The Williams family first talked about selling Catholic socks as a joke. But now they run a joy-driven small business called Sock Religious.
"People have this assumption that Catholicism is boring — and that is so far from the truth," shares co-founder Scott.
Video Transcript
The Williams family in Indianapolis, Indiana: Sock Religious is a Catholic Sock company founded by married duo Scott and Elisabeth Williams and baby Dominic.
Scott Williams: We didn't have this grand plan of making this happen. It started out kind of as a joke, like it'd be fun to have.
Elisabeth Williams: It was a joke, I thought. It was a joke.
Scott: You know, one day, Elisabeth and I, we were driving to Chicago and we started talking about socks.
Elisabeth (in the car with a baby in the backseat): Bye bye, baby.
Yeah, we have hot dog socks and hamburger socks and …
Scott: And then we thought: Well, what if we made saint socks and we were able to celebrate feast days with our socks rather than National Doughnut Day?
Elisabeth: And I thought this conversation stopped. "Okay, cool conversation” — just like you have in the car, and that's it.
(Speaking to a customer) It's our thing on the side, yeah — a family business.
Scott: Yeah, so we've got “Francis for Your Feet,” “JPII for your Shoe.”
Customer: Some rosary socks.
Elisabeth: “St. Thérèse of Li-Shoe.”
“Fri-sockey,” but that's a little … (laughs)
Scott: “Fri-sockey” — I haven't heard that one yet.
Elisabeth: I may have just made that up.
Customer: This is how you evangelize.
Scott: One thing we were doing when we were engaged was we decided that we wanted to have core values as a family, so we chose three things that were very important to us. And those three values are unity, charity, and joy. And I think that we accomplish a lot of that also through this business.
The ability to bring joy to people through socks is fun.
Customer: Oh, like St. Anthony — I get it.
Scott: I think people can have this assumption that Catholicism is boring, and that's so far from the truth. This is an opportunity to laugh, to smile, to giggle.
So, for example, like the St. Joseph sock — we usually put saint quotes on the bottom, but that was hard to do for St. Joseph because he was never quoted in the Bible, so there's just empty quotes with “—St. Joseph.”
Our Our Lady of Grace sock has a snake on the bottom of it, so you're helping Mary stomp on the serpent's head.
Things like that just bring so much joy to people's lives, and that's something that we want to do, is spark that joy.
