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What if you never lost a sock again?
You’re standing in front of the washing machine, holding a lonely sock in one hand and an unshakeable feeling of déjà vu in the other. The mystery of the missing sock is global, generational, and frustratingly mundane. But in Kochi, someone decided it wasn’t funny anymore, or rather, that it could be both funny and fixable.
Enter Feet Picks, a socks brand with a name cheeky enough to make you pause, and a product innovation smart enough to make you stay.
From passion project to patent chase
When Jyothika Mary, a twenty-something St. Xavier’s Mumbai alumna and marketer with stints at boAt and Eastea, first joked about launching a socks brand called Feet Picks, she didn’t know the punchline would end with a pending patent.
“I bought the domain that very night,” she recalls. No product yet. No designs. Just a name and a hunch.
Feet Picks didn’t start as a startup. It started as an itch to explore branding, play with design, and learn about consumer behaviour firsthand. But somewhere between Pinterest boards, product iterations, and sock samples from five different vendors, the hobby hardened into a hypothesis: If everyone loses socks, what if we just solved that?
The solution? A deceptively simple mechanism called SockLock, rust-free, imported buttons seamlessly built into the brand tag, secure without compromising aesthetics or comfort. The result: socks stay coupled, survive the wash, and you stop playing hide and seek with your laundry.
We kept asking ourselves, why isn’t every sock built this way?
Jyothika’s response? She’s patenting it. Herself. Without a lawyer, just GPT-generated drafts and stubborn resolve.
Two lawyers told me not to bother. So I did it myself
Here’s how that path looks:
| Step | Action |
| Domain blocked | Night one |
| Vendor scouted | 5 tries, 1.5 years |
| SockLock stitched | Found a custom unit in Kochi |
| Patent filed | Solo, ChatGPT helped |
| Launch site built | In a week! |
The hustle behind the gimmick
It’s easy to chuckle at the name. It’s harder to dismiss the grind that got it here.
Feet Picks isn’t dropshipping quirky socks. It’s designing them from scratch. Every button placement, every thread count, every colour code was debated, tested, and tweaked. “I even learned terms like 14 stitches per inch,” Jyothika says. “Stuff I never thought I’d care about.”
What started in Delhi’s factories and Bangalore’s consultancy circles eventually found home turf in Kochi, where she stitched together her own supply chain, literally. Control, proximity, and trial-and-error trumped shortcuts. The SockLock mechanism, now trademarked and inching toward patent protection, is stitched separately at a local unit she personally oversees.
This is not some overnight D2C story. It’s a year and a half of micro-decisions: killing designs that looked good but didn’t feel right, turning down vendors with high MOQs, redoing buttons until they clicked just right. Even her designer, Gautam, is on sweat equity, not salary. Everyone has skin in the game.
Feet Picks’ launch strategy isn’t blitz-scaling. It’s more like controlled chaos:
- 23 original designs, spread across buyer archetypes
- Performance marketing via a shared investor team
- Visibility-first listing on marketplaces like Amazon and Myntra
- Quick commerce experiment with plain SockLock pairs for Blinkit and Zepto
- Impulse-buy offline model with sneaker stores as retail touchpoints
We are going to be the chewing gum at the sneaker store checkout.
That’s how Jyothika describes her shelf strategy. If you just spent ₹30,000 on sneakers, a ₹300 sock feels like a no-brainer.
And if the SockLock becomes the new default? That’s not a quirk. That’s a moat.
Start small, think weird, stay sharp
Feet Picks isn’t trying to win the apparel war overnight. But it is trying to shift the baseline. If you can normalise something as niche as a button on a sock, you’ve created space for the next idea to follow.
Jyothika already knows she won’t stop at socks. Boxers and loungewear are on the radar. Not because she wants to scale, but because the idea of fun-functional design deserves a playground.
It started as a joke, became a project, and now it feels like a responsibility.
Most startups chase growth. Some chase relevance. The best ones? They chase problems no one else thinks are worth solving.
Feet Picks didn’t reinvent the wheel. They just snapped two socks together.
In the podcast below, Jyothika shares her journey from marketer to entrepreneur, turning a lighthearted joke about socks into Feet Picks, a brand now on its way to a patent. Her story reflects the creativity and boldness needed to turn an offbeat idea into a serious business.
Feet Picks is featured in The First Brick series. The series highlights promising early-stage companies.
What are your thoughts on Feet Picks by Jyothika? Tell us in the comments below.
Did you read our last week’s article on Vriksha Essentials, a zero-synthetic skincare brand by Mythreyee Venkatesh? Read it here.
