The typical college student is stressed about what to major in, how they'll do on midterms, and whether they'll land that competitive internship. But as a college junior, Rob Starkman was facing a totally different animal. A Fortune five hundred company was threatening to sue him.
I just remember getting that lawsuit, my heart dropping, and so that was a major shock to the system. There's a lot of sleepless nights, Like I was terrified.
Rob believed that the company had sent the letter out to a few other small businesses and that many of them had folded under the pressure. But he wasn't going to back down so easily.
I was not doing that. Like, I had way too many chips in this, and I didn't want to give up. I'm like this twenty two year old kid, like going up against one of the biggest companies in the world.
Welcome to The Unshakables from Chase for Business and Ruby Studio from My Heart Media. I'm Ben Walter, CEO of Chase for Business.
And I'm Tanya Nebo, a lawyer and consultant for business own.
On the Unshakables, we're sharing the daring stories of small business owners facing their crisis points and telling the stories of how they got through it.
Okay, Ben, listen, I think you're really going to like this one. It really has it all. Lawsuits, attempted coups, explosions, and that's just the half of it.
Sounds dangerous and intriguing.
Let's hear it on today's episode Rockham Socks from Orlando, Florida. Rob Starkman has always been a bit of a late bloomer.
So I was six foot three leaving my freshman year of college, and then I entered my sophomore year of college six foot ten, so like literally over one summer, like all of my clothes didn't fit, all my shoes were out of style. It was very fast and furious. I guess I actually just started shaving like two years ago, so we're still growing here.
In two thousand and eight, he was a sophomore at the University of Central Florida and not totally sure what he wanted to do with his life. He tried out several different majors, but nothing really stuck. What did stick was his love for basketball, not that he had much of a choice.
I would say, like my heartbeat is a basketball dribble, because my whole family is involved in sports some way, somehow. My dad coach college basketball for twenty plus years. My sister played in college.
During his freshman year, he started working for the men's basketball team as a student manager. He would film and at a highlight reels, help out during practice, and manage the team's equipment. But there was a problem with UCFS gear. They had recently changed suppliers and now only had generic jerseys, shorts, and socks available for the players. So Rob took things into his own hands.
I remember literally taking track jackets so like an embroidery shop that was by a chicken coop in this little podunk town right next to us, because we just needed someone to put UCF on our merchandise.
All the generic gear was in black and white, but UCF's colors were black and gold. So Rob took matters into his own hands.
So I took it back to my mom's house and in her kitchen sing dip dyed the black and white sox to then come out and be black and gold. And so I'm like wearing socks that are accustomed to our school. Nobody else has them. They don't sell them on the market. That's where some of the players on the team wanted to know where I got him. From there, it kind of saw a little bit of an opportunity to fill a hole in the market. I guess.
Soon Rob was dip dying black and gold socks in his dorm room for all the players on the team, and everyone who saw them wanted to buy their own pair.
My entire dorman became this like incredibly intricate operation filled with hot water and rit dip dye that I was going to Michael's and Joe and Fabrics all around Orlando to get.
Now, to meet the number of orders he was getting, Rob had to buy blank socks in bulk. And by the time he hit his junior year, he was ready to grow beyond campus. So he put a pair of socks for sale online.
I put a pair of socks up on eBay, and I'm telling you, within five to fifteen minutes it sold, and it was you know, Australia, and then just from there it started to take off. It was probably like three to four weeks in where I was like, I'm going all in on this. I'm going to ride this until the wheels fall off.
Soon he decided his business needed a proper name, so.
I sat down in my dorm room and started writing ideas down for what the brand name should be. And it was like five or six names in before Rockham hit. The rock is a nickname for a basketball, to Rockham means to wear something, and so Rockham Socks was just like absolutely perfect, and I was like, that's it.
By just two weeks in, Rockham Socks was selling one hundred pairs a day, faster than he could even make them. In college became a bit of an afterthought.
I stopped going to basically every single class that I had, and my second semester in junior year, I basically failed everything.
Anything that wasn't related to Rockham Socks was over for Rob. He spent all day and night dying and packaging socks for the store.
It was like sixteen to eighteen hours a day over a stove making sure water's hot, pouring in the die. It was just NonStop, like steam everywhere, die stains all over the counter, and I remember having gone so hard on the stove that I actually blew up two of them in my apartment complex.
Tanya, I have to say it, Rob sounds like the worst roommate ever, Like could you live with this guy.
You mean, the guy who takes over the kitchen is dying socks all over the place, blows up the place twice, that guy Ben I.
Know, yeah, I think not.
So.
Rob's doing hundreds of sales only a couple of weeks into the business, and at this point he's just sewing on eBay. I mean, how's he going to keep growing this business?
