Shoddysocks began with a question:

How do we make just the clothes we need — and make them as well as possible — with the planet in mind?

After decades designing high-performance clothing for global brands and elite athletes, Piers Thomas has worked inside a vast global industry built on too much waste, too much consumption and too many assumptions.

Shoddysocks is his project to demonstrate that there is another way to make clothing — combining the best ideas from the past with modern knitting technology to build a more viable, future‑proof system for product creation.

Looking for a starting point, he turned to one of Britain’s oldest textile innovations: shoddy — the Yorkshire process of recovering wool fibres from textile waste and spinning them back into new yarn.

Drawing on his experience as a holistic systems designer, alongside decades working with technical textiles, he set out to bring that thinking to something essential — an everyday item of clothing.

So we make socks.
And only socks.

Our yarn is spun in Yorkshire from recovered wool fibre.
Our socks are knitted in England within a deliberately local supply chain.

Each pair is designed to be worn hard and kept in circulation for as long as possible.

No greenwash.
No seasonal churn.

Just the belief that if we are going to keep making clothing, we should learn to make it properly — from what we already have, and as close to home as possible.