Snoozies and the Sad State of The Novelty Slipper Market
Snoozies and the Sad State of The Novelty Slipper Market
Slippers, functional alcoholism, and the ethereal dominance of Snoozies
Every year for Christmas I usually get my sister a pair of novelty slippers. It started years ago when I was browsing one of the few local gift shops that still exist and I found a pair of slippers that were designed to look pigs from a brand called Snoozies. Hilarious! I thought, these are kind of awful and I must buy them for my sister.
To my surprise, they were an immediate hit. I thought my then teenager sister would be too cool for pig slippers, but it turns out that nobody is too cool for pig slippers, because pig slippers are amazing. She found them to be both hilarious and comfortable, so I have continued to buy her a new pair as she wears through the previous one.
Almost every Christmas I trundle down to the tiny gift store on the edge of a strip mall to search through the Snoozies rack. I beeline past the candles, jewellery, and knick knacks, heading straight for the slipper section, which is reliably stuffed to the brim with novelty slippers.
Every year the selection seem to somehow get worse. In the early years I could reliably find a bad pun or one of their animal focused ones, but it’s gotten much more difficult nowadays. I’ve seen pigs, frogs, sloths, and all manner of cute creatures on slippers, but every year there seems to be more and more of a particular kind of slipper.
It’s wine. There’s so, so, many wine focused slippers. The brand, Snoozies, is undoubtedly focused on women’s apparel, but the latest design trend seems to be less about slippers with cute puns on them and more about encouraging borderline alcoholism.
“It’s wine time,” one says. “wine not,” another cries. “Mama needs some wine,” “I’m outdoorsy, I drink wine on the porch,” the chorus continues on and on and on. Of course, the piece de resistance is a pair that reads “Alexa, bring me wine.”
Look, I get the wine mom aesthetic, I really do, and it’s totally okay to have a glass of wine after dinner, but this is less funny than it is concerning – not to mention a patently absurd joke. What does “Alexa, bring me wine,” actually mean? Sure, there’s some interplay between asking Alexa something and loving wine, but what is the joke here? That Alexa can’t actually bring you wine? I don’t think that’s actually a joke, that’s just words put together to sound like one.
I’m not looking for comedic greatness from my novelty slippers, but I am looking for something a little more interesting (and a little less concerning) than a relentless focus on wine. If the store I shopped at had an abundance of one style of slipper I would chalk it up to a survivorship bias, but no, there’s always at least five different styles of wine themed slippers on sale. To contrast, America’s second most addictive beverage, coffee, I have only ever seen featured on two slipper designs, one of which frustratingly also featured wine.
Don’t get me wrong, the Snoozies slippers seem fun and are a favourite in my household, but I was still shocked by the amount of wine represented. Naturally being incensed by this observation, the only logical response was to do an official counting of wine focused novelty slippers and find somewhere online to complain. In my quest to find all the boozie Snoozies that exist, I uncovered something a little odd.
As a resident of the internet age, I just expected to be able to hop on to whatever website they have and view their catalogue. Easy, right?
Not exactly. There are plenty of sites reselling them, most of them the same sort of local giftshop/novelty stores I buy Snoozies at, yet there isn’t much about the actual company online. Despite their popularity, they don’t seem to have a real discernible presence on the internet. There’s no social media accounts I can find and no website that pops up when I google Snoozies.
There’s a site called Snooziesslippers.com, but it’s a bizarre hybrid of a fan website and reseller. It has a number of small essays where the author lays out exactly why they love Snoozies so much. It’s written in a way that I’m sure was used mostly to climb the SEO rankings, but I’m not 100% sure. It’s just really odd all around. Their website links to a YouTube video from 2013, where a salesman shows off Snoozies at a convention (the Atlanta Shoe Market) and gives a leisurely sales pitch. I’m suddenly intrigued as the clues start revealing themselves.
Why is it that Snoozies’ only presence online is a solitary YouTube video from 2013? I search YouTube and find a smattering of reviews and show-offs from various boutiques that carry them.
So where is this company?
I pause the video as it lingers on the sign above the Snoozies stand. There’s a little symbol next to the Snoozies wordmark. A little r that says Snoozies is a registered trademark. Being the good journalist detective I am, and instead of stopping there like a normal person or asking the store where they got their slippers, I did a trademark search on the U.S.Patent and Trademark office. I found that the patent/trademark for Snoozies is registered to a man named Marshall Bank, hailing from North Carolina. Once I googled Marshall Bank, I was lead to website called snoozies.com. Bingo, right?
