#456 2013 · Bombas (Randy Goldberg, David Heath) · Apparel / social enterprise
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.
what everyone would do
Donate or design around the items donors already instinctively give -- coats, blankets, canned food -- the standard charitable giving pattern, and build a company or program that adds more of the same into an already well-supplied category.
what they saw
Goldberg and Heath saw that donor instinct and actual shelter need weren't the same thing, and that the gap between them was invisible unless you asked the shelters directly rather than picturing what someone without a home probably needs. Socks were underdonated not because they mattered less, but because nobody's charitable imagination reached for them the way it reached for a coat.
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.
why it works
Because socks wear out and get discarded constantly, with no durable substitute the way a coat or blanket can be reused for years, shelters faced a recurring, structural shortage that a one-time donation drive could never fix -- which meant a company built to supply that specific, continuously renewing gap had durable demand rather than a saturated market. The one-for-one purchase model turned an ordinary consumer transaction into the exact recurring donation the shelters had been asking for, so the business and the actual need stayed aligned rather than drifting toward whatever was easiest to market.
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.
where it breaks
The approach depends on there being a real, verifiable and specific unmet need to find by asking -- if the recipient population's actual gaps already match donor instinct, or if a company just claims to have found an overlooked need without confirming it, the entire differentiation collapses into the same crowded space as everyone else. It also requires the underlying product to be commercially viable at consumer prices; a genuinely important but low-margin or hard-to-brand recipient need might not sustain a business model even though the philanthropic case for filling it is just as strong as socks turned out to be.
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
- [3]The Toms of athletic socks is about to donate 60,000 pairs in one nightThe Manual, 2018themanual.com