In the competitive world of ecommerce, standing out isn’t just an advantage—it’s a necessity. While many brands lean on conventional marketing wisdom, what if the true key to growth lies in thinking outside the box, embracing serendipity, and deeply understanding your audience?
Sock Candy’s founder, Mary Gui, transformed a personal quirk into a thriving business by leveraging unconventional approaches and her keen eye for upcoming trends.
Mary’s journey to launching Sock Candy wasn’t a straight line. She took her deep, innate love for fashion and first began expressing herself through blogging and, eventually, an Instagram page. In just three years she amassed around 50,000 followers, so she quit her job to pursue fashion blogging and content creation full time. This move, a “bridge job” as she calls it, was a calculated risk. As Mary explains, “My original goal was, I’m gonna do this for a year, and if it doesn’t work out, I can just go back and get a job in advertising.”
This initial foray into content creation was purely about sharing her unique personal style, never with the explicit intent of starting a product-based business. But enough of her followers and friends commented on her unique ability to style socks with her outfits that she decided to begin designing her own.
Unlocking growth with unique, but intentional marketing strategies
Ahead, Mary breaks down the creative and inventive marketing strategies that helped her reach success with her brand, Sock Candy.
1. Find a white space by observing your audience
The idea for Sock Candy sprang from Mary’s observation of her own social media audience. She had a penchant for styling socks with her shoes, a detail that resonated strongly with her followers. “My followers would always comment about my socks,” Mary recalls, “So I started to realize, like, this is like something that people know me for. That’s also unique.” This seemingly small detail unveiled a significant market gap: The socks available at the time were either too expensive or lacked the elevated, fashion-forward designs Mary sought.
This realization led to the creation of Sock Candy, a brand offering elegant, funky, and affordable fashion socks with one-of-a-kind artistic designs.
2. Let customers guide development
When Sock Candy first launched on Shopify, Mary’s initial collection was mainly cotton socks with some sheer styles. “Immediately the sheer styles started selling way faster than the cotton styles,” Mary says. This market feedback led to a significant pivot. The subsequent collections reversed the ratio, heavily favoring sheer designs, and ultimately defining Sock Candy’s unique identity.
In addition to engaging with comments on her Instagram, Mary checks her Shopify Analytics data daily, offering insights into exact customer behaviors.
3. Use indirect marketing on niche platforms
Sock Candy’s marketing strategy is a master class in creative experimentation. While Instagram remains a strong direct sales channel, Mary’s recent success on Reddit is a shining example of “indirect marketing” and understanding different platforms. “We are not directly marketing on Reddit,” Mary explains. Instead, she noticed an influx of traffic from the platform where users were organically sharing photos of Sock Candy’s products, curious about styling elements.
Mary went on to create a personal Reddit account and started posting her own mirror selfies featuring her socks, without explicitly identifying herself as the founder. “People like seeing my outfits and almost all of them have my socks in them and they’ll be like, ‘Where are your socks from?’ I’ll be like, ‘It’s from Sock Candy,’” Mary shares. This genuine, content-driven approach resonated with the Reddit community, where overt promotion is typically not well received.
Exploring platforms where your audience congregates naturally and engaging authentically without a sales angle can unlock significant opportunity.
4. Be selective with marketing channels and know when to pivot
Not all platforms are created equal, and Mary’s experience with TikTok and Pinterest is a prime example of why strategic channel selection is so important. Despite generating significant views and saves on these platforms, they didn’t translate into substantial sales for Sock Candy. “I think what I learned is that [TikTok is] just not my audience,” Mary says. “Our demographic starts from, like, age 25-plus, so I’m not surprised.”
Understanding your customer demographics and where they spend their time is crucial. For TikTok, Mary also noted the platform’s preference for “demonstrative” content, which didn’t align as naturally with Sock Candy’s styling-focused approach. While engagement is great, meticulously evaluate the return on investment for each marketing channel. “You also have to know when to stop and when to realize, like, OK this is just not my platform. Like even if videos do well. You’re not gonna get sales,” Mary explains.
5. Maximize paid ads with fresh creative
While organic and indirect strategies are great, Sock Candy has also found significant success with paid advertising through Meta ads. Mary stresses two critical components: “One, you have to have great creative, so you have to have really great images and videos, and then two, you just have to know what you’re doing in terms of the strategy, like how you’re testing each ad set against what audiences.”
Mary’s experience with a Meta ads freelancer, found on Upwork, transformed the brand’s entire approach. An initial rigorous testing phase, combining numerous audiences and ad combinations, built a solid infrastructure. The ads helped Sock Candy grow monthly revenue from around $10,000 to approximately $40,000 within a couple of months of working together.
“You always have to go in, like we go in every single week to optimize,” Mary says.
By listening to her audience, being open to change, embracing unconventional opportunities, and relentlessly optimizing her approach, Mary continues to grow the Sock Candy brand.
Mary not only has built a successful business but also has crafted a compelling blueprint for other founders looking to unlock their own path to growth. Catch her full interview on the Shopify Masters YouTube channel for incredible tips on finding manufacturers, managing a freelance team, and scaling a small business.
