Sock Shop was one of the great success stories of the 80s. Many of us remember Sock Shop founder Sophie Mirman and her famous stripy toe socks. Her company was floated on the stock market in the 1987, but nearly 20 years later, after a disastrous period of poor sales, went into receivership for the third time in its history.
One of the best known high street names became one of the best known retail flops. So when the Sock Shop brand was bought out and redeveloped in 2006 as an on-line store, the new owners, Osan Ltd, were gambling on the hunch that shoppers would still be loyal to the Sock Shop brand. It was a gamble that would pay off.

When we think of socks, many of us still think of Sock Shop: so product and retailer are still closely inter-twined. The new owners realised that Sock Shop needed to revert to what it once did best: to sell socks, socks and more socks. Focusing on a wide range of core products was to breathe life into the phoenix company.
 
And the phoenix had first to take flight on-line.

Sock Shop had used up its nine lives. Its old customers may prove unforgiving. The website had to work faultlessly and it had to be capable of displaying a vast range of socks and hosiery.

Chapter Eight was charged with delivering a website with no margin for operating error, backed by peerless customer service. (After all, for e-tailers, downtime can spell disaster.)

In May 2006, Chapter Eight brought Sock Shop back to UK shoppers. The sophisticated stock control software built into C8TM, the website management software, provided full stock control facilities – including supply chain integration.,

Sockshop.co.uk includes despatch management, order management, payment integration with DataCash (including fraud screening and 3D Secure features).

In 2008, the website took careful note of usability testing done with the help of market research, to record how Sock Shop’s website visitors react to the website. The results, filmed and analysed, enabled Chapter Eight to fine-tune the page layouts.

Two versions of the website were shown to those being filmed on separate days, in order to determine which version produced the quickest route to purchase. The usability testing enabled the web designers to create buttons for each sock brand, after it was shown that shoppers would seek out known sock brands within the website. This resulted in the Sock Shop website that we see today – a brand-led homepage.

“As an e-tailer, Sock Shop can react to new trends, so the customer always finds something fresh and exciting. We are able to watch exactly where on the page shoppers and landing which, in turn, enable us to maximise effective webpage design,” explains Mikhel Ruia, Director of Marketing, Sock Shop.
 
“E-tail IS an exact science, unlike high street retail. You can’t ask a queue of customers in a shop why they’ve chosen a particular product in your shop but with sophisticated web analytics, you can see how a shopper moves from area to area on line and really get to understand what leads them to the checkout. Chapter Eight’s web analytics and website management software have afforded Sock Shop a considerable advantage over other on-line competitors,” adds Mikhel.