Jack Danos perches on a rock in Dry Canyon wearing nothing on his feet but a pair of socks.
Frost glitters on the branches of nearby trees, the mountains are dusted in snow, and the air bites a little sharper with each passing minute.
But Danos’ toes? Toasty. As long as he wiggles them or takes a few steps, his feet stay warm — all thanks to his sock invention to keep the cold at bay.
Danos launched his company, ColdSlayer, earlier this year to sell the socks. With roughly 300 preorders already in hand, he’s now working on building a factory in Logan to make them.
“There’s still a lot left to do, but it’s starting to get the smallest glimpse of a light at the end of the tunnel,” said Danos, a 26-year-old Utah State University graduate who has been perfecting his creation for a decade. “It is by no means there yet, I am very excited and nervous for when people do get to actually use these.”
The idea struck while Danos was on a ski lift with his father, Jeff Danos. The duo were inventors, Jack Danos said, “always looking for better ways to do things.”
“He’s like, 'man, my toes are always freezing out here, but my legs are never cold,'” Danos said. “And if there was a way that we could get that heat from our legs down to our toes, we might be able to keep them warm without batteries or those shake-up chemical packs or anything like that.”
Harnessing body heat
The socks contain a small amount of fluid that moves through thin tubes. Your legs warm the liquid, and when you wiggle your toes or walk, the fluid flows down to your toes.
Danos started with a rough prototype, using IV bags, “bulky” tubing, and a sock all taped together and stuffed into a boot.
“It was just about the most uncomfortable thing you could ever wear, you could imagine,” Danos said. “But it worked.”
Over the next decade, he refined the design, figuring out how to shrink the system and make it wearable.
His wife, Chloe Danos, recalled testing the socks in a freezer when they first started dating, and later braving snowy horseback rides to see how well they kept her feet warm.
“I was like, what am I doing?” Chloe said, laughing.
Through the extensive testing, the socks always worked, she said. The real challenge was figuring out how to put the technology into a sock people would want to wear and buy.
“That’s a really kind of cool component about this product,” she said, “is there’s been so much mystery and elusiveness about, ‘How are we going to actually get this?’”
Eventually, Jack Danos landed on the machine-washable final version that features a small fluid patch behind the calf, tiny tubes running along the leg, and a pouch under the toes that warms them while circulating the fluid.
“Just wiggle your toes every once in a while,” Danos said, “your feet will just never get cold”
Chloe, who has handled much of the marketing for ColdSlayer and its Kickstarter fundraising campaign that has now topped $25,000, said the product has been interesting to promote because “everyone’s going to want them for a different reason.”
Skiers may be the most obvious audience, she said, but demand has surfaced from all kinds of places — construction workers standing on cold job sites, cyclists and hikers out in winter weather, horseback riders, and customers looking for a more environmentally friendly alternative to chemical heat packs or battery-powered socks.
The product is also safer than battery-powered socks, Chloe said, which can pose risks of fire or burns and may interfere with avalanche beacons while hiking in the backcountry.
Preorders are set at $79 a pair on Kickstarter, but Danos said the price will likely go up once regular sales begin.
Making the cold-fighting socks
Danos is in the middle of building a factory in Logan to produce ColdSlayer socks — something he hadn’t planned on when he first sketched out the idea. He spent months approaching manufacturers, he said, only to learn none of them could make the heating system the socks require.
“I never intended to start a factory to make these,” he said. “It was really just out of necessity, because it was either that or not make them at all. We have had to, like, invent new manufacturing methods that nobody else in the world has to be able to just make this product.”
The Logan factory, slated to open early next year, will produce his patented heat transfer system “where all the magic happens,” he said, and the Merino wool socks will be sourced from a supplier.
While the business is currently a family affair — with Chloe on marketing, his dad on product testing, and his mom on accounting — Danos expects to expand the team in January by bringing a part-time engineer on full time.
As for the factory, Danos said it will be largely automated to meet the precision required to build the miniature heating system embedded in the socks.
The first pair is blue and orange, with a lighter blue mountain range across the top. Once production is up and running, Danos plans to offer additional color options, and eventually, expand the technology into other products.
While perfecting the socks has been a long and tedious process, Danos said he “felt like it was too good of an idea to not take a shot.”
Inventing is “in my blood,” he explained, coming from a family of entrepreneurs. He and his father previously built a product called Tactibite Fish Call, a speaker that attracts game fish, and even landed a deal on Shark Tank.
For Danos, there’s always going to be another idea to chase.
“We don’t look at things and say, ‘Oh, that’s just how it is,’” Danos said. “It’s, ‘how could that be better?’”