181: Darn Tough Founder Ric Cabot | Double Down on Your Strengths

The Hard Way With Joe De Sena

Spartan Races

Self-improvement, Health & Fitness, Education

4.8 • 874 Ratings

🗓️ 6 February 2018

⏱️ 26 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Manufacturing socks in a small town in Vermont, especially in the 80s and 90s when most companies were sending this work offshore, is hardly your standard business plan. Still, as of 2016, Darn Tough Socks was a 40 million dollar business. The name "Darn Tough" is a brilliant pun. The socks, like the CEO, are resilient (carrying a lifetime guaranty,) and relentlessly and thoroughly vetted and improved to strengthen them further. When asked for business advice Ric's was simple "never, ever, give up." What he's found is that the hard way turned out to be the best way.

Lessons:

1.When things seem impossible, sometimes the answer is to double down on your strengths.

2.There is no such thing as negative feedback; it's all valuable information that can steer you towards improvement.

3.Doing things the hard way can reap its own rewards.

4.Success is holistic - making the extra effort to support the community pays back in loyalty, quality and branding. 

Links:

Darn Tough Socks https://darntough.com

Darn Tough Story https://darntough.com/pages/made-in-usa

Darn Tough Facebook https://www.facebook.com/DarnToughVermont/

Darn Tough Instagram https://www.instagram.com/darntoughvermont/

This episode is brought to you by Four Sigmatic. Join the mushroom coffee revolution and save 15% using promo code SPARTAN https://us.foursigmatic.com/?discount=spartan#

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CREDITS:

Producer – Marion Abrams, Madmotion, llc.

Hosts: Joe De Sena with Johnny Waite, Sefra Alexandra, and Col. Tim Nye.

Synopsis – Matt Baatz

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	This is Darn Tuff.
0:01.2	Darn Tuff is a company out of Vermont founded by Rick Cabot's dad.
0:05.8	We interviewed Rick Cabot.
0:07.2	This company's been around forever.
0:08.7	But here's the amazing thing.
0:10.1	They're American.
0:11.5	American made, and that hasn hasn't changed and they survived.
0:14.0	Somehow, every textile company in the world moves overseas,
0:18.0	these guys dug in further.
0:20.0	So for somebody out there watching and thinking about how can I survive these guys
0:24.8	figured out how to do it so watch this learn and we'll be back at the end to
0:30.2	talk more about this this this this episode of Spartan Up is brought to you by Four Sigmaic.
0:35.4	Join the mushroom coffee revolution at four Sigmaic.com slash Spartan.
0:41.1	We are here for Spartan Up Podcast in the sock capital of the world, Northfield, Vermont, where they make darn tough socks with Rick Cabot.
0:50.0	Joe, how are you?
0:51.0	You know, I've lived in Vermont, it's got to be 14 years now. I don't even know there was a sock capital of the world here in Vermont.
0:56.5	Well, we are, we are the self-proclaimed sock capital of the world. And it's, for us, it's not about size, it's about quality.
1:03.0	So we make the best socks in the world.
1:04.5	We've been knitting socks here in Northfield since 1978.
1:08.5	And Darn Tough is coming on about 14 years old.
1:11.5	A lot of people don't know this.
1:13.1	I studied textiles and apparel.
	...

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