FAST COMPANY

TOMS SETS OUT TO SELL A LIFESTYLE, NOT JUST

SHOES
FOUNDER BLAKE MYCOSKIE HAS SET OUT TO SAVE THE WORLD
WITH HIS "ONE-FOR-ONE" TAGLINE. HIS CRITICS SAY THAT GIVING
ALONE DOESNT SOLVE A THING.

BY: JEFF CHU

Carpe diem.
It's a bit surprising to see that Blake Mycoskie repeatedly invokes
such a hoary old self-help slogan. But there it is, in foot-high,
wooden letters on an upstairs landing at the Los Angeles
headquarters of his shoe and accessories company, Toms. There it
is again, in a painting on the wall of his office/man cave. And you'll
find him repeating it several times in his book, Start Something
That Matters.
If there's anyone who can make a case for seizing the day, it's
Mycoskie. He has done it repeatedly and successfully over the past
seven years, orchestrating Toms's rise into the top flight of fashion
and establishing it as a new kind of business. More than any other
brand, Toms has integrated old-fashioned, for-profit
entrepreneurship with new-wave, bleeding-heart philanthropy,
bonding moneymaking and giving in an unprecedented manner.
The company has become so closely identified with giving away a
pair of shoes to a poor child for every pair sold--Toms has
trademarked the tagline "one for one"--that it's often mistaken for
a charity. And it has spawned buy-one-give-one copycats offering
everything from dog treats to cups of coffee.

WITH HIS DEEP TAN,

UNTAMED MESS OF CURLY
BROWN HAIR, AND
SOMETIMESQUESTIONABLE HYGIENE,
MYCOSKIE APPEARS
ALMOST FERAL.

This spring, Toms gave away its

10 millionth pair of shoes. "Within
the next 18 to 24 months,"
Mycoskie says, "we expect we'll
have given away 10 million
more." It now also sells
sunglasses--more than 150,000

pairs in the past two years--and in turn has helped deliver eye care
to more than 150,000 people. Toms currently donates shoes in 59
countries and eye care in 13. The figures add up to remarkable
growth for a remarkable company, one that has put shoes on the
feet of many poor children, made its owner a very rich man, and
pioneered a much-admired business model. "I had no idea it would
ever get this big," says Mycoskie, a 36-year-old Texan whose laidback, surfer-dude vibe masks the ambition of an entrepreneur who
prefers to talk less about the company he has built than of the
movement he is building. "Now that we've grown, it's all about:
How do you use these resources to do even more?"
Mycoskie says the one-for-one model
Related: The
could involve much more than your feet
Broken BuyOne, Give-One
and your eyes--he envisions a Toms
Model: 3 Ways
empire that encompasses all sorts of
To Save Toms
Shoes
everyday products. But what many of his
critics would like him to talk about instead-and what, during two long interviews with
Fast Company, he discussed publicly at length for the first time-are Toms's failings on the giving side and its plans to change its
ways. You could sum that up with a different Latin phrase: Mea
culpa.

There's an old Dutch proverb that says "Shoemaker, stick to thy

last"--an admonition to go with what you know. But what if you
never knew much about anything, including how to make shoes?
Mycoskie has never been conventional. The son of an orthopedic
surgeon and a cookbook author, he confesses that he never
graduated from high school (he didn't fulfill his Spanish
requirement) but managed to attend Southern Methodist
University anyway; he then dropped out after two years as a
philosophy and business major. He started a laundry company, a
billboard company, and an online driver-training company before
he hit upon Toms, and says that he has never known anything
about any of the businesses he has gotten into. "When you don't
know the rules, you break them all," he tells me when I meet him in
his L.A. office in early April. "It's hard to take big risks when you
know the history of an industry and what has worked and what
didn't."

