dot socks, candy. And thinking I wrote, john wrote a handwritten thank you know, we went across the street to the grocery store and got bags of Hershey's and would fill the boxes up load the car up and drove around and knocked on doors. There were some funny moments, there was sometimes we're out at 10 30 at night and john's knocking on doors and I'm looking to see are they answering with a shotgun or something. But how the customers respond loves it. And they took a fi oh taking pictures and I sit on show it to me. Yeah I would I get a spread. We had customers ordering just to have john come back to their house, there will be families waiting for him to show up. So In two weeks really we shipped 452 orders. Had about $13,000 in revenue. We had some funny moments when we started we had very little inventory and we sold so many so fast that we were running out of things to sell. So that first saturday I drove to every kmart in Suffolk County on Long Island buying all the socks. I could just so we could have something to resell. We weren't gonna make any money but we had to have something for the customer and you learn like doing Yeah. No, I like the fact that not only did you take the lean startup route and you said we're gonna do this, we're gonna try it out, see how it goes. But you even thought about the packaging at that moment to that how important it is. Not just to put it in a plain envelope or a plain box you got the red box and you thought about putting a note in it and you even put candy in it. Just the level of what that customer experience was like when they opened up the box and I saw it myself too. When I get my box I see it and you feel that happiness, you feel the love that comes through that. So I'm amazed and right out of the gate, you guys have thought about these things and I'm sure there were hiccups along the way. But once you had that initial spurt, did you realize and say, hey, we might be onto something here. We did. We tested it and we said to ourselves, okay, we got something here. So we went forward and it is a different business model. It's a social enterprise. So we have a social mission and a business mission. They feed off each other and they're indivisible. If all we were doing was selling songs, you would not be talking to us because we've now gone encountered There are exactly one gazillion sock companies and if all you're doing is selling socks, what do you say ours are better than yours? Ours are brighter than yours. Ours don't smell as much as yours. How do you differentiate yourself there at the same time? If it was just this nice father son story and we raised some money, you wouldn't be talking to us either because we wouldn't be anywhere. And sometimes people, they hear us talk and say, oh you do all these nice things, understand this is a business. We like to live indoors. If we're not making a profit, then we go home and nobody does anything, it works because we have a mission and a purpose that drives everything we do and enables us to connect with our customers really with our community. Increasingly consumers are asking who are you before they spend their money. If you sell the cheapest item, you will always have a customer. But boy, is it hard to only have the cheapest title? Otherwise people want to know, how do you treat the environment? How do you treat your employees? Why should I give you my money? And you've got to earn that trust? So you speak about the experience of opening the package that's really important to us. We're not doing a bunch of transactions. We're sharing experiences with our customers. I hope that makes sense. It does. And I think it goes beyond just the box. If I could comment on it when I got onto the website, I had a great time on the website, it was so simple for me to look for what I was looking for. Now I bought guitar socks because as you can see around me, I've guitars around me and I'm into guitar playing for many years. So I was looking for those, I was able to find them in no time flat. I was able to pick what I wanted and the checkout process was seamless and the emails that come from you. So not only was it a great customer experience, but now all of a sudden I feel like I was part of something that I wasn't just going online to amazon or anybody else and just buying some socks. I felt like I was part of something that was a little bit bigger than me, but also something that I want to be part of and I'll be buying more. I mean christmas time is coming and I'm getting ready. So it was the entire experience. That was great from end to end. From the minute I said, hey, I'm gonna buy something to check out through to the emails of when it's getting here and then when it finally gets here, it was a little like christmas opening the package to what happens with us. And I think other organizations are doing this more. You have to have a purpose and that has to be made manifest in everything you do. So what's our mission? John our mission a spring happening. We talk about spreading happiness all the time. That becomes the ultimate criteria for every decision we make and everybody here understands that and buys into that a small example. So we do our own fulfillment. We do that in part because we're creating jobs and in part because that allows us to customize what we do for our customers. So, um, more than half our employees have a different ability, many of them work in our warehouse. What do we call our pickers Wranglers, we have happiness packers. So I'll give you just a couple of small examples around them. We had a filmmaker in here last week. We're making a short introductory film about us. And she was going to go and talk with our sock Wranglers. And I said, you can ask every one of them what do we do? And they will all tell you? And she's well, do you want to come with me? You want to make sure they say the right thing, nope, don't have to do that. And when I asked her later, she said, every single person said, we're spreading happiness and they can tell you what they were doing about it. But I'll give you other examples. So among the socks we sell, we sell socks for diabetics. One of our packers, what do we call our packers? Happy packers. Happiness packers comes to us one day and says, you know, there's something strange were selling socks for diabetics and we're sending them candy. And then