The Activskin Story - I

by Steve K

Steve Katz of Activskin.com is well known in the hosiery world as a pioneer and the premier manufacturer of tights designed for men. I have been badgering Steve to publish his story for a long time. At last he has sent me his material - enough for two blog entries! So I am publishing the first one now and the second one after Christmas. - G.

A lot of people have asked us how we got into this business of selling men's tights and stockings. Wouldn't it be easier to sell ice to Eskimos? Well, it all started in 1920, when my great-grandfather, G. Lieberman, a Russian immigrant to the US,  started up a hosiery wholesaling business in St. Louis, Missouri. He sold stockings, socks, and eventually sleepwear and underwear, to all the small "mom-and-pop" clothing and dry goods stores in the area. The business was very prosperous, and my grandfather joined the business and carried it through the depression and World War II. After the war, my uncles joined the firm and they did well with it for many years, until the discount stores, department stores, and large suburban malls drove the small clothing shops out of business. As their accounts died off, business dwindled and my uncles retired in the early 1990s, mothballing G. Lieberman & Sons.

There's a standing joke that when St. Louisans meet, the first question they ask is "So where did you go to high [secondary] school?" In case anyone reading this has such an inquiring mind, I grew up in University City (near Washingto University in St. Louis), and attended University City High School, and then Washington University. While at the university, I studied geology, and met my wife, Constance. We traveled a lot in the 1970s (petrol was $0.29US per gallon back then!) and enjoyed camping. We invested in some serious goose down filled sleeping bags which were expensive but lightweight and warm for backpacking in the Rocky Mountains. My wife suggested that in order to keep the sleeping bags clean so they didn't have to be laundered frequently, thereby causing the down to clump and lose insulating value, we wear tights to sleep.

It sounded like a good idea, so we did. I found that I liked the warmth and comfort from the tights, and would wear them under my jeans in the early morning and late evening around camp. We could thus dispense with the thermal underwear and save weight, an important consideration in backpacking. I further liked the way the nylon tights acted as an inner liner sock, saving me blisters on a long hike, because the friction took place between the outer sock and inner sock, instead of between the sock and my foot. For years afterward, I would wear my wife's hand-me-down tights in winter under my clothes for practical warmth, since they were never too hot indoors and didn't require changing when going from outside to inside.

Fast forward to August, 1998. After a series of careers in science and technology, I was looking for a way to capitalize on the then-current dot-com craze. As a boy growing up in a family with a hosiery business, I surfed the Web for ideas by searching on the key words "tights", "pantyhose", "stockings", "hosiery", "nylons", "legwear", etc.. Mostly all I found was pornography, which, although potentially prosperous, wouldn't have gone over well with the wife or family! Somewhere amid all the smut, I found several web sites or snippets of web sites that proposed that tights should be unisex, because men wore them too, for reasons beyond fetish and crossdressing. A light went on, and I discussed with Constance the possibility of becoming an Internet purveyor of legwear for the niche market of men. She encouraged me to pursue it further, so together we did.

The first thing we did was to see what it was like going public. There was an outdoor flea market in Sunbury, Ohio, about a 45 minute drive from our home in Granville, so I dressed in a gray polo shirt, dark shorts, black opaque tights, and black walking shoes. We drove there and walked all over the town square, checking out the fleas, and looking for reactions from people. Nothing. Nobody noticed. One guy may have looked at me out of the corner of his eye and then went back to what he was doing. No facial expression or body language indicated anything. I couldn't believe it. We met some friends for lunch in a restaurant that had a salad bar. I thought surely they would notice my tights and say something. Nope, nothing. We finished lunch and said our good-byes and we came home. I couldn't imagine I was as invisible as I was! Some months later, after we announced our business and told these friends, I asked them if they remembered seeing me in tights that day in Sunbury, and they said no, they never noticed! That was our first indication that people were really unobservant.

Part 2