A $100,000 order for 10,000 pairs of socks is not a small experiment. For Allison Strumeyer, a former BlackRock employee, it became the starting point for testing an idea that would eventually grow into startup DoubleSoul, raise $2 million and make its way to Shark Tank.
The numbers alone make the beginning stand out.
Allison committed $100,000 to an initial order of 10,000 pairs of socks as she tested the business concept. Rather than beginning with a token quantity, the experiment placed a substantial amount of money behind a product that still had to prove itself.
That early order meant Allison was effectively testing the idea at considerable scale from the outset. It also created a simple but significant question: could a large inventory commitment be turned into the foundation of a viable business?
What followed gave the experiment a very different trajectory.
The startup, DoubleSoul, later went on to raise $2 million, marking a major step from the original $100,000 product test. The company also reached Shark Tank, taking a business that began with thousands of pairs of socks into one of entrepreneurship’s most recognisable television formats.
For Allison, the progression is particularly notable because her path began outside the conventional image of a consumer-products founder.
Before DoubleSoul, she had worked at BlackRock. Her subsequent move into building a sock startup put her in a very different setting, where the early challenge was not financial markets but whether a sizeable physical-product order could support a new business idea.
The contrast gives the DoubleSoul story its defining thread: a former BlackRock employee making a six-figure inventory commitment to find out whether an idea had legs.
There is also a useful sense of scale in the numbers. The initial $100,000 commitment covered 10,000 pairs of socks, while the business would later secure $2 million in funding. Those figures trace DoubleSoul’s journey without requiring embellishment. What started as a costly test became a funded startup with a Shark Tank appearance to its name.
The story is not simply about placing a large sock order. It is about what happened after that order.
Allison’s initial decision put real capital behind an unproven business concept. DoubleSoul’s later $2 million fundraise represented the next stage of that journey, while reaching Shark Tank brought the company to a much broader entrepreneurial platform.
From 10,000 pairs of socks and a $100,000 commitment to $2 million in funding and Shark Tank, DoubleSoul’s path is built around a surprisingly straightforward starting point: Allison was willing to test the idea at a scale large enough to find out whether it could become something more.
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