we put sugar candy in there. So we put sugar free candy in the packages. Now with the people that order diabetic sucks, marketing matters. The email matters. Yes, we segment our email, but we also segment our fulfillment. So every package gets the handwritten note from john. Yes, We are copying it. On the back side of that. You learn the story of john's crazy socks about giving back, you get a package of candy, you get to discount parts, friend customers and then on the packing slip, you get the picture and the name of the person who packed your order. So what we want to share their is you're not just getting a transaction. That package becomes an experience, that becomes a little dose of happiness, Okay? But now we have five different basic packages because you get one if it's your first order, but if it's your fit to order, you get a different package, the experience is different. It's all got the same basic ingredients. None of this is the proverbial rocket science. It's just paying attention to what we say we're about and really believing it. And then you just keep looking for ways to make that happen. We talk about customer experience, we talk about the journey mapping and all of the analysis that goes into things and it does boil down to it's how you want to be treated. Let's do business the way we want to be treated. We wanna feel special. We want to feel noticed and from a business perspective, you want to get the customer's attention and you want to over deliver on your promise and you want to keep their attention and keep finding ways for the customer to feel happy to keep coming back, our mission is to spread happiness. You've heard the old line, The customer is always right nonsense. The customer can be dead, but we're not in the business of being right. We're in the business of taking care of their customer. And we get to do things the way we want to, we get to create the world that we want to live in. So I'll give you an example. This happened a couple of months ago. Somebody had called up and placed an order, right? So today we only sell online unless you call us and say, can I give you an order over the phone? Will take your order over the phone. And this particular customer had said, I don't trust credit cards. I want to send you a check. Well, what happened is before the check arrived when ran out of one of the socks. So now we're short and I'm hearing this and saying, oh, well, how come? We didn't just ship the order right away. Well, we had to wait until we got to check. Said why? I asked my colleagues, I said, if you told somebody you were gonna mail them a check, would you do that? They all said yes. So then why wouldn't we believe our customers. This is not some anonymous person with somebody who spoke on the phone. They said they were going to send a check and they all kind of, oh yeah, we could do that. We'll just send it right away. And then I looked, We'll have our 5th anniversary in two weeks. We've never received amounts track. So why can't we live in that world? Let's trust people. It's the same. We offer a full money back guarantee. No limit. No time. You don't have to send us your thoughts back. Just tell us if you're not happy we're gonna refund your money, we're gonna send you extra stuff. We can do anything we can to make up for it. So we give away money all the time. Our happiness creators. That's what we call our customer service people. They know they can spend $200 on any customer without asking. Just make people happy. Our refund rate is . 5% of our revenue so we'll give money away. But in fact we have happy customers. We take care of them. And isn't that a better way to do things? Don't you feel better about that? The people that work with us, They're not fighting with customers. We don't time phone calls. We have no scripts because it's a conversation between two actual humans. Why would you do it any other way? Thanks for listening to another two minutes. C. X. Thoughts. I'm steve Pappas Today. I wanted to talk about a business process failure when something goes wrong, what do you do what you do after a process failure is probably the most important that you can do whether a business process or a technology or a miscommunication or even employee is what fails. It is extremely important to own up to it and not cover it up. Start with explaining the failure, explain it in customer speak and own the failure. Once it happens you should go into over communications mode, let the customers know what happened as timely as possible. Do not wait to get the right spin on the story, honesty and transparency are important right now but you need to also prepare for a backlash on social media or the press. There may be some initial revenue dips to next listen very closely to what your customers are saying. What feedback are you getting from the many channels that they may be talking, they're upset and they may say things that might be hard for you to hear because it's your business. Just listen, take things in now go into solving mode but take your customer with you and give a behind the scenes look at how you're fixing those problems and you're righting the ship. Those are the important things to do when there is an unfortunate business process failure no matter what type it is, make sure that you're honest you're transparent and you're partnering with your customer so that they know exactly what's going on when it will be fixed and when they can continue on their journey. Thanks again for listening to another two minutes C. X thoughts, I'm steve Pappas last time I talked to you, you had mentioned that you guys kind of operate under five pillars. Could you explain the five pillars that really drive things in a foundational way for you guys. So five pillars are different and hope give it back fun players, you can have make it personal and make it a great place to work. If we have a mission to spread happiness, how could we make people happy if our employees aren't happy? And so we're a very flat organization. It's a place where people feel respected and valued. We offer a mission worthy of their commitment. Everybody knows what their role is in serving that mission and we want to put people in position to do their best work ever. So you start there, they're making it personal, it is that personal connection with the customers. So it starts with a