Okay? So what he does is he actually moves his business from eBay to his own website, and then he started making socks in every imaginable like color combination. But yet he's still the only employee.
I'm like doing customer service, I'm doing shipping, I'm doing production, I'm doing procurement. And it was just like NonStop. You know, I'm trying to build this as if it's a much bigger brand than it actually is.
Even though Rob was all in on Rockham Socks, there was one thing he didn't give up. He was still working for the men's basketball team. In the weeks leading up to Black Friday, he was hardcore focused on his business and prepping for a rush of sales, but he still maintained his obligations to the team. He even worked at a basketball tournament in the Bahamas with the team on Thanksgiving.
We had made a ton of socks beforehand. We had gotten all of our socials ready and like we had just blown out of sales. That Black Friday night.
Rockham Socks had sold a thousand pairs in just one night.
I knew that this was a fork in the road moment. It was like first year. I'm like, I'm twenty one. I'm like, jeez, we did like a quarter of a million dollars in business. I was loving just the eighteen hour days of hustling and building a brand, and I knew that that was the last time I were stepped foot in a classroom.
Rob knew that he wanted to drop out of school to pursue Rock Them full time. So we made a plan for how to tell his mom.
Going to take my mom out for breakfast and I'm going to take her to an outside restaurant so that she won't cry in front of everybody. And I just told her. I was like, hey, ma, got this opportunity, I'm going to see it through. And she goes, You're dropping out of school and I was like I am, Yeah, I am, And She's just like I'm so disappointed in you.
Rob's parents didn't talk to him for the next four months. But by this point he had other problems. Copycat brands had started popping up and selling the same product. He knew he'd have to differentiate Rock them to survive, and he knew just how he'd do it.
I found out about how you can customize like T shirts, and so there's a process by which you can print out an image and then transfer it via heat onto a T shirt. And I was like, nobody's ever done this with socks before, so let's like try it out with socks.
Rob bought the image transfer machine and was now able to design all types of socks.
From there, we were able to expand beyond just dip dye colors now into actual designs onto socks. So we'd be able to go from instead of black and red, we might be able to put camouflage black and red with a logo on it.
Rockham Socks had another stroke of good fortune in twenty twelve. It was sneaker Mania. Streetwear had crossed over into the mainstream, helped along why celebrities with shoe lines like Lebron James and Kobe Bryant. Rockham started making socks to match each highly anticipated sneaker release, and.
That became so popular in the sneaker industry that we were on top of that world for two to three years. We'd go to all the conventions, people would be wearing our socks with their sneakers, and so all these kind of trends are converging at the exact perfect time that we're building this brand.
But it was at that moment that Rob's luck ran out.
That's where we get the big old letter saying that we're doing trademark infringement, and so that was a major shock to the system.
Rob had been using blank white sox made by a popular athletic brand from the start, but now this company was threatening to sue rock them if they didn't stop selling them. The company claimed that Rockham was selling their socks as if they were designed and officially licensed by the big brand.
At that time, there was a ton of like little copycat brands, and I would have to assume that they all got the same letter, because as soon as we got that, the competition stopped posting, they cut their websites out, they took their ball and went home. I was not doing that. I had way too many chips in this, and I didn't want to give up.
Rob found a lawyer to represent the company and respond to the letter. He was bleeding cash. It cost him fifty thousand dollars in fees just to retain the lawyer.
I'm like, this twenty two year old kid, like going up against one of the biggest companies in the world.
His lawyer put together an argument asserting that customization is not illegal. Fortunately for Rockham, there was already a case precedent involving a well known brand that had sued a customer for the same thing, and that big brand had lost the case.
We use that case study, and I believe they prevailed in saying the customization of an existing product that they bought at retail is not illegal. You can resell that as a service. And that is literally the thing that saved us. And I just remember the sigh of relief after like two months of not having received any other letters, that I felt like we were finally in the clear. There was such a David Versus Goliath moment that it doesn't even feel real.
At this point, Rob could now direct all of his attention back to building Rockham socks. But in early twenty thirteen, Rob realized that something about the blank socks he was using had changed. The DIPDI didn't develop the same way, and the designs and collars wouldn't transfer properly. It exposed a real vulnerability in his business.
I remember coming to this realization that like I'm building my house on someone else's land. To this day, like it's so vivid that I remember having this phone call of like making the decision that we're going to stop utilizing someone else's product and develop our own, or else we're eventually going to die.
So Rob and a small team worked with a sourcing company in New York to come up with the perfect prototype for a sock. Four months later, they'd perfected it. It was a better product with much better margins. Rockham socks continued to grow their reputation, especially in basketball. By Christmas of twenty fifteen, they had licenses with six colleges and could use their names, logos, and callers on Rockham socks.
