courier: how do your socks make you feel?
courier makes performance socks for athletes, you can define what type of activity that encompasses. the brand exists because one of the five founders snapped his achilles but still had an epic trip through the alps planned and figured there had to be a better option than daily athletic tape. the organizing idea is that a sock should be chosen by sensation rather than by sport, so the question isn't running sock or cycling sock or hiking sock, it's how you want your feet to feel. three lines carry that so far: HiFi, LoFi, and AroFi a merino built on Nuyarn® performance wool, all of them running on a knit system the team has patents-pending on. the achilles pod sitting on the back of the HiFi is a small nod to where the whole thing started.
the thing that never changed
matt snapped his achilles, had surgery, and came back faster than anyone expected. that left him with a conversation to have about a trip he had been planning for two years, a village-to-village bike-pack through the french alps for a friend's wedding. his surgeon's assessment of the plan was “that’s a stupid idea”. he went anyway, on an e-bike, for a little extra support since the the french alps are not a midwest hill.
every morning of that trip he taped his leg. not for any physical benefit, he is direct about that. he taped it because it made him feel supported, and the feeling was the entire return on the ritual. the route ran through annecy, up and over tour de france stages, and into morzine, the mountain bike hub he describes as the whistler of europe, there the taping turned into a question. if a strip of tape can make you feel supported, why can't a sock?
matt had spent most of his career in apparel and had always paid attention to socks, partly out of a cycling background where the sock has long been a statement piece and a fast read on who is serious. but the question that stuck was bigger than that. footwear had been through a decade of technological escalation. apparel had changed. nutrition had changed. training data and analytics had changed. the sock, sitting in the middle of all of it and in close contact with the athlete, was roughly where it had been for decades.
matt sat on the idea for awhile, unsure if it was worth pursuing. then some friends-of-friends came to town, tom and kate, runners and fellow kiwis with athletic and business expertise matt and kate went to school near each other in auckland, new zealand without ever directly crossing paths. matt and tom had spoken once, eight years earlier, on a call about a community collaboration that went nowhere, arranged by a mutual kiwi friend while matt was at lululemon in Canada . matt remembered it vividly anyway. the same friend reconnected them years later, which is how tom ended up in the water in southern california listening to the matt talk about socks.
so out past the break on a surf in southern california, matt made his first sales pitch for courier socks. tom said “interesting," and went quiet. then tom called matt every day for two weeks asking questions and trying to pressure test the soundness of another sock company. kate's reaction when she finally heard all the details was shorter.
of course, why is no one doing this?
— kate, co-founder
how do you want to feel
building around sensation instead of discipline was a deliberate call made early. the default in the category is to sort by sport, running sock or cycling sock or hiking sock, which means picking a lane before you ever start researching or buy a pair socks. courier asks a different question, which is how you want the sock to feel, and lets the answer do the sorting. part of the bet is that nobody has ever asked you that question let alone had an answer for you.
the technical piece underneath it came from The product designer, who arrived with a long list of things he had wanted to try from his time at burton, nike, lululemon and stance, and had never been able to get through the internal machinery and red tape of margin plans, product line briefs, and seasonal calendars. cushioning and breathability traditionally pull against each other. terry cloth is what gives a sock its cushion, and terry also holds heat and moisture. courier's system backs these terry sections with a knit mesh and when manipulated the right way, so it allows air to move through the sock, they then dial the knit up or down to produce different sensations across the line. patents are filed on the tech, protecting that unique feeling and difficult construction.
from sketch to on foot sensation
HiFi, LoFi, AroFi
HiFi is the high-sensation end. it is thinner, so more of the ground comes back through the foot and into the shoe, but it isn't just a thin sleeve. small terry pods aptly named CourierPOD’s are mapped to specific zones, medial, lateral, dorsal and achilles, which gives a light layer of targeted cushion without taking away the racy, connected feel. the achilles pod is matt’s old injury showing up in the product years later. it's the kind of detail that only exists because the person who started the company needed it.
top of foot pods and bottom of foot pods, targeted cushion and lightweight feel
LoFi inverts the construction. a large surface area of terry for cushion, called CourierPOCKET’s, with breather ports built in so that the heat has somewhere to go. that is the problem it is built against: cushioned socks traditionally trap heat and moisture, and most of what goes wrong later in a long effort tends to start there.
the AroFi merino shares LoFi's technology at a lighter scale and leans on what the fiber does on its own. it uses Nuyarn® , a merino that is wrapped rather than spun on a spindle. Traditional spinning chokes the the natural fibers, so air can't pass through and moisture gets held. wrapping leaves it free to breathe and regulate. it is compressive and holds its shape rather than bagging out. matt wore one pair for four straight days at leadville pacing a friend through the hundred, ran 20k the next day in the same socks, and then wore them home.
a customer review on their site puts it better than a spec sheet would:
Love these socks. I admit to wearing merino socks for days without swapping. In the first week of owning my new Courier merino socks I've worn them for runs, walks and all day at the desk without switching them out. Give 'em a shake and put 'em back on. They fit great, don't retain odour and are comfy. Definitely won't be my last pair.
