The storefront at 328A Main Street in Huntington village has a new name over the door. John's Crazy Socks, the company built by a young man with Down syndrome and his father, has renamed its shop Wahooo Market by John, and the shelves now hold a lot more than socks.

The change arrived the way this company does everything: loudly and joyfully. Dozens of friends, family members and neighbors paraded through the heart of the village this week to celebrate the launch, and Town of Huntington Supervisor Ed Smyth joined the Cronin family for the renaming, saying afterward that the town was proud to support them.

From one pair of crazy socks to a Main Street market

John Cronin and his father, Mark X. Cronin, started John's Crazy Socks on Long Island in 2016, after John finished school and decided the job he wanted did not exist yet, so he would build it with his dad. John loved colorful socks, and the online store they launched around that simple fact became a phenomenon: hundreds of thousands of orders shipped to customers in dozens of countries, a workforce where most of the crew are people with differing abilities, and a standing pledge that sends five percent of earnings to the Special Olympics. By the time the company moved into its Farmingdale warehouse in 2022, it had donated more than half a million dollars to its charity partners.

John became the public face of it all as Chief Happiness Officer, and the company's story has been told everywhere from network television to the halls of Congress. The honors have kept coming this fall: in mid-September the Marty Lyons Foundation named John its Man of the Year at a ceremony in Northport. What the company never had, for nearly a decade, was a shop where a customer could simply walk in. That changed in June, when the Cronins cut the ribbon on their first physical store on Main Street in Huntington village.

What the new market sells

Three months later, that store has grown into something bigger than the sock brand that opened it. Wahooo Market by John still carries the signature socks, but the aisles now hold apparel, jewelry, home goods, candy and cookies, and the thread connecting all of it is the mission: goods made by people with differing abilities, sold by a crew with differing abilities behind every order.

That makes the little shop in Huntington something Long Island did not have before: a Main Street showcase where the work of makers with differing abilities is the whole store, not a shelf in the back. The new name is the family's own cheer. Their announcement of the launch began with the word Wahooo and three exclamation points, which tells you everything about how the place feels when you walk in.

The bigger plan behind the name

The renaming is part of a larger turn the Cronins announced late last year, when they created Abilities Rising, an umbrella for the ventures growing up around the sock company: publishing that centers voices with differing abilities, coaching for families, consulting for workplaces that want to hire inclusively, and speaking engagements across North America. The sock business is not going anywhere. Johnscrazysocks.com keeps shipping, the Sock of the Month club keeps arriving, and the Farmingdale operation keeps packing orders.

The Huntington market is the retail face of that bigger idea, and the renaming makes the point out loud: the company that proved a man with Down syndrome could build a global sock brand is now proving the same thing about a whole community of makers.

Worth the walk down Main Street

Wahooo Market by John is at 328A Main Street in Huntington village, with the new name on the window and the same crew inside. The shop posts as wahooohuntington on Instagram.

Huntington village has plenty of places to buy a gift. It has exactly one where the gift was made by someone proving a point about what people with differing abilities can do, where the person ringing you up is part of that same story, and where the opening celebration was a parade. If you are starting holiday shopping early this year, this is a good place to let the list meet the mission.