The dorm-room startup Skunk Skin, maker of an odor-preventing sock featured on the Amazon Prime show Buy It Now, has been acquired by Western Wearhouse, a retailer in Atlanta that specializes in Western-style clothing, according to Matthew Tesvich, founder and CEO of Skunk Skin. Terms of the deal were undisclosed.

Tesvich, 25, says the retailer wanted to add the socks to its product lineup as a complement to the boots it sells. “In the Western industry, there is a huge need for anti-odor products,” he said.

Jerome Underwood, owner of Western Wearhouse, said the brand’s uniqueness stood out.

“Skunk Skin caught our attention because it’s genuinely one of a kind,” said Underwood in a statement. “In a market flooded with commodity products, a brand with a real identity that resonates with its customers is rare—and that’s exactly what we look for. Our goal is to pour resources into what makes the brand great, scale it thoughtfully and bring it to a much larger audience. This is about expanding a category, not just adding an SKU—and we’re excited to be part of this next chapter.”

Tesvich said the Skunk Skin brand will continue to operate under the new ownership. He will stay on during the transition and through the end of the year and will be involved in R&D for new products, he says.

Tesvich officially launched the business under the name OX SOX in 2020 from his dorm room at the University of Georgia’s Terry College of Business. The brand uses a chemical-free anti-odor technology Tesvich developed after being inspired by a roommate’s antibacterial towel.

The entrepreneur had planned to play baseball in college, but after tearing the cartilage in both shoulders and injuring his elbow, he turned his attention to entrepreneurship. He raised $250,000 in non-dilutive funding for the startup through pitch competitions.

Tesvich appeared on Buy It Now in 2024, navigating a port workers’ strike that threatened to delay the arrival of his inventory before the show. After he was cast, he flew around the country to visit his top 10 customers to gather feedback on the brand, and ultimately renamed it Skunk Skin.

Discovering that Skunk Skin’s most ardent customers were blue-collar workers and athletes, who often cope with damp shoes where bacteria can grow, he targeted his marketing to them. The brand grew distribution to all 50 states and all seven continents.

Tesvich said Skunk Skin was on pace to reach $1 million in annual revenue by 2025, in an interview we did for Forbes in late 2024. That put him and his co-founder, Payton Cranford, among the growing number of million-dollar, one-person businesses and partnerships.

The number of million-dollar, “nonemployer” businesses in the U.S. reached an all-time high of 117,760 in 2023, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Nonemployer businesses don’t have traditional employees. They have extended what one or two people can do by relying on automation, AI, outsourcing, contractors and other ways to achieve high impact with very lean operations.

Tesvich says his next step will be launching another startup. In the meantime, he is interested in promoting manufacturing in the U.S. He reached out to more than 130 manufacturers before he found one in China that would develop a prototype and produce the socks for Skunk Skin.

“Everything that we did was very China-dependent,” he said. “I'm very interested in sourcing domestically and how we can improve US manufacturing efforts here and become less China dependent and more self-reliant.”