Just Who Is This Lily Trotter, Anyway?

Lily trotters are birds that look like our logo – birds with absurdly long legs and huge clawed feet that are found in tropical, marshy regions of the wild. Lily trotters’ extraordinary legs and feet enable them to hop over lily pads and walk on floating vegetation. In fact, their uncanny ability to appear to walk on water earned lily trotters the nickname Jesus Bird. Contrastingly, they have also been called the Prostitute Bird.

In nature, female lily trotters are the ultimate power chicks – as they are larger than their male counterparts, who are responsible for incubating and raising the young. The female lily trotter will stake out a large territory and mate with multiple males. Once a mate builds her a nest, she will lay a clutch of eggs and then go relax before she seeks out another male with whom to breed. (We applaud her bold ways and choose to not judge her!)

Our founder Susan saw plenty of lily trotters on the trip to Africa that inspired our socks in 2012, but it was her daughter who found a rustic metal sculpture of the lily trotter in Nairobi. They brought the sculpture home and placed it in their front hallway. Then one day, in the midst of trying to name our sock line, they thought, ‘What about Lily Trotters?' as they passed the bird sculpture while rushing out the front door. The rest, as they say, is history.

What fun we have had working with such a cool bird for inspiration! Imagine how high she might leap if her long legs could experience the benefits of compression? We’ll just have to get to work on that…