The Underwear Subscription Service

Guys, how many times have you continued to wear your socks or underwear until they got worn out, ripped and eventually were nothing more than a few strands of cheap fabric hanging together by a thread? I’ll be the first to admit that about half the socks I own are riddled with holes. But one new startup has come up with a brilliant solution. Two words: underwear subscription.

Manpacks.com offers consumers the option to subscribe and receive a shipment of underwear, socks and undershirts every three months to replenish their stock. Just call it your own personal care package. Shoppers can choose how much clothing they want shipped to them. The official “ManPack” includes two pairs of underwear, two shirts and two pairs of socks every three months all for $24. If that’s not enough, they also have the “MachoPack” which features three pairs of each for $33, and if that’s too much you can also pick and choose which of those items you want.

The site launched in mid-January and is the brainchild of two Web-savvy entrepreneurs in their mid-30s. “The interest is truly in automating a mundane task,” said Andrew Draper, the co-founder and chief designer of Manpacks. That’s a pretty serious way of describing a site that sells underwear, and in fact, Draper is all business. Even the idea for the site was all business. Draper says, “[We] were chatting one evening about recurring revenue models…” Whoa whoa whoa, what?

Ultimately, according to Draper, the allure of the site boils down to offering a “pack of essentials to take care of a task that everyone needs to do but don’t always want to do [so it] often gets pushed to the bottom of the list.” That sounds about right. The only time I ever shop for these clothes is when my mom or girlfriend make me.

So who are the customers so far? According to Draper, most are “higher-income individuals” including CEOs, as well as “tech-oriented” people like Web developers. And of course, there are some women buying stuff for their men.