Sheer sadness

Kenmore Square is losing a landmark. No, not Fenway Park, silly. Super Socks!

by Jason Gay

Some businesses work because they do something that no one else does. Other businesses work because they do something better than everyone else does.

Then there are businesses that work because they do everything. This is why it is depressing to talk about the imminent closing of Super Socks, the world's best pantyhose/phone card/nipple-piercing/baseball hat/Halloween superstore, located in Kenmore Square.

Super Socks is one of those wondrously haphazard urban enterprises that have no particular rhyme or reason. Whereas today's hyperslick corporate stores -- Banana Republic, for example -- are laid out by people with design degrees who know exactly how many cubic feet should divide the stretch pants from the ribbed T-shirts, Super Socks is the kind of place that makes it up as it goes along. At the center of the store, socks are piled higher than a frat boy's laundry heap. Dozens of phone-card advertisements are plastered in the entranceway. Hand-written signs resemble the scribbled confessions of serial killers. Boxes of hats and T-shirts are arranged at ankle height. Looking for something special for Halloween? Go down the aisle, take a left, and trip.

Super Socks may be a mess, but it's a glorious mess. The store was founded 10 years ago by Karl Volker, a 45-year-old Austrian with a thick brown mustache and a devilish laugh. Karl has had an entrepreneurial life more interesting and random than that of any Forbes 400 member. He knows more about the nuts and bolts of business than most MBAs. He also says he takes a daily tae kwon do class. It's not clear if this last fact is conveyed merely as a piece of information.

Karl's story goes something like this: born and raised in Austria, he went to school and got a degree in hotel management. Sometime after this he went to England and Belgium and France. He worked in Monte Carlo. He spent four years working on a cruise ship. He started out as a waiter. He ended up as a purchasing agent. Remember that last part. It's important.

Karl decided to come ashore on the West Coast. He wound up working as a chef in Lake Tahoe. He cooked, he skied, he cooked, he skied. He eventually gave that up and went to work for the Hyatt in San Francisco. Then the Hyatt in Hawaii. Then the Hyatt in Cambridge. He liked the Boston area. When Hyatt asked Karl to transfer out of Cambridge, he decided to quit his job and stay. He bought a little coffee shop in the Downtown Crossing T stop. Business was pretty good.

But when the MBTA renovated the Downtown Crossing stop, the powers that be said Karl could no longer sell food. He would have to switch to retail. Karl wondered what he should sell. A friend had an epiphany: socks. Now cue Karl's experience as a purchasing agent on a cruise ship. Karl learned the socks business inside and out. He traveled. He scouted out the Empire State Building, a/k/a the New York Sock Exchange, where more than 90 hosiery retailers have their corporate offices. He spent two weeks at a plant in North Carolina, studying pantyhose.

Studying pantyhose. "Ninety percent of the people who wear hosiery don't know anything about hosiery," says Karl.

A Super Socks empire was spawned. After the Downtown Crossing store, Karl opened branches in Kenmore Square and Coolidge Corner. He decided to sell other things besides socks. He took on new product lines like an elderly shut-in adopting stray cats. He did clothing. T-shirts. Hats. Costumes. Super Socks developed a reputation as a place to go for cheap Halloween stuff, whether it was fake blood, fake teeth, or fake boobs. "Halloween is like Christmas to us," says Karl.

Karl also decided to do piercings. It's a high-profit industry, he explains. He got a piercing gun and taught himself. He pierces people right at the counter. "No big deal," Karl says. "Anyone can do it." At first, he pierced ears. Then noses. Then bellybuttons. Then tongues. Then other body parts. "We close the door," Karl says, uncorking that devilish laugh.

At the Kenmore Super Socks, Karl did baseball. His Comm Ave store is but a few feet from the Green Line. Every home game, Karl set up tables and hawked T-shirts and caps for five bucks. That's about the cost of a beer in the bleachers. Super Socks became a well-known place for buying cheap baseball stuff. There was a bus tour from Toronto that stopped at the store before every Blue Jays series.

But baseball was unreliable. The strike hurt. If the team sucked, business sucked. Things got better when Nomar and Pedro arrived, Karl says, but it was still unpredictable. You never knew. A better bet was international phone cards. Phone cards are unreal. In recent times, in fact, they have been much more super than socks: Karl claims that his store sold more than a million dollars' worth of phone cards last year.

But profits don't always guarantee a future. Super Socks is one of several Kenmore businesses getting kicked out by Boston University to make way for a swanky hotel. Karl was supposed to be out already, but he persuaded BU to let him stay through Halloween. He thinks he may be able to hang on until the first of the year. But he's not so sure.

Understandably, Karl is frustrated that he's getting the boot from Kenmore. After all, it's not as if this branch of Super Socks isn't successful. Today, as we sit on the steps leading down to the storefront, a steady stream of customers files in -- punk rockers, BU international students, hippies, students from the nearby hair school. "The problem is when you work really hard and you exceed what you want to accomplish, and then someone kicks you out," Karl says, as he makes an appointment with a young woman to pierce her tongue.

Karl may be back. Don't count him out. He's still got his stores in Downtown Crossing and Coolidge Corner. And he's got eyes on an abandoned building a few hundred yards down Comm Ave. It won't have the captive baseball business, but it's still close to Kenmore. It's something. And Karl Volker, owner of Super Socks, is used to making something out of nothing.