#403 2013 · Bombas (Randy Goldberg, David Heath) · Apparel / social enterpriseask-the-recipient
Bombas built a company around the one donation item shelters actually run out of
the problem
Donors give shelters coats and canned food; shelters actually run out of socks
background
Homeless shelters receive a steady stream of donated coats, blankets and canned food — the items donors instinctively think of when picturing what someone without a home needs most. But shelter staff consistently identified something different as their most requested and least-supplied item: socks, a low-cost, unglamorous item nobody thinks to donate but that wears out and gets discarded daily, with no durable substitute the way a coat or blanket can be reused indefinitely.
Simply donating more of what people already donate wouldn't fix a shortage that existed precisely because everyone's charitable instinct pointed at the same handful of items; the actual gap was invisible to anyone who wasn't asking the shelters themselves what they ran out of.
the move
Co-founders Randy Goldberg and David Heath built Bombas around that specific, overlooked gap: a sock company operating on a one-for-one model, donating a pair of socks — and later underwear and t-shirts — to homeless shelters and related charities for every item a customer purchased.
the payoff
By 2023, Bombas had generated more than $1.3 billion in lifetime retail sales and donated more than 100 million essential apparel items to people experiencing homelessness, becoming, among other milestones, the top-selling product in the history of Shark Tank, the show that gave the company early exposure.
what came after
Bombas is widely cited in social-enterprise and startup writing as a case study in finding a defensible business niche by listening directly to an underserved population's actual stated need rather than the need donors assumed existed, and the one-for-one donation structure it popularized has since been referenced by other apparel and consumer-goods companies pursuing similar giving models.
references
- [1]BombasWikipedia, 2025en.wikipedia.org
- [2]Bombas founders wanted to help the homeless — by giving them socksCNN Business, 2018cnn.com