The most noticeable thing about Michael isn’t his Great Lakes Dad T-shirt.
It’s not his salt-and-pepper hair, nor his toothy grin.
It’s that he is a sock.
Made in the likeness of Michael McGarry ’96, the sock puppet couldn’t be more apropos. As the owner of GoBros, an online sock retailer, McGarry lives and breathes the footwear accessory. So, it makes sense that when the company redesigned their “about us” webpage, typical headshots were replaced with puppetshots.
That taste for fun is evident in the Minneapolis-based company, which values flexible working arrangements (“We’ve relied on a lot of mothers who want to work that 9 to 3 shift.”) and its vacation policy: “I’m a big believer of work/life balance,” McGarry says, “and I’ve tried to have that, too, for staff here.” The company culture is, in part, what makes the decade-old business successful in a vast e-commerce market.
McGarry bought GoBros (then Goldman Brothers) in 2010. “I didn’t even go through a broker, I just called the business out of the blue,” he remembers. At the time, it was a retail store on Long Island with a negligible internet presence. Wanting to move into the e-commerce space, the Colgate economics major partnered with sister-in-law Katie Frank and focused the new venture on socks, a commodity nearly every consumer needs. Together, they’ve expanded their sock empire to include more than 30 brands.
Running and hiking socks are the website’s bread and butter, McGarry says. The company’s best-selling pair is the Hidden Comfort by Balega, a running- focused brand. Then there’s Darn Tough’s Light Hiker, for more trail-focused activities. Around the holidays, novelty Stance pairs edge up, with quirky designs featuring NBA star Steph Curry and scenes from National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation. “The last two years of COVID, we’ve grown, and a lot of that’s because people are home and they’re being active outside,” he says.
McGarry entered the world of NYC investment banking after graduation (“I loved getting in and seeing how these companies worked”), but when his wife, Rachel (Kordonowy) ’95 McGarry, received a grant to study art history in Rome, he paused his career to try his hand at writing location-based guidebooks. “I had a little business selling those books and that morphed into a foodie newsletter business,” McGarry recalls. When that business eventually fizzled out, he took with him an important lesson: “I knew I loved running my own business.”
Though he’s the CEO of GoBros, McGarry still manages two brand accounts while running the business. At the time of writing, he was buying stock for the fall, choosing more than 300,000 pairs of socks to feature on the website. The pandemic has made the process more front-loaded, he says, with fewer order changes allowed by manufacturers. Day to day, he’s “trying to make this as good a workplace as possible during a difficult time,” by ensuring the company is fully staffed to eliminate burnout. But, at the end of the day, as with any small company, it’s all hands on deck. Sometimes he can be found packing orders or fixing a bum printer.
“We’re very busy for about four months a year,” McGarry says. “But when it’s not as busy, I do try to get out and about and live the Be Great Outdoors motto.”