The unique store was formerly located in downtown Conover, but Cooke saw an opportunity to move back to her hometown of Newton. Cooke said that she remembers shopping in downtown Newton when she was a child and is excited to be a part of the downtown square.

She has operated Badas Boutique for 11 years and hand-makes the items sold in the store. Cooke specializes in custom-made children’s clothing, purses, aprons, draperies, doll clothing, and more – anything that is sewn.

Store hours are Wednesday through Friday from 10:00 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. and Saturday from 10:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m.

Cooke’s daughter, Amanda Osborne, is also planning to open “Mandy Loo’s” beside her mother’s store in early April, offering art lessons and other fun activities for children.

Badas Boutique is located at 24A East 1st Street.

For more information, call (828) 962-7718, send an email to badasboutique101@yahoo.com, or visit their Facebook page at www.facebook.com/pages/Badas-Boutique/306570296041.

Maybe you have a new business idea that you’d like to explore. Where do you start? Hickory resident David Washco would tell you to start with the Edison Competition. The Edison Competition is a contest sponsored by the Catawba County Chamber of Commerce in which judges evaluate business plans and presentations to identify the best local business ideas. Washco was the Competition’s first winner last year for his business idea GoPriceDrive.com, a website based car buying solution that matches “ready to purchase” car buyers with auto-retailers in a secure and confidential manner, shifting the feelings of power and control to the car buyer.

For Washco the $5000 first prize that he received this past September was nice, but the experience he received was the real value. “There are two ways to climb a tree, limb by limb or by sitting on an acorn,” said Washco. “The Edison Project allowed me to climb the tree by helping me map out a plan that I’ve been able to follow.”

Starting a business is something David knows about. He formed Washco Consulting in 2008 after a successful sales career to help companies adopt and learn best practices. “It wasn’t the best time to start a company,” remembers Washco, but he secured several key customers and has seen his business grow. Shortly afterward David’s wife Amy started Pink Penguin Solutions, a marketing and advertising firm that often collaborates with Washco Consulting. “We make a great husband-wife team,” says David.

Amy and David have made their home in Hickory since 2004 and now have two daughters. Why Hickory? “It’s been great for us,” says Washco. “Hickory has a strong cultural understanding of family time and work time, and it has so many advantages for us.”

So what is next for David’s award-winning business? He’s building a framework for his web site which will be ready in March. “The framework will go a long way to showing dealerships how this can work for them, as well as for the car buyers.” When he looks into the future, he sees a business that could grow and add jobs to the Hickory workforce.

When he looks back to his Edison Project experience, what made the biggest impression was the support he received from the competition’s advisors. “By far, the mentorship was the best part of the program,” said David. “If you have someone who has walked the path before you it’s the strongest foundation you can have to help you accomplish your goals.” And ultimately David wants to serve in that role. “I have such an appreciation to those who have contributed to my success,” says David. “I want to give back. The talent is here in Hickory. There is a track record for success here, just look at companies like Commscope and Corning. We will keep it going!”

Plans are currently underway for the 2012 edition of the Edison Project. Check back for updates, or visit the Catawba County Chamber web site for more information.

Speakers this year include: Scott Millar, President of the Catawba County Economic Development Corporation; Michael Brown, an economist with Wells Fargo in Charlotte; Lew Ebert, President of the NC State Chamber; Taylor Dellinger, Data Analyst with Western Piedmont Council of Governments and Alan Jackson, The Jackson Group and Chairman of the City of Hickory’s Small Business Development Task Force. Moore Hallmark with the US Chamber office in Atlanta will also be in attendance for Q&A only.

Major items for discussion include the local economic development outlook for the county; a look at our national and world economies; what affect does the 2010 census data tell us about our local economic forecast and potential planning strategies that our county needs to address; what legislation is proposed in the short session in Raleigh and in Washington that will impact business; and what plans are there for new entrepreneurial development opportunities for new and existing small businesses.