For several years he lived on a boat, until he got married last

summer and his wife, Heather, forced the issue. And while he loves
to read business books--John Mackey's Conscious Capitalism is a
recent favorite--he also revels in talking about Plato, Socrates, and
Kierkegaard and in reflecting on the existential questions of his
purpose in life. "Anytime I see a book like that," he says, "I buy it."
The reading can only have helped. Mycoskie is a brilliant storyteller
and a charismatic, masterful marketer--one of his staff says that
Toms's secret "is Blake's gut"--and in some ways, the Toms
genesis story has been the company's most lucrative product.
Mycoskie was traveling in Argentina in 2006, playing polo and
drinking wine, when he met a woman who was collecting shoes
for the poor. Startled that in the 21st century so many kids still
needed shoes, he decided to start a shoe company that would give
a pair away for every one it sold. His first product: a variation of the
traditional Argentine shoe that he brought home from his trip, the
rope-soled, canvas-topped alpargata.
With $5,000 saved from his earlier ventures, Mycoskie set up shop
in his Venice apartment. It was chaos. Liza Doppelt, the second
person Toms hired, recalls that when she arrived for her interview,
"I had to physically move dirty laundry from the armchair I was told

to sit on." When Garett Awad showed up for his internship

interview a couple of months later, he found boxes and shoes
everywhere. "It was totally insane," he says, "and I thought, Yes, this
is exactly what I want." (Doppelt is now VP of marketing for
eyewear, while Awad heads retail marketing.)
Despite the mess behind the scenes, the combination of a slightly
exotic yet still approachable shoe and a do-gooder story proved
alchemical, establishing the brand's popularity with tastemakers in
fashion, lifestyle, and entertainment. Booth Moore, the Los Angeles
Times's fashion critic, was the first to write about Toms, in May
2006. Then the editors at Vogue featured Toms in its October
2006 issue, naming legendary designer Karl Lagerfeld as an earlyadopting fan.
The shoes themselves did not always work as well as the story. The
first pairs of Toms--the name stands for tomorrow's shoes--were
made in Argentina, but Mycoskie quickly realized that producing in
China would be more cost-effective. As a supply-chain novice, he
didn't send anyone to supervise production there. "If you don't
show that you care, they assume you don't care," says Jonathan
Jung, Toms's first hire. "Every single pair was defective in some
way--glue stains, mismatched shoes, insoles that were too big for
that shoe." Mycoskie, Jung, and a crew hired via Craigslist worked
crazy-long hours to salvage what they could, cleaning stains,
matching pairs, pulling out insoles and recutting them to fit. (Jung
is now director of supply-chain planning for Toms.)
Another early Mycoskie mistake nearly cost the company its
account with Nordstrom, which today is Toms's biggest retailer. "I
was adamant I didn't want the environmental waste of cardboard
boxes," he says. "I wanted organic linen bags with drawstrings. It
meant less money spent on shipping. It was eco-friendly." It was
also salesperson-unfriendly. Finding the right sizes amid the messy
piles of linen bags took too long, and the drawstrings were forever
entangling. Sales tanked. Toms went back to conventional boxes.
For someone who has quickly built a formidable fashion-andlifestyle brand, Mycoskie has never been much of a fashion guy.
His look could be described as sentimental neo-hippie. He always
wears a thatch of bracelets and a tangle of necklaces, accessorized
by stories; one faded, pinkish woven-fabric strip around his wrist
was a gift from a young boy on the first shoe drop in Argentina,
while his string of brown prayer beads comes from an Indian
ashram he and Heather visited during their honeymoon.

When we went to lunch one day, he wore a blousy, shiftlike top he

had picked up in Nepal, shorts in a Native American print that he
thought were Polo Ralph Lauren, and a pair of camouflage-print
Toms. With his deep tan, untamed mess of curly brown hair, and
sometimes-questionable hygiene, he appears almost feral. (By all
accounts, he has been significantly cleaner since he married.
Heather told me that her wedding vows included a pledge to "love
him regardless of how many times he showers or whether he
brushes his teeth on a daily basis.")
That don't-care-too-much sensibility fits well with what Toms
sells. It's not so much shilling tangible, sartorial accessories (shoes,
sunglasses) as offering ineffable, emotional ones--an aura of
goodwill, a sense that one is doing something positive with that
consumer dollar. "We're about empowering people, inspiring
people, helping them to see the life they could live differently,"
says Awad, the retail marketing head. "We've changed the way
people think about consumption."
If that sounds a tad grandiose and self-righteous--the rhetorical
opposite of the humble alpargata--it's also completely consonant
with the way we live and market today. Toms has identified likeminded, high-profile influencers, partnering with Charlize Theron
and Ben Affleck, who collaborate on limited-edition lines and
appear at Toms events to promote the brand and their own causes.
And it has heavily courted young, trendsetting actors and
musicians, such as Olivia Wilde and Passion Pit, hoping that they'll
be photographed in and tweet about their Toms. (The company
says these unofficial brand ambassadors occasionally receive free
products but are never paid.)
The Toms story has also been magnetic to big corporations, which
have integrated the brand into major ad campaigns and saved
Toms the expense of advertising. After an ad exec saw an item
about Toms on a video screen in the back of a New York taxicab,
Mycoskie and Toms were featured in TV commercials for AT&T.
Microsoft, American Greetings, and AOL have promoted Toms in
digital campaigns.
All this publicity has helped Toms become more than a small
business very quickly. The company, which is wholly owned by
Mycoskie, does not release revenue or profit figures. But Mycoskie
did tell me that the average retail price for a pair of Toms is $55,
and that about 30% of its revenues come from direct-toconsumer sales via Toms.com. Its giveaway projections--a trailing

