Sophie Mirman Keeps Her Millions in Socks

What should you do with those odd socks that drive you mad? You know, the leftover halves of pairs that have vanished inexplicably in the laundry.

“You should dispose of them and buy a new pair,” says 32-year-old, sock magnate Sophie Mirman. “They are absolutely not a trend that will catch on.”

The Anglo-French Mirman has more than a passing interest in the matter. She is chairman and co-founder of Sock Shop International PLC, a chain of specialty stores that sell socks of almost every sort.

They come in one shape, but Sock Shop offers them in many sizes and colors. And patterns. Lots of patterns.

Mirman got the idea for Sock Shops when she trudged around London about six years ago looking for a pair of cream-colored tights to match an outfit.

“I went to every single department store to find them. It seemed like a very inefficient way to buy an everyday necessity,” she recalled.

Capitalist Revolution

Mirman and her business partner, Richard Ross, opened their first Sock Shop in the Knightsbridge subway station, right near Harrods department store, in April, 1983.

Married in 1984, the couple now oversee a growing empire of 110 Sock Shops. They have expanded into France, Belgium and the the United States, with 12 Sock Shops in New York City and more opening in East Coast shopping malls.

She is a prime example of the growing number of self-starting entrepreneurs who have blossomed in the capitalist revolution Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher has brought to Britain.

Her company has gone public and last year added the government’s Company of the Year Award to a growing array of prizes. Her shops, in black, red and white design, have become part of the London cityscape.

Mirman is short and pale, with cropped brown hair, red-rimmed glasses and a quick wit beneath a subdued manner.

She is the only child of French parents who eloped because their own parents disapproved of the match, and arrived in England in the 1940s, speaking no English.

Her mother, Simone Mirman, is a royal milliner, and her late father was an executive for Christian Dior in Britain.

Typing Pool Dropout

Mirman was educated at the French Lycee in London and went on to do a bilingual secretarial course, because “it was socially acceptable. It seemed the thing to do.”

She then joined Marks and Spencer PLC, a leading British retailer where even Mrs. Thatcher shops and which is fondly known by its rhyming cockney nickname “Marks and Sparks.”

But as she puts it dryly, “I didn’t find the typing pool particularly stimulating.”

She became secretary to Lord Sieff, then-chairman of Marks and Spencer, and displayed her chutzpah.

“I told him categorically I would become the first woman director of Marks and Spencer, and he didn’t laugh,” Mirman said.

Sieff encouraged the young woman to enter the company’s management training program and she worked in several of the chain’s stores, including the Paris branch.

Eventually, Mirman became restless and and in 1981 looked for something new. She found a job with Tie Rack, a chain of tie shops, where she became managing director within three months.

But after two years, she said: “I decided if I was going to work so hard, I might as well work for myself.”

No Backers

Mirman and Ross, who was finance director of Tie Rack, needed 45,000 pounds (about $82,000) for their enterprise and approached a number of venture capitalists offering them a 49% stake.

Nobody was interested. But today Mirman is grateful--the stake is now worth about $55 million.

“We thank all those people,” she said.

Mirman and Ross opened that first Knightsbridge shop with a government-guaranteed loan and about $2,000 each of their own money. Six months later, they opened another shop in London.

“We had no ideas of grandeur in those first days. In our wildest dreams we thought we might have five or six shops,” Mirman said.

An early franchising experiment failed, so the couple decided to operate all its shops alone.

“We found it very difficult to control the quality standards” in franchises, Mirman said. “We prefer to expand perhaps more slowly, but fully in control of the operations.”

Went Public in 1987

The company grew quite quickly in Britain, then elsewhere in Europe, and Mirman set her sights further afield.

“America held a great fascination for us,” she said, partly because “women had this strange habit of wearing their socks over their panty hose.”

She was referring to the practice of women wearing socks and sneakers over stockings while they travel to and from work.

“The idea of double sales was too good to miss,” she said jokingly.

Sock Shop went public in March 1987, selling $4.6 million worth of shares on the London Stock Exchange’s Unlisted Securities Market, a secondary market designed for smaller companies.

The stock, which was offered at about $2 per share, doubled on its first day of trading and is now hovering at about the same level. Mirman and Ross retain 80% of the shares.

The company, which employs 750 people, had net profit of $1.8 million on revenue of $26 million in the year ended September, 1987. The 1988 results will be reported in January.

Family Lives in London.

At its south London headquarters, the atmosphere is informal, crowded and cluttered.

“We try to have a very open company. The ideas come through discussion,” Mirman said. Marketing decisions are based on gut feeling, she said.

She has abandoned her ambition of becoming Marks and Sparks’ first female director, and Sieff has become a director on her own board.

Mirman and Ross have a 26-month-old daughter and a 9-month-old son and “a very good nanny.” The family lives in London, and Mirman squeezes in skiing and tennis when she can.

“We have a rule when we’re away from the business not to talk about Sock Shop,” Mirman said. “But it’s impossible.”

Envisioning more than 1,000 Sock Shops in her future, Mirman said: “There’s a long way to go yet with socks.”