Mission-Driven Mayhem

Jacobin has written extensively over the years about why corporate charity is a dead end for effecting positive social change. But Bombas is a particularly interesting case study for several reasons. For one, it’s a big, successful, and highly profitable company, and one with wide name recognition. For another, it leans hard into its mission-driven nature and may be the best-known company in the country that embraces a model of donating one item of clothing to charitable institutions and nonprofits for every item it sells. Because of this, Bombas has become not just a model for other companies to follow, but a brand that is practically synonymous with doing good in the community.

So, it’s worth asking: Is Bombas really all that? Can they really solve the homelessness problem by selling people premium-priced socks? Does the mission-driven model really work beyond generating positive public relations? Getting hard information about Bombas is more difficult than you might expect; one article after another regurgitates the same basic facts about the company’s founding and the unimpeachable narrative of its charitable mission. What’s needed — and what’s in short supply — is an actual overview of the company’s operations and impact.

Bombas’s primary claim to fame is that it gives away one article of clothing for every one it sells, inspired by a decade-old (but still true) claim that socks are the most requested items at homeless shelters. As of this writing, Bombas says it has given away over one hundred million socks, underwear, shirts, and slippers. Right away, this brings up an interesting question. Despite a recent spike in homelessness (with rates increasing over 12 percent in 2023), there are still fewer than seven hundred thousand unhoused people in the United States. Even given a high-turnover item like socks, there should be enough free T-shirts and bralettes in circulation to provide every homeless person in America with an entire wardrobe. What’s really going on?

Although we often hear about the efficiency of the private sector over the government, it’s not really true. For all its money and reach, Bombas simply doesn’t have the resources to get one hundred million of anything into the hands of people in need. The sheer scale of homelessness in America means that Bombas lacks the presence in communities to distribute what is needed where it’s needed, sock truck or no sock truck. Many unhoused people avoid shelters for a number of reasons, so even if Bombas’s products were there for the taking, they wouldn’t always end up on the feet of everyone who needed them.

This means that Bombas has to team up with “giving partners,” almost all of which are NGOs and nonprofits. And here lies one of the biggest problems: under late-stage capitalism, neoliberal policies have consistently offloaded public services to the private sector, leading such organizations to compete for limited charitable dollars and donations. Neither fish nor fowl in the struggle of labor against capital, NGOs often have a standoffish relationship with labor and must engage in battles to establish “authenticity” to prove that they are more deserving of resources than others.

This political problem aside, many NGOs are chronically underfunded and understaffed, and are no more capable of distributing these goods than Bombas itself; some recipients have spoken of being overwhelmed by donations, with cases of Bombas’s products sitting in storerooms waiting for someone to figure out what to do with them. Bombas is cagey about the process by which its charitable products are distributed, making it even more likely that many of those one hundred million items are just collecting dust somewhere. This makes them vulnerable to misuse, disuse, waste, and even theft.

As for the origin of the supply itself, Bombas socks are largely not made in America, nor do they use union labor. Most of their products are made in China and Taiwan, with some manufactured in Peru, and a small percentage made in the United States — with the company’s product packaging and website doing little to inform customers about which is which. While defenders would likely argue that this is simply a cost-saving measure to make Bombas’s mission financially attainable, it also perpetuates the hidden costs of fast fashion and contributes to the gravely serious problems such manufacturing introduces: a race to the bottom to lower costs and a perfect example of how the material comfort of Americans often comes at the expense of the immiseration of others.

The Hand That Both Bites and Feeds You

Perhaps the key to the problem, however, is this: the greatest driver of homelessness in America is not a great mystery. It’s high housing costs. That spike in homelessness over the last few years? Data clearly indicates that it’s directly attributable to a lack of housing stock combined with spiraling housing costs, low wages, and inflation in costs of everything from food and clothing to education and health care. And what drives up housing costs and inflation? In short, the search for profit. Investors buy up real estate because, as the old saw has it, they aren’t making it anymore. Meanwhile the cost of consumer goods is increasingly attributable not to the dynamics of supply and demand, but to CEOs and shareholders’ greed for higher revenue.

Bombas isn’t publicly traded (at least not yet), so the company isn’t required to disclose financial statements. We have no way of knowing if it’s making the kind of investments in real estate that are the biggest contributors to the problem it claims to want to solve. But Daymond John, Bombas’s biggest investor, certainly does: he is an inveterate real estate huckster, addressing trade groups in the industry and offering (somewhat shady) seminars where you pay over $2,000 to hear him deliver hot tips for buyers. And even if it wasn’t real estate, investors — despite their love of mission-driven rhetoric — only want one thing, and that’s more zeros on the bottom line. That means scaled expansion, higher prices, lower costs, less costly production, cheaper labor, and all the other factors that both get you a billion dollars in sales and create the precise conditions under which homelessness increases.

Let’s be clear: there is nothing wrong with giving socks to homeless people. Helping homeless people survive the grueling conditions of rough sleeping is an unalloyed good, even if Bombas isn’t doing it as much as it says it is. The company’s website contains information about homelessness that is excellently sourced, fully vetted, and in line with all-important efforts to humanize unhoused people and destigmatize homelessness generally. It’s a terrific resource.

But, simply put, there is no way for a capitalist enterprise to fix the problems caused by capitalism. Devoting the resources of a democratic, well-organized state to stop rampant profiteering, empower the working class, and actually end homelessness is the only solution. Everything else is rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic — as the sharks keep circling hungrily in the water.