Klingspor’s Woodworking Shop offers the highest quality sanding products, woodworking tools and supplies for the professional and hobbyist. We specialize in sanding products and our sandpaper selection is one of, if not the largest available on the web.

The February Meeting of Western Piedmont Woodcrafters

“Repurposed” Wooden Furniture is the topic of the February 25th Woodcrafters Meeting

How to make wooden furniture from reclaimed lumber will be described by a professional furniture maker at the February 25th meeting of the Western Piedmont Woodcrafters. The meeting, to begin at 9:30 a. m., will be held at Klingpor’s Woodworking Shop in Hickory and is open to anyone with an interest in woodworking.

Conducting the meeting will be Gabriel Garnto of Taylorsville, who, along with his wife Athena, operates the Blue Ridge Woodworking Company. They specialize in the construction and sale of tables, desks, and other furniture pieces made from reclaimed wood. Most of their sales are through the internet.

Mr. Garnto has been a life-long woodworker and began his own business two years ago. He will describe his sources for used wood and will deal with the many problems of reclaiming wood, using it in construction of furniture pieces, and the finishing processes.

The meeting will also include “Show and Tell” in which individual members show and discuss woodworking projects they have brought in. A raffle of woodworking items will be held at intermission.

The Woodcrafters Club is made up of hobbyist and professional woodworkers of all skill levels. The club meets once each month to hear speakers and to see demonstrations of woodworking equipment, projects, and techniques. Klingspor’s Woodworking Shop is located between Route 70 and Tate Boulevard at 856 21st Street Drive SE in Hickory. Further information can be obtained from the club’s web site at www.wpwoodcrafters.org.

Photography by Garry E. Hodges

Anne Abernethy Wepner was honored as a 2011 Main Street Champion at the North Carolina Main Street Annual Awards program in Clayton on Jan. 26. Wepner was selected by the Downtown Newton Development Association (DNDA) for this special recognition in appreciation of her exceptional contributions to the downtown revitalization process.

Along with Champions from 30 other communities, Wepner received a certificate commemorating this designation, presented by N.C. Secretary of Commerce J. Keith Crisco, Deputy Secretary Dale Carroll, Assistant Secretary for Community Development Henry C. McKoy Jr., and Urban Development Director Liz Parham.

Each of the state’s active Main Street programs is given the opportunity annually to recognize a local Main Street Champion. The dedication and hard work of countless volunteers is required to make a local Main Street program successful, and the Main Street Champion designation acknowledges the extraordinary efforts of those persons who have played pivotal roles in the revitalization of their downtowns.

“A Main Street Champion is the innovative entrepreneur who is bringing fresh ideas to downtown; the reliable volunteer who can be found tending a barbeque cooker at 4:30 a.m. in preparation for a downtown special event; the creative building owner who takes great care to ensure that renovations respect the architectural and historical significance of the structure; or the city council member who has worked diligently to preserve and protect the unique, authentic assets of the downtown she calls home,” Parham said. “Whether volunteers, business or property owners, corporate citizens, civic leaders, municipal employees, or public officials, Main Street Champions are the stewards of downtown, who go the extra mile to restore vibrancy and vitality to the hearts of the communities they love.”

In recommending Wepner for this honor, the Downtown Newton Development Association offered the following:

Following in the footsteps of her father and grandfather, who both operated businesses there, Anne Abernethy Wepner continues to maintain a family presence in downtown Newton.

Anne has renovated three downtown buildings, the first of which is now home to the business she operates with her husband, Tim. With a partner, Anne next purchased and up-fitted a former restaurant building that currently houses the offices of Classic Home Renovations and the showroom for Fixtures & More, a residential lighting business operated by Anne and her children. With the growth of Fixtures & More, additional warehouse space was required, so Tim Wepner purchased a building across the street. Following renovations, the remodeled first floor contains offices, and the basement is used as warehouse space.