thank you note and the candy but you post something online, john will make a thank you video for you before I heard They noticed that somebody was ordering like for the 8th time and they were ordering all sorts of gifts. The person noticed it said I'm going to call him up and give him a gift and give them a discount of course we were. And how would you feel if your that customer that out of the blue, you get a phone call? Somebody is saying thank you, you're going to tell people it's good business anything we can to make that personal connection, it's fun products you can love. So what guides us on that is my partner here, the products have to be fun, spread happiness and john has to be able to get behind him but be clear, we have to run a great e commerce business. The website has to be great. The selection has to be great. The products have to be great and the service has to be great. So today people are worried about supply change in shipping. Every item at our website is in stock and we do same day shipping. So if an order comes in today by 3 15 Eastern time, it is going out today and we've done that through surges and ups and downs. Who was one day this year, we didn't fulfill that promise. We had a breakdown in the computer system, but you've got to have that bedrock e commerce ability jOHn and I will be off speaking places and folks asked, what keeps you up at night? Aren't you worried who's taking care of this? No, I got Andrew Andrews our Lord of the socks. He runs off from filming in our warehouse. He and his team are great. We don't worry, black friday cyber monday, How are you going to handle the surge? We get everything out on time. Then they're giving back that's baked into everything we do. So from day one, we pledged 5% of our earnings to the Special Olympics and why the special Olympic athletes, We like to say that without the special olympics, there's no john's crazy socks, but we've gone on to create products that raise awareness and celebrate causes and raise money for those causes. So the first one was, and who designed those socks? JOHN did. And they raised money for the national Down syndrome society. So they celebrate people with down syndrome and raise money to get back. So that's really important to us. We sponsor an autism can do scholarship. We sponsor different events. So we're a little company, but we've already donated over $450,000 to our charity partners. And here's a really cool thing that we celebrated last week, jOHN here, This special Olympic athlete has now donated over $100,000 to the Special Olympics and no special Olympic athlete has ever done that before, Bravo. But the most important pillar is inspiration and hope. We want to show what people with different abilities can do. It starts with johN you went down syndrome. Yes, I'm a, I am donald trump. I am a faith company. I never put me in the back. I wanted to be on the front and I have done a drum, never hold me back. You know, jOHN is out there all the time. More than half our employees have a different ability, but it's not enough for us just to hire people we want to show the world. So we make content, we make videos and pictures and share those. We hosts school tours. We were trying to figure out and we should have been keeping count of how many we've done. We know we've done over 300, I think it's over 400 school tours have come through here in five years. We've moved those online. So we've had schools from around the world come and visit and that's an opportunity for students to look and say, oh, I can do something. We take on speaking engagements. Yeah, political. We've been around the world virtually, but across the US, Mexico Canada, standing up in front of conferences, business meetings, just say, look what's possible we succeed because of whom we hire and we do the advocacy work of meeting with legislators, going to congress one time at the United Nations, right? Standing up for the rights of our colleagues. Really, are you very able ready to work? So all that makes up, john's crazy socks. Kristen who's our head buyer and product development. She knows she gets freedom to pick the socks and pick the products we sell. But look at the impact. Look at who she gets to work with. Look what difference it makes. She used to work for a big department store. How much cooler is it to know that she's going home and telling her kids, look at the impact I get to have. I have a feeling that nothing could have stopped john anyway is definitely a driving force whether he's an athlete at the special olympics or a business entrepreneur or a leader or a speaker, nothing's going to stop him. I love that a couple of things to. I think the last time we talked, we were talking about when decisions get made that there's certain criteria that you think about kind of a litmus test of what has to happen and part of it's john and part of it's the happiness for the customer. Can you explain that a little Sure if what we're about is spreading happiness and then everything comes down to, is this going to make people happy? Are we connecting to our customers? Is this how we want to be treated? Is this who we are? So here's an example. Yes, there's black friday and cyber monday and those are real. But what we do is celebrate gratitude Week. We start before thanksgiving and we're just saying thank you. So we give things to our customers. We're connecting to our customers. It's the way we build our social media. We have 240,000 Facebook followers because we're not out there banging people over the head. By, By, by. We're sharing. Hey, let us tell you what john is up to now, let us show you what we're doing here. Here's what's going on with the special olympics. We promote other businesses that are owned by people with different abilities. We're looking at our sock of the month club. It's what type of way can we offer this that people will be excited about and happy about. There's no God ideas. There's no small print. A lot of it is how do we want to be treated? There's a lot of empathy. If there's a question at all, you revert to W W. J. D. What would john do, What would john do? So back to the type of organization, john and I are at the bottom of the organization. Our job is to put people in a position to succeed and to serve them. We're at the top of the organization in the sense that we want to create