Bombas’ New Strategy

Week Two Discussion: Bombas’ New Strategy

Shop Bombas

Complete your assigned Week 2 reading (Chapters 5-8) and then read the article below which corresponds to this week’s discussion topics. Then answer the questions below the article. Use the concepts from the course textbook and the article to support the information in your initial post. It is required you support your initial posts and peer posts with cited information from all the sources you use and provide the all the sources in your reference list to meet the APA style requirements.

Bombas’s Covid-Era Pitch: Socks are the New Shoes
For David Heath and Randy Goldberg, the founders of the direct-to-consumer sock seller Bombas, 2020 is played out as it did for most businesses: utterly unlike anything they had planned.
In June, Goldberg was supposed to get married. Just a couple of months ago, the company projected that a third of its spring revenue would come from selling low-cut, “no-show” socks, driven by peppy digital ads. And their various teams had been securing co-branding licenses to sell new lines of themed footwear (e.g., Sesame Street) and pitching corporate buyers on bulk orders of promo socks (typically for corporate events). None of that, including the wedding, made sense during the Covid-19 crisis.
The founders, who were riding out the pandemic in a rental cabin in Vermont, weighed their options. Many direct-to-consumer companies were laying off staff and hunkering down. Others were shelving their main product and manufacturing masks instead. Heath and Goldberg landed on a strategy that, so far, is panning out: focusing on existing products and marketing and encouraging staff to adapt their work to Covid-19 in ways that make what might otherwise seem trivial in the current moment – selling socks – feel urgent and vital to their 130 employees. “Socks are the new shoes,” says Goldberg, referring to the suddenly we’re-all-working-remotely time we’re in. So far, sales in recent weeks are up 50 percent versus a year ago, says Heath.
Fancy Footwork
To find their footing, the founders immediately scrapped the springtime ads celebrating no-show socks. After all, with the nation sheltering in place, opportunities for outdoor ankle admiration were, at best, occasional. But they didn’t cut advertising altogether. With so many advertisers retreating, digital ad rates are cheaper than they’ve been in years. To take advantage of the low prices, Bombas did some bargain brand-building on Facebook, Instagram, and other digital channels, shifting its messaging to talk about its charitable work–the company has long taken a get-one-give-one approach to sales, donating clean new socks to the homeless.
As sales activity began to edge up toward the end of March, the founders shifted to showing more product-focused ads featuring cozy socks made with softer cottons and arch support – the kind of footwear people want to wear indoors all day long. While the percentage of people who saw the ads and bought socks was lower – plenty of folks are holding onto their cash – they were able to make it up by buying more ads than usual, keeping their cost per acquisition steady.
Succoring with Swag
While digital advertising helped drive sales, the Bombas founders worried about their other staff, especially those, like the corporate gifting team, who catered to selling bulk orders to big companies for use as promotional giveaways at conferences and benefits. Rather than have that team struggle as the events business evaporated, the founders encouraged them as they targeted a new kind of client: hospital administrators. Using an approach that’s similar to their normal work, and their skill at coordinating big orders with big companies, they’ve routed over 25,000 pairs of socks – all donated – to frontline medical workers, with another 25,000 on the way. “We want to make sure nobody is in a holding pattern, that everyone is working at full strength,” says Goldberg. “When people feel like they fit into a larger mission, it puts renewed energy in what they do.”
Benevolent Biz Dev
Before the days of coronavirus, the Bombas partnerships team focused on ways to get new brands in front of shoppers on the Bombas website – such as a line of Elmo-, Oscar-, and Cookie Monster-themed socks the company produced with Sesame Street. But when the economy is crashing and hospitals are overrun, it’s hard to find meaning and urgency in the next co-branded sock deal.
To keep their partnership team poised, Goldberg and Heath urged them to develop partnerships with other direct-to-consumer companies to do charitable rather than for-profit work. In recent weeks, they’ve worked with Brooklinen, the direct-to-consumer bedding seller, to route fresh sheets to homeless shelters and Cleancult to supply more soap. They’re all leveraging what is effectively Bombas’ separate, charitable supply chain, one they’d never fully appreciated before: The network of 3,000 charities that the company regularly supplies with donated socks. The company was better situated to cope with Covid than they might have realized. They just needed to take a fresh look at their assets and adapt.

Reference
Helm, B. (2020, May 4). Bombas’s Covid-era pitch: Socks are the new shoes. Inc. https://www.inc.com/burt-helm/how-direct-to-consumer-seller-bombas-adapted-covid-19.html
Bombas’ New Strategy
Answer the following questions:
1. Differentiate among the main types of business-level strategies and determine which one Bombas pursued that provided them with a competitive advantage. Please explain.
2. Differentiate among the main types of corporate-level strategies and determine which one Bombas pursued that strengthened their business-level strategy and competitive advantage. Please explain.
3. What is the relationship between the business- and corporate-level strategies implemented by Bombas that created value for the organization? How did it create value for the customers?
To post to the discussion, click on Week 2 Discussion above, then Create Thread. It is required to submit your initial response post to enter the Discussion Forum. If you enter the Discussion Forum prior to submitting your initial response post, you will not earn credit for your post.
Please read each question thoroughly and answer all questions in their entirety in your initial post. It is important to answer all components of the questions in a comprehensive discussion post. One or two sentence responses are not acceptable. If the question states ‘Please explain’ it is required to include this information. Please note it is required to support your responses with cited information from the sources you used.
It is required to respond to two of your peers’ posts. Your peer responses are required to be addressed to the student you are responding to by name. Your peer post responses should include the course concepts. Providing comments or a one or two sentence response is not acceptable. Simply agreeing with your peers or reiterating the information they provided is not acceptable. Your peer posts should include a response that reflects your understanding of the course concepts and provide additional information to add to and further the discussion. You should cite your sources and provide the references for your sources at the end of your posts.
Please use the APA 7th ed. format resources found in the ‘Getting Started’ tab under ‘Business Writing and Research APA Formatting Videos’
Discussion Rubric: Discussion assignments will be graded as follows:
Thoroughly answered all of the questions: 40
Quality of responses to two classmates: 20
References to text and/or other sources: 10
Spelling/Grammar at college level: 10
Posted on 3 separate days: 20
TOTAL: 100 points
Discussion Posts (APA Guidelines)
It is required you support your initial posts and peer posts with cited information from the Jones & George (2022) course textbook, the Case Study article, and professional sources such as peer-reviewed journal articles found in the Online Keiser Library. You may also use other professional business sources. It is required you provide the sources you used in your reference list to meet APA style guidelines.
It is required to use correct APA 7th ed. format for citing your sources when writing your discussion posts. Please do not provide any direct quotes from your sources. All information used from sources is required to be paraphrased in your own words and cited appropriately. Please include all sources used in the reference list at the end of your posts. In-text citations including narrative and parenthetical citations are required to meet APA style guidelines.

When citing information from the Case Study article cite the reference listed at the end of the article, not the textbook. You should cite the textbook only for the managerial concepts related to the Case Study.
All sources are required to be published from 2012 to present.
Remember, sources should include the course textbook, the article in the above Case Study, peer-reviewed journal articles, and professional sources.
The following sources are NOT accepted: Wikipedia, Wiki websites, blogs, encyclopedias, bibliography.com, online books or textbooks, other books or textbooks, dictionaries, other students’ papers found in online websites, online essays, job search websites, student dissertations, White Pages, videos, and non-professional online websites.

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