Anne Abernethy Wepner is truly invested in her downtown, and the Downtown Newton Development Association is proud to recognize her as a 2011 North Carolina Main Street Champion.

With this honor, Wepner joins a special group of 11 Main Street Champions recognized by the Downtown Newton Development Association (DNDA) to have made exceptional contributions to the vitality of downtown Newton. Wepner said that her plans for downtown Newton are not finished. She recently purchased the downtown store building that housed her grandfather’s Abernethy Hardware business and is looking forward to getting that building back into the mainstream of downtown activity.

Main Street is a downtown revitalization program for smaller towns based on economic development within the context of historic preservation. The North Carolina Main Street program, which provides technical assistance to its communities, is part of the Urban Development division in the Department of Commerce’s Division of Community Development.

In 1980, North Carolina was one of six original states, selected from 38 that applied, to launch the work of the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s National Main Street Center. The North Carolina Main Street program began with five participating cities – New Bern, Salisbury, Shelby, Tarboro, and Washington – in September 1980 and has since grown to include 61 communities across the state. The City of Newton was designated a Main Street community in 1990. The Downtown Newton Development Association follows the Main Street four-point program for downtown revitalization within the context of historic preservation. The mission of the Downtown Newton Development Association is to foster growth and redevelopment in the City’s Central Business District and to strengthen the unique characteristics that make downtown Newton a vibrant destination. For more information about the DNDA or the Main Street program, contact Newton’s Commercial Development Coordinator Rob Powell at (828) 695-4360.

Brian Tate, formerly of Foothills PC Medic, has been in the computer repair business for
over nine years working out of his home based office during much of this time. The new
store gives Tate the opportunity to serve more customers in a convenient location.

“I also build custom machines and now have a place to display them for people to see”
said Tate. He continued, “Most people know me as their ‘computer guy’, so name
recognition for the company is important thus the use of iTate in the new company
name.”

Operating hours are Monday through Friday from 8:00a until 5:00p. iTate Computers &
Tech Services will be adding employees and offering weekend hours in the near future.

iTate Computers & Tech services is located at 508 10th Street NW, Suite C, Conover, NC
28613. The number for the store is (828) 464-2430. Or you can email at bt@itate.net

At the very end of his keynote address at Apple’s WorldWide Developer Conference in June, 2011 in San Francisco, late Apple CEO Steve Jobs flashed up some photos of the exterior and interior of the new $1bn data center the company has built in Maiden, North Carolina to support its new iCloud storage cloud.

“If you don’t think we’re serious about this, you’re wrong,” Jobs said in his keynote, wagging his finger at naysayers who he knew would be trying to poke holes in the iCloud offering as soon as the keynote was over.

Then Jobs flashed up this picture of the Maiden data center:

Why did Apple, Google, and Facebook plunk their data centers in the hills of North Carolina? Two reasons: the area is wired for heavy industry and has cheap power, thanks to coal-fired plants from Duke Energy.

Ever since Apple said it was building its third and largest data center in North Carolina, tongues have been wagging about what kind of iron Apple would use. “It’s full of stuff,” Jobs said. “Full of expensive stuff.” He did not elaborate by make and model for the servers and storage Apple has chosen.

But in the first inside shot of the data center, Jobs cleared up at least who one of the major vendors is:

Those are obviously Teradata data warehousing appliances, which are actually OEMed Dell PowerEdge servers that run the company’s eponymous clustered database. In his blog, storage analyst Stephen Foskett says that these are Teradata Extreme Data Appliance machines, but this is silly since all of Teradata’s various appliances have the same outside chassis and you cannot tell from these photos what the configuration is inside the rack.

The next photo that Jobs flashed up quickly showed a bunch of rack-based servers:

People commenting on this photo of rack servers above have said it looks like Hewlett-Packard’s ProLiant DL380 G7 Xeon-based servers and NetApp FAS6200 network-attached storage arrays. The DL380 G7 is a 2U, two-socket rack server and looks nothing at all like the 1U units at the top of those racks (these could be spacers or servers, the picture is too blurry) The larger 6U unit could be a NetApp FAS6200 array if you took the front molding off. All of this gear could have been custom made for all we know.