the vision and the values in the pan. But ultimately everybody has to buy into that. We can't micromanage so Christy who manages our social media and our email, john writes a weekly message and we'll write some of them. But we don't check every email, we don't check every social media post, we'll make some of them ourselves. But in part you have to trust people, in part they have to understand how do we go about this and what he's got to buy in. And the easiest way on that is Christy knows john what would john do, what would work for? John kristen knows that and buying products, it's Andrew running the fulfillment boy, he knows we made a promise to people, it's going out today. That's it, It's a good way to be able to work together. I think it's amazing and it's obvious to me that it starts with the father and son and the love between each other that you have and also probably best friends too to make it all work. It'll sound corny, but it's a business built on love between us and with the people we work with and it's been successful. I mean you guys have done well from year one on, we've had our ups and downs, we've made mistakes were very fortunate. Now we have a strategic partner, a third generation family business that manufactures socks that helps us with financial stability and be able to produce products. But when things get tough, that's when you need to cling all the more to your purpose and your values. That's when it's easy to, oh just this one time we'll cut a corner, but that will undermine you when we got hit with the pandemic that cost those hundreds of thousands of dollars. But to paraphrase the movie, there's no crying in business. So what do you do, how you doing? Because we had this purpose and we knew our values, we were able to adapt, Speaking engagements and tours online. We wanted to say thank you to frontline workers. So we made healthcare superhero socks that have raised over $50,000 for frontline workers and then you look for new opportunities. So we sold masks how do you spread happiness if everybody's home? So at three o'clock today and every Tuesday, what do you do, john hosts an online dance party, you're not making money doing that, but we're connecting with our audience with our tribe, create the community. Absolutely. In a couple of minutes that we have left. I want to make sure that people know how to get in touch with you. So can we give them the website and give them the information now? Shine crazy socks dot com. Perfect. Right. We could probably do a search for the crazy john who sells socks. Really john's crazy socks dot com. You can find us on instagram on youtube on facebook linkedin. If you want to get a hold of us, just call, The phone number is (631) 760 5625. Or email us. The easiest way to do it is email us at service at john's crazy socks dot com and we'll respond And we're looking forward to things were now rolling out our B2B services. We make custom socks. We have a great gift packaging service. We have a charity fundraising program that's touchless and remote. One thing that we will roll out next year. It may be the single thing I'm most excited about. We're creating a program called J. C. S Champions and here's our mission In five years. We're going to put 1000 people with different abilities into business. We're creating a business in a box. We're going to give people a stand inventory training, marketing material and support so they can go and open their own business. It'll be a micro business. They will be able to sell socks and flea markets may be set up at a local store, but people with different abilities have so limited choices. And then if they earn too much money, they lose their benefits. So we want to give them a business that will work for them and we'll enroll the first people by next october and in five years we're going to create 1000 businesses all across the country just to show look what people can do. That's amazing. And if any of our audience members know or have people in their families with differing abilities, I hope they'll check that out too. But I just want to have my audience make sure that they just at least go to john's crazy socks dot com. Open up your browser, type in john's crazy socks dot com. Take a look around and just see an example of a father and son that had an idea and executed on it well. But their mission is to spread happiness. And really that's customer experience and customer service. Like we've never been able to see, I'm so happy that I was able to have you guys on so honored to be able to talk to you guys and I know I'm gonna be keeping you from the three p.m. dance party that john is going to be hosting soon. We have time, but listen, we appreciate it. And here's the thing when people come to drones, crazy socks dot com and buy from us, you're helping us employ people with different abilities. You're helping us get back and you're helping us spread happiness. It's great. Right? And we're so appreciative. You get advice from people, but some entrepreneurs out there. What's your advice? My five for your heart dream Walk hard so you can do Yeah. Show what you can do, Huh? Pretty cool pal. Amazing. And be really clear. We're very fortunate because we have a great team of people we get to work with if you want to do something, it's hard to do it all by yourself. Oh yeah, it takes a whole crew. Thank you both for joining me today. I loved every minute. I wish we could go on for hours because we could cover even more and see your dance party to. And thanks again for joining us today. Thank you steve. Well, alright, well that's another episode of the Science of C. X everyone. My name is steve Pappas. I hope you really enjoyed today's show. It was really an honor for us and I wanted to show you an example of something that we don't always come across. So please help me in supporting what john is trying to do out there at john's Crazy socks and helping folks with differing abilities, especially in this holiday season as we move forward. Thanks again, everyone, Bye bye. You've been listening to the science of C X. My name is steve Pappas. I really hope you've enjoyed this episode and if you have the highest compliment that you can give us is to subscribe rate and review the science of C. X. Thanks. And we'll see you in the next episode. 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