We were lucky to catch up with Tate Mayo recently and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Tate, thanks for joining us today. So, what do you think about family businesses? Would you want your children or other family members to one day join your business?

When business is good there is nothing better than doing it with your family. When business isn’t doing so well anybody but your family would be better to do business with.

My goal is to leave behind something to my posterity something greater than an empty old factory and a patch of sand that used to be a family farm. Challenges in agriculture, American textiles and family business in general have eaten to the core of what we have. But we’re still farming just the same as we were after the American Revolution. But we’re still making socks like we have since 1931. We’re still family.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

Since the latter part of 2017 my sisters and I have tried to find our spot in the family business and family farm. There are 15 people in our generation of the Mayo family. There are two of us with boots on the ground in Tarboro.

I have long dreamt of tending to the land that I grew up on. My obsession with tractors as a child has only grown stronger with time. Shortly after college I moved home and was able to work the green beasts of the fields everyday.

I was fortunate enough to meet Julius Tillery, the owner of a company called Black Cotton, in North Carolina Tobacco Trust Fund Commission’s Agricultural Leadership Development Program. Julius is a cotton farmer from North Hampton County that takes the cotton from his farm and turns it into products. He introduced me to Mark at Hill Spinning Company in Thomasville who takes raw cotton and turns it into yarn.

It was at this juncture that I connected the dots. I had seen boxes of yarn from Hill Spinning at the knitting mill but had never thought to get the cotton that we grew turned into yarn until I figured out that we could.

This is where Mayo Mills began. My sisters and I had tried twice already to make our own brand of socks and not met the expectations that we set out for ourselves. We started as Conference Colors in 2017. Hoping to make socks with school colors and the state shape of the schools on crew socks seemed like a good idea but we didn’t sell enough to keep it going.

We decided to rebrand as America’s Socks sometime around 2019. We had more success than what we had had with Conference Colors but still not enough steam to keep it going. We had a great local following that hasn’t waned but it was hard to get it out of our hometown.

Then comes the pandemic. Our knitting mill was shut down for an entire month. Things were hectic in everyone’s lives. We saw firsthand the necessity of keeping things local. Going to the grocery store really showed how little is made in the United States and how reliant we are on international trade.

This was also the same time that I had met Julius and convinced my family that we needed to get yarn made from our cotton and turn it into socks. After all, our family has farmed since the founding of the country and made socks for almost a hundred years.

Today we are able to trace our entire supply chain and it’s all in North Carolina. Our cotton alone helps support 103 North Carolinians. 6 at our farm, 22 at the cotton gin, 45 at Hill Spinning and 30 at Mayo Knitting Mill.

The large brands no longer do business with us. We can’t compete with $0.18 minimum wages in China in either farming or manufacturing. That cheap foreign labor has been a death blow to textile manufacturing and manufacturing in general in the United States.

Hill Spinning Company was one of nearly 100 yarn spinning facilities in the state of North Carolina and now there are three. Textile manufacturers across the state used to be plentiful and now they are mostly empty buildings. The College of Textiles at my Alma mater NC State used to be the largest school within the university and today it is the smallest.

By combining two things that we know well, farming and socks, we are able to make a superior product. We can’t compete with the prices that you’ll find on Amazon or at your local supermarket but we can’t compete tell you everyone that you support when you buy from us and they are all North Carolinians.

Can you share one of your favorite marketing or sales stories?

When we first started Mayo Mills we only had basic white and black basic socks. My wife Katie, who was my girlfriend at the time, told me that we needed “something cute” on our socks instead of being “plain” and “boring”. When I asked what “something cute” would be she told me that a smiley face would be cute.

I left the house shortly thereafter and decided that I wasn’t going to leave the knitting mill until I had a smiley face on a sock. It took me until 5:30 the next morning to get something that I was happy with to show Katie. To this day it is our best-selling sock.

How did you build your audience on social media?

My sister Grace handles our social media or as I call it “The Google Machine.” While I’m not quite sure of how well it is going for us on MySpace, Grace has built us up quite a following on other social media sites.

We even have a Tik Tok page. To this day I don’t understand what Tik Tok is but I did make a short “reel” on my phone that seems to have done quite well.

Just be yourself in social media would be my best advice. Make mistakes. Be imperfect. Nothing is more human than being a real person in how you portray yourself online. Be more like Bob Ross and have some “happy little mistakes.”

Contact Info:

• Website: https://mayomills.com
• Instagram: @mayo_mills
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/themayomills