The Reddit Hug

I wanted to to show you all what the Reddit Hug looked like for Taft last weekend and give you some metrics about just how powerful we can be as a community. Some of the content below is embarrassing and very raw emotions! As stated in my reply on Reddit, I was having a really rough day. My son was really sick and I was very stressed from trying to run this business by myself, and I was just an emotional mess (hence the tears in the video below). Let me briefly explain how it all went down...

My wife and I were on our way to take our two little babies to see a Christmas tree lighting at the local outdoor mall. It was around 6 in the evening when I saw the order notifications start rolling in. I noticed that we had about 5 orders in under ten minutes and I knew someone must have done something because typically we don't get orders that quickly. I thought maybe an influencer posted about us on Instagram or maybe something big on Pinterest....Reddit wasn't even on my radar. Well I'm not thinking too much about it and we get on with our evening. Once we are ready to go, I start loading the kids into the car and glance at my phone again.....a BUNCH of orders. The whole ride home I can see my phone lighting up every minute with a new order push notification from Shopify. It was the most fulfilling thing :) Order after order kept rolling in and I was thinking it would last maybe an hour or so. That night I got my children to sleep, and orders were starting to REALLY fly in....I'm talking an order every ten seconds or so. I jumped on Reddit to start responding, answering questions, and thank all of you as much as possible. I still didn't realize exactly what was going to happen...

I woke up to over 800 orders the next morning. 800 push notifications on my iPhone. That was a pretty amazing thing. Before the Reddit feature I had about 30,000 pairs of socks in inventory. When I woke up that morning, for the first time in a long time, I thought "we could sell out." I didn't even have an accurate inventory count because we had recently moved warehouses and I knew there was not even a chance of selling out any time soon, so I wasn't super worried about it at the moment. That Sunday, my wife and I took our little ones to the warehouse and started counting thousands and thousands of socks. We eventually had to list the socks as sold out to avoid over-selling and upsetting people about their order. I kept the women's grab bag up on the site, thinking that there was no way we would sell out of that.....later that very night I ended up taking down the women's grab bag as well. Hundreds and hundreds of orders were rolling in every hour.

I filmed this video on Monday, after looking all over town for shipping supplies and after a crazy-sleepless Sunday scrambling at the warehouse and responding to as many people as I could on Reddit. Please forgive the tears and raw emotions....I hadn't slept or eaten in a couple days and you guys finally got to me :) I was just looking at all of the orders going out and I just started to tear up in the warehouse, so I went outside and made you this... Here is what the Reddit Hug looked like...

Here is what the Reddit Hug looked like... Then this happened. SO. MANY. VISITORS. [unbelievable] Then this happened. SO. MANY. VISITORS. [unbelievable] Shopify contacted me a couple times seeing what was going on....I am so grateful the site didn't crash.

Amidst all the madness, we decided to launch a few of our shoe styles...



Printing orders....so many labels :) We had a whole bunch of these big carts of orders go out...this is probably only about 150 orders. And my (happy-amazing) family after the craziness.. And my (happy-amazing) family after the craziness..

Summary: 122,500 Total Visitors 122,500 Total Visitors $71,052 in total revenue $71,052 in total revenue