Implus+

Here is a company most people have never heard of, whose products are almost certainly in a drawer, a gym bag, or a pair of shoes somewhere in your house right now.

Implus, headquartered in Durham, North Carolina, does not make shoes. It makes the things that go with shoes - and with runs, and with gym sessions, and with icy sidewalks. Insoles. Odor balls. Performance socks. Foam rollers. Ice cleats. Kinesiology tape. If the shoe is the main event, Implus has spent three-plus decades quietly cornering the market on the intermission.

This is a subtly clever place to build a business. The accessory aisle is unglamorous, which is precisely why it is defensible. Nobody launches a venture-backed startup to disrupt the insole. Nobody writes breathless threads about the shoe-deodorizer category. And so, while the world watched sneaker drops, Implus assembled a portfolio of roughly 18 category-leading brands in the spaces nobody else particularly wanted - and reached the point of selling into more than 60,000 retail outlets across around 60 countries.

The origin story is appropriately humble. Implus traces its roots to the Sof Sole insole brand around 1989. From there the model was less "invent one hero product" and more "buy the aisle, one company at a time." Over the years the company made 20-plus acquisitions, folding in outdoor-traction maker Yaktrax, sock specialist Balega, fitness-training brand SKLZ, recovery names TriggerPoint and RockTape, and footcare stalwart Spenco, among others. RockTape, the story goes, was the 20th.

The mechanism that makes this work is not any single product - it's the plumbing. Implus's real asset is distribution: the shelf space, the retail relationships, the sourcing and supply chain that let a newly acquired brand plug in and instantly reach tens of thousands of stores it could never have accessed alone. Buy a promising niche brand, drop it onto the existing rails, and the math frequently improves. That's the buy-and-build playbook, footwear-accessory edition.

It has not been a solo effort, financially. Implus has spent much of its modern life under private-equity ownership - acquired by Trilantic Capital Partners in 2011, then majority-owned by Boston's Berkshire Partners from 2015. Which is to say the acquisition engine had patient capital behind it, and the incentive structure of a company being groomed and grown rather than one chasing the next quarter's headline.

In 2020, Berkshire brought in a notably heavyweight operator: Michael Polk, who had just wrapped eight years as president and CEO of Newell Brands - the consumer-products conglomerate behind Sharpie, Rubbermaid and Yankee Candle - after earlier stints at Unilever and Kraft. Polk arrived as interim CEO in February 2020, which, in hindsight, was a memorable moment to take the wheel of a consumer-goods company. He has stayed on, and by late 2024 was publicly making the case that leaders actually thrive inside privately owned businesses, free of the public-market theater. Coming from a man who ran a $10-billion-plus public company, that's at least an interesting data point.

What can you actually do with an Implus? If you're a consumer, quite a lot without realizing you're doing business with a single company: cushion your dress shoes with Spenco, deodorize your sneakers with Sneaker Balls, run in Balega socks, roll out your calves on a TriggerPoint, tape your knee with RockTape, and keep upright on an icy driveway with Yaktrax - all under one Durham roof. If you're a retailer, Implus is the vendor that fills a whole category wall with recognizable names and one purchase order. And if you're a founder studying it, the lesson is less about virality than about the compounding value of an unsexy, defensible niche plus real distribution.