Here’s another shot of some equipment racks heading off to infinity:

It is not immediately obvious to me what these servers are, but they look a little bit like HP’sProLiant DL180 G6 machines but are not quite the same. HP packs eight drives across the front of these 2U units, but does not have the extra space with the media bay to the right of the disks on the front of the machine.

Apple has quietly begun work on a solar farm that apparently could help power its sprawling data center in southern Catawba County.

Permits issued by Catawba County show that the Cupertino, Calif., company has been approved to reshape the slope of some of the 171 acres of vacant land Apple owns on Startown Road, opposite the data center, in preparation of building a solar farm.

Apple did not immediately respond to an email from The Observer with questions about the solar farm.

But the company’s website says Apple prides itself on using sustainable energy in some of its facilities. Its plants in Austin, Texas; Sacramento, Calif.; and Cork, Ireland, are 100 percent powered by renewable energy.

Duke Energy, which supplies electricity to Apple in Catawba County, is predominately powered by coal and nuclear plants. Duke has solar arrays in Catawba County near the Marshall Steam Station.

The engineering plans show how the company will keep soil that it moves around the site from washing into creeks and other areas. The permit has no detail about the solar farm itself, including its size. A Charlotte firm is listed on the erosion control permit as the contractor.

The plans say the site will have multiple gravel roads for access to its solar panels.

The plans are called “Project Dolphin Solar Farm A Expanded.” Project Dolphin was the code name given Apple‘s plans to build a $1-billion data center in Maiden.

County officials appear to know little about the solar farm, except for a staff engineer who approved the erosion control permit. Even Economic Development Corp. chief Scott Millar, who helped bring Apple to Maiden, did not about the solar farm until a reporter showed him the erosion control permits.

Millar said he has had “no communication” with Apple about its plans, but has said data centers like Apple‘s require large amounts of power to run its servers and cooling system. Duke Energy’s lower-than-average rates helped attract Apple to the site, located on U.S. 321 and Startown Road.

Information about the solar farm will come when Apple applies for a building permit, said Toni Norton, a county engineer who has inspected Apple’s erosion control plans for the site.

The county has not yet been asked to approve a building permit for the property. Neither has the town of Maiden, said town manager Todd Herms.

Disasters were derailleurs that didn’t derail our Small Business of the Year.
By David Bailey

In the early ’90s, after six years of playing bass guitar for a rock band, Shane Cooper became obsessed with bicycle racing. He didn’t excel as a rider, so he took to coaching, and his team from Hickory went on to win several regional and state championships. He also became obsessed with socks — bike socks. He thought standard models — white, ankle-high throwaways — left a lot of room for improvement. Besides being boring, they were backward. They had Coolmax, a moisture-wicking fiber, on the outside and reinforcing nylon on the inside. He wanted to turn the process inside out, putting the Coolmax next to the foot so it would suck sweat toward a knit lattice on the outside, where it would evaporate.

Cooper, then 29, happened to know more about socks than the average bass-playing biker. His British-born father was a sock-machine mechanic turned sock-machine distributor. The elder Cooper agreed to let his son re-jigger one of his machines on one condition: If he used it for 90 days, he had to buy it. All he needed was to find some Coolmax yarn, which was a problem. It was only available to authorized sock manufacturers.

That was just the first of many speed bumps and detours that Shane Cooper has had to overcome to turn DeFeet International Inc. into a leading manufacturer of cycling socks and accessories — all made in Hildebran, near Hickory. “We survived a fire, a flood and a $250,000 theft,” says Cooper, now 48. Despite those setbacks, DeFeet has been back in the black since 2008. What’s more, he can boast that this year’s Tour de France winner, Cadel Evans, crossed the finish line with DeFeet socks on what had to be one tired pair of dogs.