The webpage from Snoozies that links itself to Bank is not the site’s homepage, but seems to be the initial press release/announcement of Snoozies in 2010 (viewable here, if you so wish). It’s a fairly standard press release encouraging suppliers to buy the slippers and extoling its various uses and features. Yet it also makes some bizarre assertions. The release claims that 98% of women suffer from cold feet and that Snoozies are warm. Which is … probably true, but I’m not sure is the kind of research backed assertion you can make in a press release / sales pitch.
The release is signed by the president of a company called Buyer’s Direct Inc., none other than Marshall Bank himself.
Going to the homepage of snoozies.com redirects you into snooziescanada.ca, a single page site that leads you to the various sales reps across Canada. My rabbit hole ended there for a while as I lost the scent. There had to be a catalogue somewhere, right? How was I supposed to find all the wine themed novelty slippers?
A few minutes later an epiphany hit me and I googled Buyers Direct Inc. Perhaps this unassuming corporation name could lead me to the prize I was looking for. Sure enough, a few clicks later I arrive on buyersdirectonline.com and find the holy grail of Snoozies slippers: the full catalogue.
The website is this wonderfully 2010s experience – in fact all the Snoozies associated websites I visited felt like a blast from the past that were somehow still functional, but lacking the modern pizzaz most business sites now have. The Buyers Direct site is definitely geared towards retailers, especially seeing as the slippers are only available for sale via bulk purchases. Nevertheless, the low-tech, but solidly built website gave me what I needed.
The full catalogue incidentally proved one of my earlier hypotheses right as I saw the number of coffee slippers grew exponentially. There were more coffee themed slippers than I had ever seen, yet there’s no denying that a site with a whole section dedicated to alcohol-based slippers is a little concerning.
Sadly this is where the rabbit hole ends. There aren’t any other bizarre or hidden websites to discover. In fact, none of this is really all that interesting.
Snoozies is a simple direct to distributor model of business, one ripped right from the early 2000s/2010s retail playbook that allowed them to go international from North America to Europe, Australia, Japan, and New Zealand – this wide reach claimed by the man in the earlier video, who I assume is Bank.
The slippers debuted sometime during 2008 in a limited run and sold extremely well, prompting Bank to bring them to market in 2010. To be honest, despite its wine focused inclinations, it’s a refreshing change from my normal trend research. Today’s viral businesses are propelled to popularity by the influencers that wear them and promote them to millions of people on the internet. Businesses tend to suddenly explode with popularity and rocket in out of seemingly nowhere. The Snoozies of the world don’t match in the same way, but they still have their own comparable successes.
There’s dozens of designs available that range from cute sloths to chocolate – there’s even a Christmas themed batch. I’m intrigued until I actually read the slippers. “Dear Santa, leave presents, take cat” one reads. “My favourite colour is Christmas lights”, “This Elf runs on wine”, and there’s even one that incurs my vexations by saying “Alexa! Decorate the tree.”
What? Why? My interest fades back into annoyance. None of these actually makes sense. If I wasn’t familiar with the brand I’d figure them to be an AI creation, but these are 100% human creations – AI could never. Somehow they seem to sell and somehow I seem to be buying for my family, so Snoozies seems to be winning no matter what.
Snoozies is an enigma. It’s a brand with almost no online presence that has nevertheless crept its way across the world with a lovable soft-soled pun-filled dominance over the novelty slipper market.
This started as simple frustration with wine slippers, but as I dove into the world of Snoozies slippers, turned into so much more. It’s once again a reminder of how large the internet truly is. There could be, and probably are, dozens of sites and brands just like it. Products that are beloved but run under the radar on quiet little websites that feel more at home in 1995 then 2024. It’s bizarre and fascinating all at once, while also being mind-numbingly dull.
The clues finally reach their inexorable end as I finish browsing the site. I click through the final category of slippers on the Buyers Direct site and see a category called men’s pairables (pairables is the name they give to pairs with catch phrases or puns on them).
The list is considerably shorter than the women’s slipper list, but to my shock and horror, the first design that meets my eyes is an unholy abomination: Don’t Worry, Beer Happy. Agony.
I scroll down.
Dad needs a beer.
Sigh. Thanks for reading everyone.
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