How Socks Are Made
4 Steps to Make Great Socks
It's one of the most often-asked questions to the Ozone staff: How exactly do you make your socks? Not that this question is difficult to answer, but it's a lot more complex than can be explained in just a sentence or two. The mills that we partner with in Columbia, France and Japan produce garments for some of the finest brands worldwide, using age old techniques that many have left behind when it came to choosing efficiency over quality. There are several things to consider when making a great sock: here they are, step-by-step.
Great Socks Start with a Great Design
With a mission to embody “The Art of Socks”, a creative idea always comes first at Ozone. Our design team meets to discuss recent inspirations, drawing from travel, pop culture, museum visits and more. A designer then takes these ideas to the drawing board...literally. Multiple sketches with many color ways are made, eventually whittled down to a cohesive collection with a distinct color scheme.
Choose Quality Materials
In order to make a great sock, great quality materials must provide the foundation. The mills that we work with are small, family run and hold a commitment to using fair trade cotton. While many other sock-makers sew the garment and then press color into it (sort of like a computer printer for socks), our mills use cottons that have already been dyed, allowing for a much more colorful garment inside and out. Each facility also has a variety of other textiles for us to choose from: wools, nylons, lace...the list goes on. If we can dream sparkly lurex intertwined with comfortable cotton and silky nylon, they can make it!
Production in the Mill
Each facility has sets of sewing machines that utilize some of the most complex techniques in the industry, providing the utmost precision. Thread counts range from around 200 up to 220, meaning more potential for more detailed designs. In Japan, the highest end needle counts make the sophisticated stitches of our sheer socks possible, giving them a polished and refined finish. Our French mill is famous for its “pointed toe” technique, creating a more seamless garment that will last for ages without any sign of wear and tear.
Send Them Into Production
With a set of styles that fit together, we send finished designs to be converted into graphs that the sewing machines at the mill will be able to interpret to make our socks. These act as a sort of “map”, guiding the needles on where to stitch onto each garment. Samples of each style are produced, errors are corrected, and we send them into final production. From there, the socks arrive back into the States, and are then dispersed from our New York headquarters out into the rest of the country and the world!
~Ben LoPiccolo - Content Creator for Ozone Design