“This was truly a story of determination,” says Doug Salkewicz, president of Advanced Technical Welding Inc. in Etowah, last year’s Business North Carolina Small Business of the Year. It’s one reason Cooper’s company is this year’s winner. Another “is that DeFeet is a great example of a company keeping its work in North Carolina,” says Salkewicz, who with N.C. Secretary of Commerce J. Keith Crisco and BNC Publisher Ben Kinney judged this year’s competition, sponsored by Winston-Salem-based BB&T Corp.

DeFeet follows on the heels of a long tradition of hosiery manufacturing in a state that once bragged about knitting more socks and legwear than anywhere else on the planet. U.S. employment peaked in 1969, with about 300 companies and 107,000 workers, then began dropping, first due to consolidation, then automation and, finally, foreign competition. Now, some 110 domestic manufacturers employ 13,100, according to Dan St. Louis, director of the Manufacturing Solutions Center at Catawba Valley Community College in Hickory. He estimates that 76% are in North Carolina. “When you look at the folks who have survived, there’s a reason why they’re here. It’s a combination of market niche and a willingness to set up the plant to run quick-turn, short orders. This isn’t about making a plain white sock.”

Cooper couldn’t agree more. Though he has tried making socks in Mexico and had to fend off Asian counterfeiters, sticking to his knitting at home has made him nimbler with a firm grip on quality control. “We’re proud to make our product in America,” he says, “and we plan to keep making it here. It gives us so many advantages.”

WINNER

DEFEET INTERNATIONAL INC.
Headquarters: Hildebran
CEO: Shane Cooper
Employees: 35
Founded: 1993
Projected 2010 revenue: $4.5 million
Business: Maker of bicycling socks
When he started DeFeet, Cooper wasn’t sure he was going to be able to knit that first pair, much less outfit top pro cyclists. “It won’t work,” the first salesman he tried to buy Coolmax from told him, referring both to inside-out knitting and making socks in America. “I remember to this day being in that room with that one machine, and I remember him backing me into the wall and laughing at me. It made me feel about this big,” he says, measuring a millimeter between his thumb and forefinger.

He had been belittled before, so he just shrugged it off, as he had learned to do in grade school as a dyslexic kid with a British accent. “Failure to me was standing up and reading in class — and not being able to read — and the teacher skipping you because you were stuttering and slow.” Overcoming dyslexia had given him determination, and being a rocker had given him an up-yours attitude. “I wanted to put it in that guy’s face who said we wouldn’t have a company. I just wanted to dance in front of him naked with DeFeet socks on.”

Cooper’s father, Alan, had brought his family to the United States when his son was 4, moving from one industrial city to the next — Reading, Pa., Laconia, N.H., Warwick, R.I. — before settling in Hickory to work for Ellis Hosiery Mills. Bored with high school, his son focused his adolescent energy on the bass guitar and a ’72 blue Triumph TR7 sports car. Given Shane’s lackluster performance in school, Alan Cooper told his son if he wanted to go to college, he would have to pay his own way. “I told him I was going to be a rock star and became a musician and traveled the college scene from Florida to Virginia for six years.” Self taught, Shane describes himself as “the worst musician in the band,” which was named Graffiti. By contrast, former band mate Robert Kearns now plays bass for Lynyrd Skynyrd.

If being in a band didn’t bring Cooper stardom, it offered another benefit. It introduced him to competitive cycling. This was the ’80s, and cycling was in vogue among American collegians, thanks to Greg LeMond and the 7-Eleven team. In 1986, LeMond became the first American to win the Tour de France. He won again in ’89 and ’90. The 7-Eleven team, for its part, competed successfully on the European professional cycling circuit during the second half of the decade. The exploits of LeMond and 7-Eleven inspired a generation of kids to take up bicycle racing.

