2020 Socked But Your Packaging Doesn't Have To

Imagine getting home after a crazy day, wearing your most annoying shoes. You have blisters all over your feet and all you want is to untie those laces, wash your feet with warm water, and put them up on the couch. That was 2020 for us. It SOCKED!

2020 was a hard year… for everyone. Our small but mighty team (as well as our clients) walked through unknown paths and had to reinvent along the way. What matters is we all made it, together. To celebrate the blisters, we decided to kickoff 2021 by shipping out much-deserved home office swag to all our friends and faithful clients. We wanted to make sure everyone continued to feel hipstery, sexy, or even business sporty in the new normal – whether wearing sweatpants (or no pants at all) while working from home.

We designed 3 different sock patterns and their corresponding packaging, guided by 3 simple rules:

• Make under 100 products, since several steps of production could not be outsourced due to the pandemic and would have to be individually accomplished by the loving hands of our team;
• Source eco-friendly and responsible materials, production methods and printing;
• Make people smile.

The core message was to make the best out of a bad situation and play a word pun with the fact that 2020 sucked so much that it was as painful as wearing really tight shoes. Through the packaging, we wanted to provide people with the feeling of untying those strangling laces and finding something warm and soft inside. And of course reinforce the message that we want to keep walking side-by-side with them.

We designed 3 different types of shoes, to match the different personality types of our clients and that we ourselves embody: business, urban and weirdo. The result was one dress shoe, one sneaker, and one sandal with hairy feet.

The packaging was printed sustainably with bio-ink on 100% recycled paper. Both the printing and the contour cutting were sourced from local businesses, in order to stimulate the local economy in these difficult times as well as reduce the carbon footprint of shipping.

They were designed to mimic actual shoes from all sides and have small differences between one another in order to bring character and believability to each shoe. For example: the soles have different designs on the bottom and sides and each shoe also has a different closure/lacing method.

In terms of production and considering that the reality in Germany is that non-essential businesses are closed, we did all of our prototyping in-house with the use of a Cricut plotter. Eyelets and aglets were applied individually by hand.

The response was amazing and people were really happy to have received such personalised and unique gifts. We definitely achieved our core goal of strengthening the relationship with our clients and reminding them that they can always count on us for creative solutions to complicated problems – even one as big as making people smile again after 2020.