That just became very, very popular, Like we put a mascot on a sock, just logos and crazy colors, and it was a different type of product that fans had never seen before that really opened up our aperture of what you can do as a business, and from there it was a dogfight to go and get every single other school.
Rob began to travel around the country meeting with schools. After landing licensing deals across the NCAA, Rob decided it was time for Rockham Socks to break into entertainment, and he knew just where to start. The WWE. Rob had landed a meeting with their licensing director. A longtime WWE fan, he had been to a WWE match in middle school and happened to be filmed during it.
I had purchased the WWE streaming network and paused it when I knew that. The cameraman went to me with a big old sign and I was like, this is me and I am a wrestling fan. You will never work with someone who is as passionate as I am about wrestling.
Robin his colleagues had a simple strategy for picking out licenses to pursue. Stick to what you know.
I think it's all about authenticity. We are huge fans of these licenses that we work with. It's so natural for us to say, like, hey, we know the fan, we know product that doesn't exist out there and we can expand your market, and we are going to treat it like the absolute biggest thing in our own lives.
By the end of twenty nineteen, Rockham Sox had licensing deals with MLS, WWE and Nickelodeon. They were growing and growing fast. He decided to hire a friend with the background and operations who could help scale the company.
He was very instrumental in trying to scale the business, like hiring a lot of people at the same time. There's like a two factions of the business happening and splitting off the original people that I started in my house with and like was with from the beginning, and then like all these new people that this guy brought on and hired and led by him, and I just felt the business getting out of my hands and getting away from me.
It was soon clear that Rob had hired the wrong person for the job.
It was always such a challenge to manage this man. He was very petulant, he was very emotional, and he would storm out of the office when any sort of argument would happen.
The employee's behavior quickly took a toll on Rob and his colleagues.
I was ready to give up the business. I was ready to like just completely give up. It was like a week before Christmas time that year, and I called my mom and I'm like, I don't want to do this anymore.
Around this time, Rob got a call from the vice president of Rockham Socks, his longtime friend Steve.
Steve calls me and he's like, this guy started another business and it's a sock business. My heart dropped. And not only was it one guy the founder of it, but as the co founder was our head artist.
From there, things only got worse.
We have the business name, they like started a Facebook page, and we see the people that are following it. It's like eight of our employees. We like basically devised this plan to like completely purge everybody the day we got back from the office, and so we let go of eighty percent of our staff.
Rob later found out that the head of operations had been spreading lies to the team so that he could poach employees from the company over to his own.
I just turned twenty seven, and at the time that was like the worst thing that ever happened in my life life, like backstabbed by close people that I thought I was giving opportunities to. Thought we were working on great things with I felt disrespected, My trust was violated, and from there I was looking around every corner and there was like months of me just lacking complete and utter confidence.
Rob was gutted, but over time he started to take responsibility for what had happened.
Now, looking back, I could clearly say that without that, the business would not be where it is today, because I look back on that moment and I'm like, I was so immature, twenty six years old trying to oversee twenty people. I was so immature in coming across as putting myself first before the business and before a team, or not taking things as seriously as I should have,
and like leadership wasn't even in my wheelhouse. And so after that, like having to look back and stomach the fact that you are absolutely the reason why this happened to you, that was tough. There was like a complete shot across the bout for an ego, and it completely brought me down to earth. And from there on, one hundred percent of my focus was put into being the best leader that I could be.
Having to take stock also forced Rob to grow and to change for the better. He got himself in the company back on its feet, and thanks to a new proprietary software, Rockham was now able to make products quickly and on demand. At the same time.
Disney Plus launches Star Wars the Mandalorian and Grogu becomes like a thing around the world and like it instantly catches fire.
Disneynew Grogu would be a hit, and they were right.
As soon as it launches, people are like clamoring for this product.
Most manufacturers needed significant lead time, not weeks but months to make their products, but thanks to their new software, Rockem could produce large quantities quickly.
And I remember going to the airport with nothing but five hundred pairs of Grogu socks in a Duffel bag. Get to the partner's facility in Anaheim, which is right around the block from Disneyland. I'm getting in his car and we get my Duffel bag out of the sky's car and I'm wheeling it into the back of a store and I'm like a child, you know, I'm like pointing people out wearing them. I'm following them around taking photos of them. I bought pairs off the shelf, so
I have a receipt. It's an unmatched feeling that I have never had before and just such a high for me.
After that, Rockham continued to make two to three thousand pairs of Grogu socks a day. It also opened doors to other licensing collaborations. Today, Rockham Socks makes twenty thousand pairs of socks a day. They have licensing deals with partners like the NCAA, the NBA, the NFL, Star Wars, Marvel, Warner Brothers, and Yes, Disney. And that's just naming a few. They employ thirty full time employees and have even expanded their product line beyond socks.
