Can a pair of $18 socks end homelessness?
Hippy Feet, a Minneapolis benefit corporation that employs homeless youth, has got attention in the last two years for its mission. This year, it’s a semifinalist in the impact ventures section of MN Cup, a startup competition by the University of Minnesota Carlson School of Management.
But the company founders, Michael Mader and Sam Harper, know the $11-an-hour jobs they offer in packaging, screenprinting, and embroidery won’t totally solve the complex problem that affects an estimated 6,000 Minnesota youth on any given night. But they believe it’s a rung on the ladder.
“When we talk about employment for young people, we talk about it as a stepping stone-type process,” Mader told Minne Inno. “We can successfully provide step one.”
Hippy Feet was started in 2016 with the familiar “buy one, give one” model, and soon donated thousands of pairs of socks. But Mader and Harper weren’t satisfied. While giving socks is a good thing – socks are the most-requested and least-donated items at shelters, Harper said – it only treats the symptoms of homelessness.
“[Youth] were appreciative but still homeless,” Mader said. “We wanted to do more.”
They rethought their approach and started a jobs program that works like a pop-up shop. They bring their process for packaging their socks to local nonprofits, already working with homeless youth, including Youth Link in Minneapolis. They also employ workers in Duluth and Chicago. By taking the process to them, Hippy Feet knows the youth will be in a familiar, safe environment. It also helps overcome the most common barrier for these young people as they look for work: a lack of transportation.
Hippy Feet also partners with Elpis Enterprises to train youth to perform the embroidery and screenprinting work on the socks. They successfully raised capital to buy presses for Elpis, a St. Paul-based nonprofit that offers job training, work experience, and job placement.
So, there’s their first step – an unskilled job with little to no barriers to entry. Since it started its pop-up employment program, Hippy Feet has employed close to 100 youth ages 16 to 23, the founders said. They’ve sold 40K socks and hope to double that number in the next year.
Now, they want to find ways to overcome the challenge of developing steps two and three. They want to build an entire employment pipeline that leads to self-sufficiency. They want to leverage their relationships to find opportunities outside Hippy Feet. They’ve done that before, referring a couple of workers to internships.
They’ve also trained a couple others in sales positions. They see potential for building out their own staff, like hiring a marketing intern, where they can continue to teach business skills that would better transfer to broader contexts more than embroidery might.
“I think it resonates with our customer base,” Harper said. “Our products aren’t for everybody but we don’t want them to be for everybody. We want them to be for that person who believes in quality, ethically sourced clothing, who know that their products did some good in the world.”
