Happy Sunday,
A belated happy New Year to everyone. We hope your holiday season was wonderful, and the new year is off to a strong start. A “New Year” as a small brand is nothing more than an accounting reset. There is no start or stop in this game; everything keeps going full speed whether you want it to or not. But it does create a time for us to always look at what is working and what isn’t. In this day and age, the conversation always comes back to content and how we present the brand. We’re small, but we do not lack any confidence in our product or what we have built. In fact, we are more bullish now than ever about our quality; we would argue that we make the best products in the market in our categories. That’s not marketing, that’s facts based on our sourcing and materials development that have taken years to build. We’re serious, the best, like better than the biggest brands you can name, we make better products, period. What we have learned, though, is that no one cares unless you can tell the story and explain it in a way that is engaging, compelling, and fun. That’s marketing.
Enter 2026. How do you market a small clothing brand across social media, email, traditional media, and live in-person? Product images, video, comedy, “founder”, product-led, UGC, influencers? All of it? None of it? Do we try to do something new? Are we late to a trend? What’s the through-line, what’s the story, and how do we want Arvin Goods perceived?
These are all questions you have to ask and try to understand in any marketplace. In a textbook view, you think you have a strong brand identity, and a good product, if you’re growing sales, then the rest will sort itself out, but in this new age of direct marketing, you have to find an audience and then figure out how to stay in front of the noise and keep you and your products visible. This is a major challenge even for the biggest brands with the biggest budgets in the world; it’s a rubix cube level puzzle that only gets more complicated as the budget gets smaller. This is where we sit today, 11 days into 2026, working to solve this puzzle of how to continue to tell our story.
We started this Substack a few years ago to share the ups and downs of the brand and company behind the scenes, and also share content that we find interesting each week. It’s a different way for us to talk about Arvin Goods in a more long-form way than just an email about new socks or T-shirts. We aren’t experts in any of this, and what we realized is neither is anybody else; everyone has something to share or learn, and the more we all do it, the more informed we become in how this world weaves together. Whether it’s stories about geopolitical trade policies, socks made in Portugal, tragedies, successes, or just a mellow DJ set for the weekend on YouTube, we will keep you plugged in every week on Sunday mornings.
As always, thank you for reading! Enjoy the news below, and we wish you a great week!
Hope you enjoy today’s Clean Up. We would love to hear from you. Comment here on Substack, hit us on social, or email us at info@arvingoods.com. Have a great week. Cheers,
Stories Of The Week…
Design
Why socks in Japan are a serious business - Financial Times
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Should you be in search of a new pair of socks and visiting a certain kind of sartorially forward shop, such as Ven Space in New York, Mohawk General Store in Los Angeles or Trunk in London, chances are you will stumble on the Japanese brand RoToTo. Even if you do not need a pair of socks, one of RoToTo’s soft-spun styles will probably beckon to you. There is something ineffably inviting in the weave and colour combinations of these creations, which are made in the Nara prefecture, more famous for its hand-fed deer than for being the centre of Japanese sock production. A pair, on average, costs about $35 (or $20 in Japan). In the west, we tend to treat socks as an afterthought. Most of the time when we are out and about, they are covered by trousers. Women are accustomed to not wearing socks with leather shoes, and loafers without socks have been a menswear staple since the mid-20th century. Socks with sandals make westerners cringe. For the past couple of decades, we’ve made a concerted effort to hide socks whenever we can, preferring the low-cut kind, especially when pairing them with sneakers. And when we are at home, well, no one is looking, right?🧦🇯🇵
Photo
Time’s Top 100 Photos of 2025 - Time
We stand at scenic overlooks and lift our lens to capture a post card view that, of course, looks better on a postcard. It’s not about gear, or the 10,000 hours. It’s simply that almost any photograph is improved by having people in it—a lesson TIME’s Top 100 Photographs of 2025 underscores in images that capture not only a year, but also the faint but discernable shadow cast by a less human future.
The moments photojournalists document tend to be most visible on faces: the panic of a fallen runner about to be spiked, the anguish in an immigrant in a headlock, a smiling Buddha toppled in a quake. Robots (in a footrace, at a bedside) serve as comic relief partly because they have no faces. But, as machines, they carry the same ambiguous edge as artificial intelligence. In Ahmedabad, the tail section of an Air India flight juts from a building like a paper airplane that sailed in and stuck. And in Portland, Ore., sworn agents of the United States government all but disappear inside red smoke, body armor and gas masks. — Karl Vick📷📆
Industry
CMOs Reveal the Top Marketing Trends That Will Dominate 2026 - Inc.
Back in January, branding guru Tom Rinks, who co-founded the sunscreen brand Sun Bum and created Taco Bell’s famous chihuahua, predicted that marketing would get weird in 2025. He was not wrong.
This year, Duolingo killed off its green owl with a Tesla Cybertruck and hosted a funeral before resurrecting its corporate mascot. David, the brand behind the popular gold-wrapped protein bars, took the country’s protein obsession to its logical end stage.The company started selling frozen cod, and people bought the white fish in droves. Blueland founder and CEO Sarah Paiji Yoo proved how well her sustainable cleaning products worked by scrubbing the toilets at Target. Tech startups blanketed the New York City subway with rage bait. Meanwhile, Ramp, the $32 billion spend-management platform, sent its in-house economist to a Russian bathhouse.👨🏻💻📊
Entertainment
Tame Impala at Parque de Quetzalcóatl, Mexico, for Cercle - YouTube
Tame Impala performing a DJ set inside Javier Senosiain’s surreal creation, Parque Quetzalcóatl, in Mexico.
Show curated by Derek Barbolla
Directed by Mathieu Glissant
Images by Mickaël Fidjili, Augustin Thai, Alexis Olas, Arthur Maneint, Derek Barbolla
Extra footage by Colt Grice
Edit by Manon Metzger / Grade by Ines Sanchez
🔊🎧
'The Clean Up' is a weekly newsletter that mixes in some Arvin Goods news, products, as well as stories we saw during the week that are worth a share. From books to podcasts, sustainability to business news, we try to keep it interesting, and fun. If you are not a subscriber, sign up and join everyone who receives The Clean Up directly in their inbox every Sunday.
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