You know, we're a scrappy upstart company. We have zero investors and the sky as the limit for us and our team. The demand keeps on rising, the products keep on getting better, and we keep on finding ways to deliver value across the entire chain that we're work in.
Tanya, What a cool business. What a great story?
Yeah, awesome story.
You know, if you start right at the beginning, that is the ultimate bootstrap story if I've ever heard one. I mean, he started with nothing, He built with virtually nothing. Now he had a business that didn't require a lot of capital, but he just kept putting money in putting the proceeds of what little he had back in and not taking any outside money and building a business of that size. That's quite a feat.
It's a tremendous feat. It's such a young age for him to know to continue just to reinvest in the business and the sacrifices that he made in doing so. That's great entrepreneurship there.
You know, you have to decide what you're going to lead with, and he led with great product. He knew what he wanted to make. He made them well. He found something that there was demand for and he made a great product that people wanted.
Yeah, and it was also a passion focused product, right, it was in his background.
The other thing that struck me was he had to be pretty fearless to drop out of school. Obviously his parents weren't too happy about that. To get a lawsuit from a major brand that everyone's heard of, and to just keep going, Yeah, that guy's got grit.
And the strength to stand up and be able to say, you know, we aren't doing anything wrong. We're just going to find a different way to do this. But we're not going to be bullied out of business because of who we're facing. I think that's huge. That took a lot of guts right there.
Yeah, And he characterized it, particularly at the end, about making hard decisions, and I think that is a story in entrepreneurship that is too often underplayed. Ultimately, when you're the boss and every buck stops with you, you have to make really hard decisions. He talked about hiring and firing friends. He talked about, you know, having to give really devastating news to his parents about his decision about
at school. You have to make some really tough calls that are tough, emotionally tough from a business standpoint, and they're not obvious decisions. They're difficult. You just can't underplay what that means in terms of the resilience that a business owner has to show.
Yeah, I think the theme of courage is woven well throughout his story, and he even had to make some tough relational decisions even from the beginning. He had to make some what I would say are some courageous choices that I mean they ended up paying off, of course, but he had to do that all throughout.
The Other thing that inspired me listening to him is how much he has become a self aware learner through his mistakes. If you think about particularly what happened with his employees and what happened with him sort of in many ways, almost losing his business to one employee and a subset of employees. He didn't just do the hard thing, but he's thought really hard about how to make sure that never happens again, how to build in a culture.
My view is he acknowledged that he had some things wrong that allowed that to have and he's not about to let that happen again.
He was great at staying the course, and he was also great at taking responsibility. You noticed that throughout his story he said, you know it was on me, I take responsibility for this that happened, or I take responsibility for bellowing people to come in and infiltrate the way that they did, and then used each of these challenges to just further elevate the company and where it was going. I think that's tremendous.
What he learned is, you know, there was that book what got you here Won't get you there? And I think what made him really good in the early days, which was being great at identifying a product, being great at getting that product out at amplifying the marketing around that product wasn't going to be what was going to make him successful as he started to scale the business. And I think he was self aware of that, and I mean he learned it in a tough way, but he learned it.
I think it's important for small business owners to look at how their organization is and the communication lines there and ensure that those are open somehow.
I agree. I mean that's not just for small business owners. That's fair, that's what that's quality relationships and quality organizations are based on trust, and ultimately trust is the foundation of all of that. And if there isn't trust, then the rest of it is just commentary, to be honest. Yeah, if you've had to make that many hard decisions and you can come out of it on the other side feeling like you've learned and you've grown and you're ready
for the next step, that's a real lesson and resilience. Yeah.
I think he did such a great job with that, And to be so young in making these tough decisions and taking responsibility for his decisions, all these just kind of an amazing foundation for what's to come with this company. But it's a great lesson for other people to see as well.
Tanya, I want to go to the advice that Rob shared with us because it had to do with his core values and one in particular that I think is relevant for every small business owner.
One of the ones that I was thinking about today is how disciplined do you have to be as a leader, So being one hundred percent disciplined across the board, making sure that things are done correctly to your standard, but working with your team to get them to a point where they're doing that kind of work satisfactory. And so starting with that mindset that people around you are willing to work hard and willing to do the right thing
as long as you can teach them. It's all those things that you have to come to work every single day one hundred percent ready to lead your squad.
Thanks so much for listening to The Unshakables. If you like this episode, please rate and review it. It'll help our sho'll find more listeners. I'm Tanya Nebo and this is The Unshakables from Chase for Business and Ruby Studio from iHeartMedia. On the next episode of The Unshakables, makeup artist and influencer Desi Perkins never set out to start a sunglasses company, but after a brand partnership turns sour, she decided to severtize and start a company of her own.
The Unshakables is a production of Ruby Studio from iHeartMedia