Made in Canada boosts family-run sock manufacturer amid ‘elbows up’

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When brothers Sunil and Bipin Khimasia bought The Great Canadian Sox Company in 1988, the sock manufacturer in the East York community of Toronto had 90,000 square feet of floor space, a dye house and enough knitting machines to supply some of the biggest sports brands in Canada.

Today, it has downsized to 30,000 square feet but, with a trade war driving “buy Canadian” sentiment, the small domestic sock maker has never been busier.

The family-run business has reinvented itself by shedding low-margin private-label contracts, surviving the collapse of Canadian manufacturing in the 1990s and outlasting Eaton’s, Sears and other big department stores that once anchored its wholesale business.

Now, a second generation has stepped in: Sunil’s son, Sid, 42, runs e-commerce, sales and wholesale for the business, and his daughter, Priyanka, 39, manages marketing and its three retail locations, all in Toronto.

“A lot of people are really buying Canadian,” says Sid, who spent his summers as a teenager working on the factory floor. “We’ve noticed a huge jump from last year to this year.”

Online sales doubled from 2024 to 2025. Physical retail and online now account for 40 per cent of business while wholesale makes up the rest. Most clients are in Canada, with a few retailers in the United States.

But it’s taken strategic pivots to get here.

The Khimasias came to the sock business naturally. Sunil and Bipin’s father built a textile business in Kenya – starting with T-shirts and underwear, then expanding into socks. Sunil, 73, grew up inside it.

When he emigrated to Canada in the 1980s, Sunil sought opportunities in familiar territory. Ontario Hosiery, as the company was then known, manufactured for brands including Fila, Reebok, Champion, Roots, and Northern Reflections. It was being advertised for sale. The brothers bought it.

If you wore a sock made in Canada back then, chances are it came off one of their machines. But through the 1990s, domestic manufacturing collapsed. One by one, brands and department stores that had filled Great Sox’s order books moved sourcing overseas.

“The margins were pretty low and very tight and there was always pressure on pricing – every year customers wanted a better price,” Sunil says. “It wasn’t a good model.”

Rather than chase volume at thinning margins, the Khimasias made a deliberate call to shrink. They sold much of the building they had once owned outright and cut the factory footprint. “We decided to focus more on more technical, more functional higher-end products,” Sid says.

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The pivot came with a timely acquisition. In 1998, as the private-label business was contracting, the company bought J.B. Field’s, an outdoor adventure sock brand dating back to 1877 that originally outfitted Canada’s logging industry. The brand had gone into receivership.

The Khimasias purchased the assets, the machinery and the name, and built it into the cornerstone of what Great Canadian Sox is today: a specialist in technical cold-weather socks made from merino wool and built for hikers and workers.

In 2007, Bipin departed the company to work on another venture, leaving Sunil, who is CEO today, to run the business. Sid had joined the previous year after graduating from Dalhousie University with a degree in sociology and brought a fluency his father’s generation didn’t have: an instinctive understanding of how people were beginning to shop online.

Sid pushed the business toward its own e-commerce channel, building a direct-to-consumer website and digital marketing infrastructure.

“The older generation doesn’t get how you can buy socks from a Facebook post,” says Priyanka, who joined in 2015 to launch Great Sox’s first retail location. She had previously studied urban planning at the University of Waterloo and then spent a decade trying other fields. “Once I tried marketing, I realized I really liked it,” she says.

Together, the siblings represent a generational handoff that Sunil describes as a work in progress. He monitors the finances and the factory floor closely; a persistent challenge is finding qualified technicians for the specialized knitting machines.

Another key barrier is capital, says Srimanta Banerjee, the company’s recently retired chief commercial officer. With around 50 employees and 40 machines – each costing roughly $40,000 – a considerable investment is required for Great Sox to stay competitive.

Jacek Mlynarek, executive director of the Canadian Textile Industry Association, sees that pressure as emblematic of a broader struggle. According to the Canadian Institute for Research on Public Policy, employment in Canadian textile manufacturing has fallen from 200,000 workers at the turn of this century to roughly 15,000.

“The question is always, do we have a workforce to do what they want to do?” Mr. Mlynarek says. “They need to have a good strategy to commercialize and to promote a product, which is our biggest weakness in the Canadian industry.”

Mr. Mlynarek adds that a firm such as Great Canadian Sox has a lot of equity in the family story and multigenerational expertise. “But they need to be sure that the next generation has enough knowledge to progress with this rapidly changing situation.”

Mr. Banerjee, who watched Sid and Priyanka grow up before working alongside them, has little doubt about the future. “Sid and his sister can very well take the flag,” he says.

Sunil has not set a timeline for stepping back, but what is clear is that his kids intend to keep building – more modern machines and a stronger direct-to-consumer business.

Currently, 85 per cent of the company’s products are made in Canada. It isn’t trying to compete with cheaper overseas imports, Sid says. The focus is on making better-quality products that customers will pay a premium for; the trade war has only sharpened the company’s advantage.

“People are waking up, they want to support Canadian, they want manufacturing jobs to stay here,” Sid says.