Why sustainable fashion costs more — and why Teddy Locks socks are priced the way they are

Published by Samantha, founder of Teddy Locks

This is a question I get asked directly, and it deserves a direct answer.

A pair of socks from a supermarket costs £1–3. A pair from M&S or John Lewis costs £3–6. A pair of Teddy Locks socks costs £8.50. Why?

The short answer is that the price reflects what actually went into making them — the materials, the manufacturing conditions, the certifications, and the reality of producing at small scale with a transparent supply chain. The longer answer requires understanding what gets cut when socks cost £1.

What the price of a cheap sock is hiding.

A pair of socks sold for £2 in a supermarket multipack has passed through approximately six to eight stages of production: fibre growing, spinning, dyeing, knitting, finishing, packing, shipping, and retail. At each stage, someone is being paid.

For the socks to reach a UK shelf at £2 — and for the retailer, the brand, and the logistics company to all take their margin — the people doing the actual physical work at the production stages are being paid very little. In Bangladesh, the world's second largest garment exporter, the legal minimum wage for garment workers is approximately £70–75 per month. The estimated living wage — enough for food, housing, education and basic savings — is around £140 per month. An estimated 93% of garment workers globally are not paid enough to live on.

This is not a supply chain problem unique to socks. It characterises most of the fast fashion industry. The £2 price is not a market miracle. It is a transfer of cost from the consumer in the UK to the worker in Bangladesh.

What makes certified recycled materials cost more?

The REPREVE® recycled polyester in Teddy Locks socks costs more than virgin polyester. This is a simple supply and demand dynamic: the infrastructure for collecting, cleaning, processing, and certifying plastic bottles as textile feedstock is more capital-intensive than refining petroleum into PET chips. As recycled polyester production scales — and it is scaling — the premium over virgin narrows. 

The TENCEL™ lyocell used alongside REPREVE adds further cost. Lenzing, the Austrian company that produces TENCEL, operates a genuine closed-loop solvent system and sources wood from FSC-certified forests. These practices cost money. The fibre commands a premium over conventional viscose for the same reason.

Certifications compound this. The Global Recycle Standard, SCS Recycled Content Standard, and Oeko-Tex Standard 100 each require independent third-party audits, annual renewal, and supply chain documentation. These are not self-awarded badges. They are audited standards with real costs — costs that don't scale with volume.

What North Carolina manufacturing costs

Teddy Locks socks are knitted within a 250-mile supply chain in North Carolina. This is not the cheapest place in the world to knit socks. It is not intended to be.

Manufacturing in a country with robust labour law, functioning health and safety regulation, and a workforce earning wages that reflect the local cost of living costs more than manufacturing in a country without those protections. This is not a moral judgement on any individual manufacturer anywhere — it is a simple statement of economics.

The decision to manufacture in North Carolina was about supply chain transparency and control. I can visit the facility. I know the people making the socks. I know what they are paid. At the scale Teddy Locks currently operates, that oversight would be impossible with a factory on another continent, and the minimum order quantities required by most Asian manufacturers would make it financially unviable anyway.

What small scale actually costs

What Teddy Locks sells in a year, M&S might sell in a few days.

Every fixed cost in a small business gets divided by fewer units. The Shopify subscription. The domain name. The photography. The packaging design. The certification fees. The accountant. The Meta advertising — which costs the same per click regardless of whether the brand behind the ad is a one-person operation or a multinational.

When M&S develops a new sock style, the design cost is amortised across millions of pairs. When Teddy Locks develops a new style, the development cost falls on a few hundred pairs. This is the structural reality of small-scale manufacturing, and it cannot be wished away by efficiency improvements. It can only be reduced by growth — which takes time, and which requires the brand to survive long enough to achieve it.

What the price is not

The price is not a luxury premium charged because sustainable products are positioned as premium goods. Teddy Locks socks are a functional, well-made, everyday sock with verified environmental credentials. The price reflects the cost of making that product honestly.

It is also not a reflection of excessive margin. Manufacturing costs, platform fees, payment processing, packaging, shipping, advertising, and the operating costs of the business all have a price. At current sales volumes, Teddy Locks makes a modest margin. It is not a business built on overcharging.

The cost-per-wear argument, made specifically:

A Teddy Locks trainer sock, worn twice a week for three years before it wears through, is worn 312 times. At £8.50 per pair, that is 2.7p per wear.

A £3 supermarket cotton sock, worn twice a week for one year before it thins and holes, is worn 104 times. At £3 per pair, that is 2.9p per wear.

The more expensive Teddy Locks sock is cheaper per wear, before accounting for the material and ethical differences.

This calculation changes in Teddy Locks' favour even more significantly for customers who buy the 6-pair pack at £7.50 per pair, or who are repeat buyers. 

Why this matters beyond personal economics.

When you buy a £2 sock, the cost hasn't disappeared. It has been paid — by underpaid workers, by polluted waterways, by the carbon emissions of a supply chain that no one has accounted for. The market price doesn't reflect those costs because the people and environments paying them have no mechanism to charge them back.

When you buy a £8.50 Teddy Locks sock, you are paying a price that attempts to reflect the actual cost of making the thing responsibly. Not perfectly — but honestly, with independently verified evidence behind the claims.

That is what the price difference is. Not marketing. Not profit extraction. Just the cost of doing it properly.

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