"Ew, what's on your feet? Why are you wearing those? Gross!"
Trust me — I get it. I was that guy not too long ago.
We're raised to feel some kind of way about feet. Like they're weird or something. But as I got older, I started to realize how important foot health actually is. Strong feet are one of the most untapped performance advantages out there — and for most of my career, I had no idea.
As I kept climbing to higher levels of basketball, I needed every edge I could find. That's when my brother Gabe and I started shooting barefoot. He called it "bullet-proofing" our shooting — we'd already done all kinds of weird stuff. Lights off. Smaller basketballs. Might as well add barefoot to the list.
And it worked. Not only did it sharpen our shooting, but our feet got noticeably stronger. Less susceptible to injury. More confident in our base. More connected to the ground.
But every time warmup ended and we had to put socks and shoes back on, I felt it. That disconnect. There's got to be a better way.
So we went looking. Minimalist shoes. Different sock setups. We eventually landed on toe socks — the idea that your feet could move more naturally even inside a shoe. But we couldn't find any we actually liked. As high-level athletes, we needed more than just a novelty product. We needed comfort, padding, performance durability, and grip. None of the options checked all the boxes.
So we built it ourselves.
We had no idea how to start a company. But we knew we needed quality toe socks for the rest of our basketball careers — and we had a feeling other athletes needed them too. We hit Google, figured out the next steps, and less than a year later, here we are.
Mad Dog Barefoot — the only toe sock on the market built by pro athletes, for all athletes.
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