The email reached everyone at Tesla in the middle of the night. Zack Brust remembers the time as 2:37 a.m. The message ordered the whole company back to the office, and Brust had no problem with the order itself. He liked being in the office. Then he learned which office. He lived in Los Angeles, and his assignment was Palo Alto. “I’ve never lived within two hundred miles of Palo Alto,” he told them. He had two weeks to get there.
“You kind of suspected you’re always a number,” he says. “This was as tangible as it gets. You’re a number, and your number says you live in Palo Alto.”
Brust was an engineer, and the job had been wearing on him long before the email. “You’d work your ass off for months and months on a project, it would get across the finish line, and there were times you’d never even physically go see it,” he says. “It’s a line in a spreadsheet, or a sixty-person email chain. There was no emotional payoff.” He wanted to be connected to the thing being made, or to the people making it.
Who knew the way out would be a pair of socks?
He quit to start a golf sock company. “People said I was a lunatic,” he says. “You need to almost have irrational conviction. It’s not even like I believe this is absolutely going to be a success. It was more like, life is short, I think there’s something here, and I know I’m going to work my ass off at it.”
“You’re a number, and your number says you live in Palo Alto.”
Del Campo Golf launched in 2023 after nine months and twenty-five prototypes. Brust runs the company from Atlantic Beach, Florida, under the title Chief Sockman. He left Tesla’s culture in California and carried two of its habits home. The first is depth: take what he calls one of the simplest products in the world “and just go insanely deep on it.” The second is speed. Tesla built its cars in the United States and moved fast. Del Campo makes every sock in the United States, and Brust tells customers a custom pair can go from design to the shop in four weeks.
During our call he turns his camera to a wall of socks and pulls down a pair made for the Zurich Classic, the PGA Tour stop outside New Orleans. A three-legged alligator named Tripod roamed the grounds at TPC Louisiana. “It’d be really easy to just put the TPC Louisiana logo on a sock, and that’s a great logo,” Brust says. “But what if we put Tripod holding a golf club on it?” The socks sold out. “Every pair has a story,” he says.
The payoff he never got from a spreadsheet came with the socks. The Jaguars, the Gators and the PGA Tour were the loves of his life, and none of them had anything to do with his career. He kicked for Florida in college and went to THE PLAYERS Championship every year as a fan. Now he counts twelve Tour events that carry his socks, THE PLAYERS among them, and he visits the Tour’s office in Ponte Vedra at least once a month. On Saturday he was down at Florida, where every player on the golf team wears Del Campo. “I always had a job, and then I had my life outside of it,” he says. “It’s become blurry.”
“I always had a job, and then I had my life.”
The Jaguars go back the furthest. Brust was seven when the team came to Jacksonville, and he did not miss a home game for the first ten years. He sat in the upper deck, section 440, with his brothers, parents, uncles, cousins and grandmother. “Who wasn’t there?” he says. He remembers the losing better than the winning. “It hardens you,” he says. For years the football world mocked the team and the city, and every rumor had the franchise leaving for St. Louis, London, Los Angeles or Las Vegas. “No, we’re not,” Brust says. “We’re here.”
When Del Campo landed the Jaguars license this year, the team asked what he wanted to make with its logos. “Everyone makes fun of North Floridians for jorts,” he told them. “Why don’t we just lean into it?” He made jorts and a ’90s-style polo, and he shot the collection on a backyard putting green beside the ocean. A friend’s black 1993 F‑150 was parked on the grass. Mark Brunell’s daughter stood in front of the camera, next to a row of teal stadium seats that had been bolted in on day one in 1995 and pulled out for the renovation. “That was a good decision by the league,” Brust says of the team’s arrival, “and we’re going to prove it.”
I tell him that Del Campo sounds like his Jaguars: doubted, laughed at, still here. “There’s definitely some stubbornness to it,” he says. “You’ve got to weather the storm and believe in it and keep pushing forward.”
Three years in, Del Campo has launched a V2, a V3 and a V4, and the goal is the number one sock in golf. The man who was a number in a spreadsheet now works seven days a week and says he has to remind himself to put the phone down. “If you don’t start, you can’t learn, you can’t iterate, you can’t improve,” he says. “If you don’t start, it’s just an idea.”