After a year in limbo, Darn Tough recruits in Waterbury to boost production

June 18, 2021  |  By Tulley Hescock | Community News Service

Empty space in the Waterbury Darn Tough facility will soon be filled with sewing machines for sock production. Photo by Tulley Hescock.

Last Saturday, Darn Tough Socks opened the doors in Waterbury for a weekend job fair in hopes of hiring 60 people to get production at their new location here started by October. 

The turnout to help staff up the local manufacturer as it rebounds from a year plus of COVID-19 limitations did not disappoint. 

The company’s head of Human Resources, John LeBourveau, said he and the rest of his staff who worked the fair were thrilled with the response. The event brought in just under 100 interested candidates and it resulted in 20 on-the-spot hirings. 

“We got a bunch of people, many of them local. I think a lot of them probably … worked at Green Mountain Coffee and [are] looking to come back to the space, so you know, it was a big success,” LeBourveau said. 

Darn Tough is the brand of socks made by Cabot Hosiery Mills, a family-owned Vermont business based in Northfield. The company expanded its headquarters to include a second location in Waterbury in space formerly occupied by Keurig Dr. Pepper in the downtown Pilgrim Park commercial complex. Here they have offices, storerooms, and a cavernous space where they plan to bring in knitting machines to begin making socks soon.

The Waterbury Darn Tough facility now stores merchandise for distribution. Photo by Tulley Hescock.

Darn Tough prides itself on being a Vermont company that employs Vermont workers. Its bet on Waterbury as the place to expand so far seems to spot on. LeBourveau said Waterbury was ideal because of its location in the state and because they knew there was a workforce available after manufacturing job cuts by Keurig over the past few years. 

“It was our hope that if we came back here, people that had originally lived in Waterbury would still be interested in staying here, or at least to come back if they knew that good jobs were here,” LeBourveau said.

Getting things up and running at full tilt has been a challenge, however. Darn Tough opened its Waterbury headquarters in March 2020, the same week Vermont went into a statewide lockdown as the COVID-19 pandemic began. Many people were sent home as the operation was shut down, however, LeBourveau said the company still grew 10% since then.

The facility in Waterbury currently houses a warehouse of socks to fill orders on the first floor, and administrative offices on the second floor. From the warehouse, Darn Tough fills wholesale orders as it does not have its own retail stores. While supplying other retailers with its products though, the company has also increased its own online sales. 

Darn Tough Manufacturing Manager Sasha Cady works the weekend job fair. Photo by Tulley Hescock.

Bringing on the Waterbury facility as another manufacturing operation will grow the company’s production. “We are at full capacity in Northfield. There was no opportunity to expand at the current footprint we had in our buildings, so Waterbury became excess,” LeBourveau said.

Now by adding new machines and more staff, the Waterbury plant will not just contain office and distribution functions, it will be turning out the rugged socks that come with a lifetime guarantee. 

LeBourveau said that production managers will assign certain socks to be made exclusively in each location, but that each facility will have the ability to make any type of sock. “We wanted to find a way to keep manufacturing close to the people that support manufacturing,” LeBourveau said. 

At Saturday’s job fair, Manufacturing Manager Sasha Cady handed out applications in a waiting area on the second floor of the Waterbury facility. She relocated her family from the Newport area to Waterbury after working for Darn Tough for a year. Now she’s two years in and she said she loves the family environment at her workplace. 

Darn Tough head of Human Resources John LeBourveau welcomes applicants at the Waterbury facility. Photo by Tulley Hescock.

“To know that even at the employee level people know that they're cared about and they are a company that will invest in them just as much as they invest back,” Cady said. 

Workers who make the socks are known as knitters and those positions start off paying $16 an hour. “We focus a lot more on quality of life for folks,” LeBourveau said. “Currently the Northfield plant runs 24/7 with three knitting shifts running for nine hours each, four days a week with three days off.”

Vanessa Cochran helped to check job candidates in at the front door on Saturday. She is a third-shift knitter, meaning she works the 10:45 a.m. to 7:15 p.m. shift, which she said is hard but works better with her children’s schedule. She described Darn Tough as a “local staple.”

She explained: “It sounds like they're trying to keep it in Vermont. Keep the jobs here which is big for me.” 

LeBourveau said other jobs at Darn Tough Waterbury include filling shipment orders of socks as well as administrative positions. 

If all goes as planned, Darn Tough will be making socks in Waterbury by the middle of September to October. That will mean more trucks in and out of the Pilgrim Park commercial complex again as trucks loaded with socks continue to replace trucks hauling coffee pulling out onto Main Street.

Community News Service is a collaboration with the University of Vermont’s Reporting & Documentary Storytelling program.