EC HH Manufacturing In America: Are American Jobs Worth $30 Socks?

My younger daughter doesn’t conform to, well, much of anything. As a very young girl, she insisted on doing her own hair. She liked pony tails – lots of them – but as a four or five-year-old, she didn’t have much skill at getting them right. This meant that she often had 11 or 12 fountains of blonde hair sticking out all over her head. She was very proud.

Much to her dismay, in the sixth grade we enrolled her in a private school that requires a uniform. The queen of individual expression met the tyranny of “The Man,” but she wasn’t about to be deterred. She found her outlet inside her shoes. Every day she insisted on wearing rule-breaking colored socks, and they could not match.

Today she is a senior at the same school, still wearing colored socks that don’t vaguely resemble each other.

I know she’s breaking the rules. I know she’s staging her one-woman protest. But she also might be doing something else – supporting manufacturing in America, one foot at a time. While that sounds like a noble effort, should she?

There’s a woman in Ft. Payne, AL whose companies make the kind of socks my daughter wears. Her name is Gina Locklear, and her two companies, Zkano and Little River Sock Mill, make socks only using U.S. goods and labor. There’s just one problem.

The socks cost $13 to $30 per pair.

Note, my daughter does not wear this brand.

The New York Times recently covered this in an article in which they dubbed Mrs. Locklear the “Sock Queen.” Her family started producing typical athletic socks in Ft. Payne, AL in the 1990s. Business was pretty good until overseas manufacturers undercut their prices. By the time of the financial crisis, the big box orders had evaporated.

Despite the industry’s decline, Mrs. Locklear approached her parents in 2007 saying she wanted to make socks.

To be sure, she wasn’t interested in athletic socks, or the tube socks you get in a six-pack at Walmart. She wanted to make specialty socks of many colors and patterns out of organic cotton and dye, all sourced in the U.S.