By his mid-20s, Cooper had tired of touring with the band and had begun hanging out and biking with students he met at the schools where Graffiti played. When the band broke up in 1987, he started attending Catawba Valley Community College while managing a bike shop. “Cycling started to consume me,” he says. Soon he was coaching a team sponsored by the shop. “I found I was a much better coach than rider.” He was still, however, a poor student. That was before he met his wife. A triathlete with a master’s in exercise physiology, Hope Dixon was as prudent as Cooper was profligate. She talked him into selling his 1964 Fender Precision bass to pay off his credit-card debt. He made straight A’s his final semester. “When she and I met, these two different worlds collided, her black and white and my blobs of color.” They shared his passion for cycling, spending their honeymoon in Virginia in 1992 watching his idol, LeMond, win the Tour DuPont.

By then, he was selling machines for his dad and had become fascinated by a particular one that could knit patterns and lettering on socks. And after persuading another salesman to sell him some Coolmax, he watched as the first few dozen pairs of DeFeet materialized stitch by stitch. These he took on the cycling circuit with his team, at first giving them away, then selling them out of the trunk of his Ford Taurus. Soon an Italian cycling-shoe company, Sidi, and a French pedal maker, Look, bought DeFeet socks emblazoned with their names and logos. Al Burdis, president of Manna, Calif.-based Sidi America Inc., says, “DeFeet never compromises on materials or design, thereby making the most durable and best-fitting products.”

Cooper tried to meet as many cyclists as he could, some of them budding professionals. From the beginning, says Scott Duncan, DeFeet’s head of product development, he used “grass-roots marketing, showing up at events, doing local clubs and visiting independent bicycle dealers” — all the things the bigger companies either couldn’t or wouldn’t do. “We understand our market because we live the same way our target customers do,” Cooper says. “We ride, run, ski and enjoy solo sports.”

What’s more, being in a band had given him “an understanding of cool branding,” such as naming your company with a pun on the word “defeat” when what athletes want to do most of all is win. “It’s in your face,” Cooper says. Does everybody get it? “I don’t know, but they all remember the name.”

Like the name, DeFeet’s socks stood out. Cooper went with wild colors, and over the years his products have featured skulls, pansies, Christmas lights and racing flames. One recent pair even showed swimming sperm. “We gave the teams the ability to NASCAR their sock and put their logos on them,” he says. The flamboyant designs distinguished DeFeet, and customization let Cooper charge more, giving him a higher profit margin than a typical sock maker. He soon began making them for LeMond. In 1994, “our socks were on the yellow jersey in the Tour de France” — meaning they were worn by cyclists who held the overall lead in the three-week race. “That was our second year in business.”

Cooper’s desire to be at the forefront of both innovation and style distinguished DeFeet. But sometimes, especially in the early years, his efforts “brought us to the bleeding edge more so than the cutting edge in our innovations,” says Paul Willerton, the company’s brand manager. “We literally patented a short that is stitched like a baseball around the crotch pad. The problem is it looks like you’ve got an armadillo strapped between your legs.”

Even with the occasional misstep, sales soared. “Every year it was 50% growth,” Cooper says, “so I went from one machine the first year to three the second, then to eight, then to 16.” That never would have happened if he had outsourced manufacturing to China, he insists. “We can stop a machine today to make a product change tomorrow.”

Then came 2001, when DeFeet was almost defeated. The year started well. Cooper’s second child was born, work began on an addition that would double its space, and DeFeet stepped into new markets. It came out with golf and auto-racing socks, gloves, arm and knee warmers, and all kinds of outerwear and underwear. “And that’s when things started getting out of control. Everywhere we turned we had success, and every product we developed turned into a great product. And I’m getting cockier and cockier.” He ordered 12 machines from Italy to crank up production. With the addition still under construction, he stored them in the old wing.