— christian, satisfied customer
the renaissance athlete
this courier positioning has a name. the renaissance athlete. this is the person with several strings to their bow, moving between sports without treating any one of them as an identity. most of the brand’s identity came from matt's wife, mattie. she helped the team of matt, tom, kate, terry the whole way but officially joined the company last. the idea of the renaissance athlete came out of her time living in vancouver. out in the city she was regularly meeting new zealanders who were casually, undramatically excellent at several things at once. matt's example is meeting someone for an afternoon trail run, asking what they did earlier, and hearing “oh, just went for a 60-mile ride,” with no fanfare attached to it.
matt grew up in new zealand where sport was broad by default. what struck him in the united states was how single-minded people are about one discipline. his argument for the alternative isn't really about performance. the more you do, the better you become as a person, and the lessons that stick tend to arrive two, four, ten hours into something hard.
going narrow with the product line has made the community deeper rather than smaller. kate handles customer email and says people respond to the multidisciplinary label more strongly than to anything else the brand says. the repeat purchase rate is high enough that matt watches first-time buyers specifically, because of how often they come back. his read of the running market is that most brands are pushing hard at trail, which is hot but still a small share of total run consumption, and that nobody is building across modes the way courier intends to.
five lanes
five co-founders is a lot and they know it. it works because each person owns a lane. matt is the extrovert, the idea guy, connector, marketer and the public face of the company. kate has ops and the business, and came in off a hydration company and a distribution business in new zealand, both winding down as courier ramped up. tom, kate's husband, british-born kiwi, competed for the uk at middle distance, and carries a ton of experience across the business of sport . A product designer or "product guru”. mattie does the marketing, brand strategy and brand positioning work.
they connect twice a week and the group chat runs all day. kate has been full-time since the start, matt went full-time about ten weeks ago, and everyone else still holds another job. that is a lifestyle and finances decision rather than a commitment one, and they are straightforward about it.
five lanes, converge to one vision for the renaissance athlete
manufacturing got the same unconventional treatment. rather than picking a factory and hoping, they ran an rfp with three at once, with detailed tech packs thanks to their industry expertise, to find out who could actually execute. matt's analogy is espresso. most of the world's sock machines are italian, and owning a la marzocco means nothing if you can't dial in the grinder. all three came back with noticeably different results off the same brief, and one of them stood clearly apart. even with highly specific instructions, getting the design executed was harder than anyone expected, and the factory that took it on committed to iterating until it worked.
how much everyone hated making them tells you you're on the right track, because no one has done it before.
— kate, co-founder
the plan is to keep going deeper into socks rather than sideways into apparel. plenty of sock brands expand outward quickly. courier keeps coming back to the size of the sock market and how little of it has been touched technically.
wholesale is this year's focus. they are in over 30 run/ride and outdoor specialty stores, which covers most of the leading retailers. renegade running was the store that took them on at the start and is still one of their best accounts. the first independent sales reps came on recently, which is where the next leg of growth is expected. the team is still approaching this next phase with a long term commitment, building an actual lifestyle brand, and not growth for a quick exit.
After years of building other people’s brands, we started our own—not for a quick exit, but to build something lasting
— matt, co-founder
all five had been in the corporate job long enough to be done with specific constraints that come with outside shareholders and bureaucracy.
hobbyists with an obsession over technical details sounds like a fit for our syndicate community
our take
the sock is one of the lowest priced investments in the kit and the only thing in contact with you the entire time, which is a strange combination for a category that has barely moved. what makes courier worth watching isn't the patent filing. it's that the question they started from came out of taping a leg for a feeling, not out of a gap in a category deck. five founders in five lanes, bootstrapped, not built to flip. we have the socks on foot now, ripped a 20 miler in the HiFis, experienced a comfortable weekend in the AroFis, and are excited to report back on the sensation that courier delivers over the long run.
check out the courier site and follow them on instagram at the links below.
Socks For Runners who Ride and Riders who Run | Courier – Courier Socks