The Madrid banker who quit the trading floor to sell the one thing nobody looks at - and made socks worth noticing.
Most founders chase the obvious gap. Felipe Cortina found one hiding between your shoes and your trouser hem.
Walk into a room and look down. The shoes get attention, the watch gets attention, even the belt gets a glance. The socks? They live in the blind spot of menswear - bought in black six-packs, replaced when they vanish in the laundry, never chosen with any joy. Felipe Cortina looked at that blind spot and saw a brand.
Today he is co-founder and co-CEO of Jimmy Lion, the New York-born, Madrid-fueled sock label that turned combed cotton and loud stripes into a product people actually pick on purpose. The socks sell in more than 30 countries and sit on the shelves of El Corte Ingles, Galeries Lafayette and El Palacio de Hierro. Not bad for a garment most people forget they are wearing.
The operation now runs across New York, Madrid and Mexico, with the bulk of sales in the United States and a strong home base in Spain. It is co-led - Cortina shares the wheel with Alvaro Gomis, the same friend who stood beside him in that menswear store years earlier. The two of them did not split into a founder and a hired CEO; they kept the partnership intact and put both names on the title.
The idea did not arrive in a boardroom. It arrived on a New York afternoon, sometime around 2012, when Cortina and his friend Alvaro Gomis wandered into a menswear store and watched a small scene play out: women were raiding the colorful-sock shelf, refreshing their boyfriends' wardrobes one bright pair at a time. The shelf kept emptying. The two of them kept watching.
They had met in 2008 on the unglamorous side of finance, both working at an investment bank in Madrid. By coincidence, both later landed at NYU Stern for their MBAs in the same city, the same program. When they graduated in 2012, they had a choice between safe finance careers and a hunch about socks. They picked the socks.
In 2014 they launched the first Jimmy Lion collection - a modest 8,000 pairs, made in Portugal, sold online. The orders shipped out of their New York apartment, which by then was their home, their office, and their warehouse all at once. The combed cotton came from Europe. They fussed over the durability of the cuff and the hand-linked seam at the toe, the details that separate a gift you keep from one you lose.
The timing was not accidental. A wave of design-led sock brands had already proven there was appetite for the idea - the so-called Happy Socks effect - but the field outside that handful of names was still thin, especially in Spain and Latin America. Cortina and Gomis built where the established players were not, anchoring in New York for the brand's color and energy while quietly assembling the supply chain and retail relationships that would let them scale across borders.
Stripes were only the opening argument.
Once the basics earned trust, the range widened into something closer to a personality test for the ankle. There are themed collections and characters borrowed from films, prints lifted from animals, designs that nod to urban art, and partnerships with artists who treat a sock the way others treat a canvas. There are pairs built for special occasions and pairs built for a Tuesday. The premise stays constant: a small, affordable garment can carry a surprising amount of self-expression.
It is a deceptively hard thing to pull off. A sock is cheap, which means the margin lives in the details and the storytelling, not the price tag. Cortina and Gomis leaned into custom packs, gift-ready sets, and a steady drip of new designs - the kind of catalogue that turns a one-time buyer into someone who checks back for the next drop. The model is direct-to-consumer at heart, sold online and then carried into the world's better department stores.
Pop-culture and movie-character pairs that make a serious garment a little silly on purpose.
Urban-art motifs and artist collaborations - the canvas just happens to be cotton.
Animal prints, bold patterns, and pairs designed for the days that ask for a little extra.
Cortina did not stumble into entrepreneurship sideways. He studied business administration and management at CUNEF in Madrid, one of Spain's well-regarded finance schools, then spent roughly three years inside investment banking - the kind of resume that usually leads to more banking. Instead it led to an MBA at NYU Stern and a city far enough from home to try something that would have raised eyebrows back in Madrid.
He also brought a family relationship with quality and craft. Before Jimmy Lion took over his calendar, he worked on the international growth of Vallegarcia, the family winery in Toledo. The thread between fine wine and well-made socks is not as thin as it sounds: both are small, sensory products where the difference between forgettable and beloved hides in details most people never consciously notice.
"A sock is a subtle way to express your personality through color and design."
Ties, belts and wallets were crowded. The sock aisle was a desert of black and white. Less competition, more room to be the brand people remembered.
European combed cotton, durable cuffs, hand-linked toes, and designs aimed at 20-to-30-year-olds who wanted a small, affordable way to look like themselves.
Roughly 10 euros a pair, four-packs around 30, and free shipping used deliberately to stand apart from the competition. Easy to try, easy to gift.
None of these bets is dazzling on its own. Stacked together, and repeated for a decade, they compound. The cheap product becomes a habit. The habit becomes a catalogue. The catalogue earns a spot in a department store, and the department store sends the brand into a new country. By 2021 the company had grown enough to open a 2,000 square meter logistics hub in San Fernando de Henares, outside Madrid - the unglamorous backbone that lets a brand promise fast shipping and actually keep the promise. The flat in Manhattan had become a real operation.
A rough sketch of the trajectory - one product, taken seriously, compounding.
Illustrative scale based on reported milestones, not audited figures.
Banking, an MBA, a hunch, and a long stretch of shipping boxes.
Cortina's world is not only cotton. He is the son of the late Spanish businessman Alfonso Cortina, and in 2021 he took over as president of the family's Vallegarcia winery in Toledo - the same place where he had earlier cut his teeth on international business development before Jimmy Lion. Stripes and Syrah, run from the same restless instinct: refuse to be boring.
There is a tidy lesson buried in Cortina's story, and he would probably wave it off. The overlooked product is the opportunity. Everybody owns socks. Almost nobody loved them. He noticed the gap between owning and loving, and spent a decade closing it - one combed-cotton, hand-linked, loudly striped pair at a time.
The blind spot, it turns out, was a market. Look down once in a while. Cortina did.