We know a lot of people want our socks to be bigger or stretchier to fit calves bigger than about a 15” circumference. We hear you. But it’s honestly really complicated. The thing about our designs is they are knitted into the fabric, not printed on, and they use both cotton and nylon thread to make the durable, soft, detailed, vivid images everyone loves. But nylon isn’t as stretchy as cotton. “So just make it bigger,” you might say, but if we make them any bigger, they don’t stay up on anyone. Chelsea has been working on this problem for longer than most of us have worked with her at FootClothes, and that means she’s already tried making things bigger or altering the cuff or all kinds of changes, but where we are right now with our regular crew socks is that they stay up on most people, and because the human calf is wider at the top and gets smaller as you go down toward the foot, if we make things bigger they slide down and bunch up at the ankle. Which is not cool for anyone.
The more intricate or detailed the design, the more nylon thread it requires, and thus only simplistic designs, such as lines or large blocks currently lend themselves to wide calf sizing. Because of this, and because knee-high socks go up above the widest part of the calf so they are more likely to stay up, we created the line Oh Hey, Stripes. This line includes two colors of wide-calf friendly knee-highs that use an entirely new production technique we hadn’t tried before. It doesn’t solve the nylon thread problem, but it has proven to be a popular option. We couldn’t get all the stripe colors in both regular and wide-calf when we launched Oh Hey, Stripes, but that doesn’t mean we didn’t WANT to. We just had to pick somewhere to start.
If you want to support our efforts to make more wide-calf options, the best way is to buy the current ones we have and send us an email to request others. That tells us people are interested and willing to support us putting our money into the project. You can sign up to the wide calf notification list here, and you’ll be notified as soon as we have any new options, even if you don’t sign up for our regular marketing emails.