On the morning of Oct. 21, a ringing phone woke him at 6 a.m. “I answer, and it’s a lady’s voice. ‘We are reporting a fire alarm at your business.’” Speeding to the factory, Cooper saw smoke smeared across the sky. The ballast on a fluorescent light had exploded and set the ceiling on fire. “It festered above the ceiling, burnt everything around it, and all of a sudden, everything in sight — socks, boxes, yarn — everything turned into an incredible inferno.” Eleven fire departments from three counties responded. “It was so hot, they were afraid to open the doors and give it any more oxygen because they thought it was going to explode. We lost everything, every single thing we had.” He thought, “We’re done.”

But over the coming months, he reconsidered. He wasn’t going to let the company fail; if he’d learned anything from LeMond, who recovered from being shot in a hunting accident to win the Tour de France, it was grit. He hit the road in a rented PT Cruiser, visiting one independent bike shop after another. Riding with him was Willerton. “We went out on the road for 30 days at a time,” Cooper says. “I drove the entire USA and went out and shook hands and told everybody about the fire.” They visited Seattle, San Diego, Salt Lake City and Chicago. They covered Texas and Florida. They motored up the Eastern Seaboard to New England. They averaged five bike shops a day, more than 200 in all. Using a couple of salvaged machines, Cooper had knitted some phoenix socks, their red-bird pattern referencing the mythical being that rises from its ashes. “I’d say, ‘Thank you for the support, here’s a gift pack, and we’ll be back in business soon.’”

His saving grace was that the new addition, still under construction, wasn’t connected to the old building. DeFeet had insurance, too, though the new machines weren’t covered. A dispute ensued with the insurer, which wanted to pay only the prior year’s business income plus 3%. DeFeet demanded a 50% increase. Three years and much lawyering later, the insurer agreed to 33%. “I was happy with that, but guess what — that money comes in, it’s business income, and you have to pay taxes on it. And guess what that does? It triggers an IRS audit.”

Then came the flood. In 2005, a retaining wall collapsed, and water poured into the plant he rebuilt that had once been enveloped in fire, causing about $15,000 worth of damage. As if enough plagues hadn’t been sent his way, Cooper got a call a couple of years later from someone who felt remorse for having stored 24,000 pairs of stolen DeFeet socks — about $250,000 worth. “God told him to come clean,” Cooper recalls. An employee had been stealing them, and her husband, a trucker, was selling them at truck stops. “Good news? We have lots of truck drivers saying they love DeFeet socks. Bad news? They paid a buck a pair for $10 socks.” n account of that series of disasters, DeFeet ended up with losses for several years and didn’t turn a profit again until 2008, with revenue increasing 23% in 2010. “Growth is flat now,” he says. But he has several projects in the works that he says will get the company moving again. “We’re not a $10 million company, but I would say that we have our eyes set on that within the next few years.” To help it get there, DeFeet has embraced the latest marketing trend — social media. Today, what a Tour de France winner says in a tweet can reach more cyclists than a slick magazine ad. So DeFeet uses blog posts, offbeat videos posted on Facebook and “DeTweets” to give cycling enthusiasts an irreverent view of what’s hot in their sport. Ideally, customers then pass along the company’s messages by re-tweeting or linking to them on their Facebook pages and blogs. “Punk marketing and guerilla marketing give us the advantage now because our customers love to tell our stories,” Cooper says.

Hope Cooper says living and working with her husband — she’s the company’s chief financial officer — is like a thrilling bike ride through the Alps or the Rockies. Other visionaries take a shower and emerge with a cluster of ideas. “Shane wants to reinvent the shower. His vision is often bigger than the company itself.” Cooper says he has to keep in mind that “just because you can create doesn’t mean you can manage.” He lets hosiery-industry veteran Jill Patton — “as in the general,” she says — run manufacturing and tries his best to stay out of her and his other managers’ way.

“It’s my job to get the athlete to wear this product,” he says, holding up a tattered black sock that once graced the sweaty foot of Greg LeMond. So far, he has succeeded. “But it took all my nerve, every dime and most of my hair. I’m in a race right now, and until I finish, I’ll keep going.”