There have been hundreds of thousands of workers in the sports industry affected by the COVID-19 shutdown, a group that includes everyone from arena staff to restaurants and retailers.
One small local company that was founded in my neighborhood in Toronto’s east end is in that group.Major League Socks created by Jake Mednick and Tom McCole four years ago, has sold hundreds of thousands of socks branded with hockey players’ faces. If you’re a Leafs fan, you’re probably familiar with their original idea, Babsocks, which were dedicated to then-Leafs coach Mike Babcock.
After Babsocks took off — selling more than 400,000 pairs since their launch in the fall of 2015 — Mednick and McCole went on to partner with the NHL Alumni Association and later the NHLPA to add nearly 100 more faces to socks and get them into team stores across North America.
They also have an agreement to begin selling socks with Major League Baseball players on them that is on hold until the baseball season resumes.
Their quirky little idea has become big business. Or at least it was, until the shutdown.
“We were finally starting to build up some traction in markets outside of Toronto, especially in the U.S., which is really exciting,” Mednick said of the momentum the business had. “Honestly, the timing couldn’t have been worse.”
Full disclosure: I’ve gotten to know Jake and Tom fairly well the last few years, after first writing about them in the Globe and Mail back in 2016. I see them around the neighbourhood, and we play beer league hockey once in a while. It’s been great to see them turn into a local success story.
The reason I wanted to write about them was twofold.
One, they’re representative of the wide array of businesses and people in sports affected by the shutdown. Their business has basically been decimated the past few weeks, with most retailers cancelling all orders. Major League Socks has raised more than $150,000 for mental-health charities since the company was founded, in part thanks to Babcock’s endorsement, and all of that work is on hold now that revenues have evaporated.
The other thing that is unique about their story is the Babsocks themselves, something I had intended to write about before the shutdown. When Babcock was let go by the Leafs back in November, the company still had a huge inventory of socks bearing the coach’s likeness — 13,000 pairs to be precise. Boxes and boxes, to the chagrin of Jake’s parents, whose basement is filled with them.
So, for the past four and a half months, they’ve been wondering what exactly to do with 13,000 socks that have an unemployed NHL coach’s face on them.
“Well, I never have to buy another pair of socks again,” Mednick said when we connected the other day. “At least that’s crossed off the balance sheet in the future, you know?”
“Maybe, you know, Seattle could be blue?” McCole added, joking that the new franchise might be where Babcock ends up.
The pair are hopeful that Babcock will be rehired somewhere, and the momentum behind the brand will come back. Realistically, however, that may not happen. And that’s a lot of socks.
The company recently donated 1,000 pairs of Babsocks to one charity, Souls for Socks Canada which provides the homeless with footwear. According to their website, socks are “the most needed but least donated item of clothing to homeless shelters” and more than “20 percent of medical problems experienced by homeless people are related to foot care.”
The donation means Major League Socks still has 12,000 Babsocks to somehow dispose of, something they’re willing to take suggestions from our readers on. Unless Babcock signs on with another NHL team in the near future, it’s unlikely they will be able to sell them — only 150 pairs have been purchased in the past five months.
Some of the controversy around Babcock after the Leafs let him go damaged his reputation with hockey fans, too. While he arrived in Toronto hailed as the best coach in the game and the team steadily improved in his first two seasons,he was left under a cloud of negative stories related to the way he treated his players.
Despite losing his job and leaving the city, Babcock made the four-hour drive from Michigan to coach the Midget AAA Elgin-Middlesex Chiefs in January at Chesswood Arena. The practice was vintage Babcock, apparently, with plenty of preparation and tutoring turned into an hour-long grind on the ice.
“He put everything into it,” Mednick said. “He did a great job.”
Babcock also spent time with the team’s captain, Eric Smith, and spoke with his parents, who had been devastated by a recent suicide in the family.
“The entire community rallied to make sure that they won this practice with Babcock,” McCole explained. “I know that he got a hold of the parents that lost their son and had a private conversation with them. He’s always been so good to us. It’s awesome he kept his word.”
“With the help Babcock, we’ve done a lot of good charity work,” Mednick said. “So it’s nice as the socks can continue in that vein.”
Mednick and McCole hope that Babcock will coach again in the NHL — and not just for the sake of their company. They saw a lot of good in the man in the years they spent turning his face into a sock empire, and Babcock never asked for anything in return.
It’s Babcock’s charitable spirit, they said, that they hope to carry on even with business ground to a halt these past few weeks. Major League Socks is working on another initiative that will be announced soon that will support front-line health-care workers fighting COVID-19 in hospitals around the world.
Their goal is to create a line of socks with doctors, nurses, and other medical staff on them and donate 100 percent of the proceeds to helping them combat the pandemic.
“We usually celebrate hockey heroes on our socks, but there are some more important heroes to celebrate right now,” Mednick said. “That’s the goal of the program.”
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