Lawson Glidden, 39, is president of Minus33, a New Hampshire maker of merino-wool base layers, underwear and socks that traces its textile history in Ashland back to 1916.
Glidden told Fortune that since he joined the company in 2018, profits have roughly quadrupled and revenue is up about 2.5 to three times. The company’s PR pitch billed this year as one of its highest-profit years, though Fortune said it could not independently verify the figures.
The family business was once a much larger operation. At its peak in the 1990s, Glidden said, the mill was a $50 million operation with about 300 employees. By around 2002, he said, it had become a 'zero-dollar, three-person company'.
When Glidden left tech consulting in 2018 and came home, he bought sock machines and learned to program and run them. Minus33 started manufacturing in the U.S. in 2019, and Glidden said he programmed and designed the machines himself.
He said he thought socks were a solved problem until he got the machine. His approach centers on fit: socks that hug the foot 'like a second skin that eliminates all the friction', using less nylon and more wool, he said. He also said a pair has lasted the entire Appalachian Trail, worn every fourth day, without a hole.
Glidden described his earlier work as a senior technical consultant for a regulatory-software company, doing database work for big telecom companies that needed to report data to the government monthly instead of yearly after a change in the law. He said he was working 80-hour weeks and once calculated he had spent the equivalent of a full month on airplanes.
He said his decision to return was simple when his father called in 2018 and asked if he wanted to come work at the family business. Two years later, he was president.
For Minus33, the turnaround appears tied to a very old business lesson: make something people actually wear, not something a business analyst in New York thinks should look better on a shelf. Glidden said the product has to solve a real problem, because 'your customer’s complaints become your complaints'.
That is the free-enterprise answer hiding inside a family-company story. Capital rewards practical products, not branding theater. In a market that gives no points for sentiment, fit and durability can beat scale, style and bureaucracy. If Glidden’s numbers hold, the lesson is plain: the taxpayer did not rescue this company; a founder got back to basics, and the market responded.
