“When we went down there to visit the facility, there was a family connection,” he says. “There was a mutual appreciation and dedication to quality, as well as the capacity to be able to continue to grow and scale, so we’ll be able to maintain this partnership and grow alongside them.” Bolstered by inventive promotions such as its Boys Club, through which subscribers receive a new pair of socks not available for individual sale on the first of every month, Ace & Everett now sees its products carried by boutique shops in a dozen states, as well as Puerto Rico and Japan, and online. The company’s designs are evocative of New York City architecture; for instance, The Blake is redolent of construction-site fencing but stylized with a classic medallion jacquard.
With a distinctly cosmopolitan backdrop, each season’s suave styles lend themselves well to the kind of fashion photography made for the age of Instagram. In fact, the brand’s account on the popular photo-sharing social medium showcased a series of dramatic, first-person perspective shots with Ace & Everett-clad feet dangling from various Manhattan skyscrapers. After appearing on the online news outlet Buzzfeed, the story and the dizzying photos went viral, and the subsequent buzz helped to catapult Ace & Everett into the public consciousness. The brothers also spent several weeks on the road last spring promoting their brand on their Great American Road Trip. They were able to speak with retailers in a number of cities, but also detoured well off the beaten path. The brothers’
willingness to inject themselves into totally unfamiliar cultural milieux, such as the Louisiana Bayou, made for rather unexpected imagery. “What we were trying to do, especially around content marketing, are events that are visually compelling and eye-catching, and that have the potential to be shared in a viral component,” Disch explains. “The Road Trip was that as an opportunity to get out there, to physically interact with customers, wholesalers, and different creatives in each one of the cities that we stopped in, and let them know, ‘Hey, we are two brothers who are extremely dedicated and passionate about our company and about our product.’” Sock it to your sense of style at aceandeverett.com.
Sage Disch ’09 doesn’t require the Manhattan backdrop to display the cosmopolitan sense of style he’s built into Ace & Everett.
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