This 39-year-old quit 80-hour consulting weeks to make underwear for his struggling family business. He credits ‘sweaty feet’ for record profits

When Lawson Glidden gets back from a hike in the woods around Ashland, N.H., he doesn’t always head home. Sometimes he heads to the sock department.

“If my sock doesn’t fit just right, then when I get back from my hike, I go to the sock department, and I check in on our QC boards and make sure that the foot is fitting correctly,” he told Fortune.

Glidden, 39, is president of Minus33, a maker of merino-wool base layers, underwear and socks, and the latest incarnation of a textile business his family has run in Ashland since 1916. He wears what he sells, more or less head to toe. “We make this polo, we make the underwear I’m wearing,” he said on a video call. “… We don’t make the pants or the shoes. That’s all we don’t make right now.”

He also has opinions about what he sells.

“They are the best socks on the planet,” Glidden said. “I say that because not only am I incentivized to say it and I believe it, but also because it’s true.”

The numbers he cites aren’t modest either. Since he joined the company in 2018, Glidden said, profits have roughly quadrupled, and revenue is up about 2.5 to three times. The company’s PR pitch to Fortune billed this year as one of its highest-profit years. Minus33 is privately held, and Fortune could not independently verify the figures.

That’s a long way from where the family stood two decades ago. At its peak in the 1990s, Glidden said, the family’s mill was a $50 million operation with about 300 employees. By around 2002 it was, in his words, “a zero-dollar, three-person company.”

Glidden tells the story of how it got back up — and of nearly everything else — at length. At the end of the interview, he made an offer: “If you ever want to talk again, I can talk for days.”

‘If you put moose on it’

When Glidden left tech consulting and came home in 2018, the first thing he did was buy sock machines and learn to program and run them. Minus33 started manufacturing in the U.S. in 2019. “I program and designed them all myself,” he said.

He thought socks were a solved problem. Then he got the machine.

“You’re like, wait a second, everybody else, they could have been making this good sock the whole time, and they just chose not to,” Glidden said. “I had the same sock-making machine as everybody else.”

There are a lot of ways to make a sock, he said. You can stuff it with synthetic material for durability. You can make it bigger, because a bigger sock looks meatier on the shelf and, he says, studies show it sells better. Or you can make it fit. His socks hug the foot “like a second skin that eliminates all the friction,” which lets him use less nylon and more wool, he said. He claims a pair has lasted the entire Appalachian Trail, worn every fourth day, without a hole.

The tradeoff is that they look smaller on the shelf, and plainer. Glidden is fine with that. The alternative, as he describes it, is some “business analyst sitting in New York, you know, saying, oh, if you put moose on it, it’ll be better. I don’t know.”

“We’re not as stylized or pretty as everybody else, but I think that’s fine,” he said. “I made them for myself. I’ve got sweaty feet, and I just kept making socks until I no longer got blisters and I was comfortable all day.”

His advice to other founders follows from that. “Use your product every single day,” he said. “If you use it every single day, then your customer’s........

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