TAMPA, Fla. — Matthew Tesvich is a University of Georgia senior who grew up loving sports and everything that comes with them—good and bad.
"I grew up playing baseball and my socks always stank. The rule in my house was, [when] you come in you've gotta throw away your socks," he said.
It's a family rule and a joke that Tesvich said always stuck with him.
"Fast forward to college, it was my sophomore year, and my roommate brought home this towel that you could wash your hands without soap," he said. "I was like, 'Dylan, where did you get that towel?' And he was telling me that this was something his aunt was working on at the University of Tennessee, ironically. So I knew if you kill bacteria you kill odor. So I started doing research, I was up super late. And I was like, 'I wonder if I could put these into a sock to kill foot odor.'"
Tesvich said more than 18 months, 100 manufacturers, and 50 samples later—and his company Ox Sox was born.
"My dad actually came up with [the name] 'Ox Sox.' And the idea behind it is the Ox is the world's most powerful animal, and we've got the world's most powerful socks," he said.
Tesvich's inventive socks have also won him an award at UGA, but he said it's been even more rewarding to see how the socks have helped others.
"One of our first success stories was [about] a little girl who was a dancer, and she couldn't take her shoes off at school because she was so embarrassed by her foot odor," he said. "So she wore these socks, and she doesn't have to worry about it anymore. And it was just so fulfilling and joyous to hear that."
He added that his next plans are to expand Ox Sox and the types of socks it offers in the future.
