Waterbury sock company Darn Tough on Tuesday celebrated a Canadian man’s questionable accomplishment of wearing a single pair of its socks for 101 days straight.
The company honored 48-year-old Desmond Tse of Edmonton for smashing the previous record of 55 days, held by an outdoor gear podcaster.
“Some call it impossible. Some call it inadvisable. We call it brand validation,” company spokesperson Courtney Laggner said during the lighthearted ceremony at the company’s headquarters.
Tse is a siding contractor who started offering pro tips on Instagram during the pandemic. He admitted to his followers, who now number more than 300,000, that he usually wore socks from Costco and just threw them away when they inevitably wore out.
Seeing an opportunity to grow its workwear market, Darn Tough began sending Tse free socks about six years ago, and he fell in love with them, according to his wife, Carley Tse.
In March, Desmond learned about the record that Adam Jaber set in 2023 and decided to top it.
The rules? He had to wear the same pair every day without washing them, taking them off only to shower and sleep.
Sometimes, after a run, Tse would lay his 1466 Hiker Micro Crews out in the sun to dry while he took a shower. They never saw the inside of a washing machine.
“I promised Carley that I would stop as soon as she sensed any odor at all,” he said.
But because the socks are made of merino wool, they miraculously never stank, he said. They never got any holes, either, even though they were 2 years old when he began the challenge, he said.
He wore them from May 1 to August 9 and only changed after he took part in a Spartan race that forced him to run through muddy water.
“Honestly, I could have gone a lot longer,” he said.
Company quality inspectors in white lab coats made a show of inspecting the pair Tse wore and confirmed they held up.
Then they presented Tse with a framed sock as an award “for taking our lifetime guarantee a little too literally.”
The original print version of this article was headlined “Darn Nasty”
This article appears in September 23 • 2026.
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