indicator of sales, since Toms aims to distribute its "giving" pairs

within six months of a consumer's purchase--indicate that it
expects to sell at least 7 million pairs of shoes this year. A little
back-of-the-envelope math gives a conservative revenue estimate
of nearly $250 million in 2013, but an inside source suggests that
the figure will surpass $300 million (including sunglasses).
The hard part? "Giving, man," Mycoskie says with a shake of his
head. "Giving is hard."
Toms's powerful marketing, its good intentions, and the potential
of its model to do enormous good inspire widespread praise. Lane
Wood, a not-for-profit consultant who has worked with Charity:
water, the well-digging NGO that is one of Toms's partners, credits
Toms with helping companies mature beyond basic corporate
social responsibility. "People have seen the success of Toms and
said, 'How do I get a piece of that?'" he says. "While you've seen
some really disingenuous campaigns, what I'm excited about is that
this will become ubiquitous. Companies have to understand the
effect they have on the world."
Yale professor Dean Karlan, who has done groundbreaking
research on poverty alleviation, seems cautiously optimistic about
what Toms has achieved--and what it could yet accomplish.
"Toms has a tremendous vehicle for figuring out how to do this
right," he says. "It's a neat idea. I love the passion. But show us the
impact, because it takes more than passion to do good."
Here is where the critics chime in. Laura Seay, a professor at
Morehouse College, argues that by giving away millions of pairs of
shoes, Toms is "just treating one symptom of a much deeper
problem, and treating symptoms is not a cure." She adds that
Toms's model is built on what's known in trade as dumping. "It
undermines the local economy," she says. "The shoe seller goes
out of business. He can't send his kids to school."

TOM'S BRAIN TRUST

Mycoskie's rule-breaking philosophy pervades Toms--not least in the hiring of an eclectic
staff you wouldn't expect to find in top jobs at a shoe company. From left: Liza Doppelt, a
former tech publicist, became employee No. 2 in 2006 and now heads marketing for Toms
eyewear. Social media director Caitlin Coble was an intern at Nylon magazine when
Mycoskie hired her to lead social media in 2008. Creative director Anya Farquhar worked as
a designer at TBWA and BMW Designworks. Chief people officer Amy Thompson has had
one of the more conventional careers, previously working in HR at Starbucks, Ticketmaster,
and Citysearch.

Others say Toms addresses the wrong issue. Scott Gilmore, CEO
of the not-for-profit Building Markets, which works to boost local
economies in post-conflict countries, says the problem of
persistent poverty is "not a lack of shoes, but a lack of opportunity
and a lack of jobs." While he concedes that Toms has helped to
build awareness of poverty, he argues that its success really shows
the power of monetizing white guilt. "How can we make ourselves
feel better?" he asks. "This is the power of self-congratulatory

smugness, of saying, 'I'm better than you because I'm helping

somebody.' But the people who lose out are ironically the ones
they say they're trying to help."
Such criticisms aren't new. They've been growing in number and
vehemence--especially on the Internet--in lockstep with the
popularity of Toms shoes. But Toms has declined for years to
address its critics publicly, giving the impression that it is ignoring
them. Mycoskie explains that he has chosen not to engage, in large
part because most of the grievances have been broadcast online:
"It's a debate you can't win in that medium." He expresses doubt
that many of Toms's detractors genuinely want dialogue, and fears
"that they'll just take that one sentence out of context."
Privately, Mycoskie claims, he has been seeking out constructive
criticism for several years. "I've asked people, 'What could Toms do
better?'" he says. "I've learned that the keys to poverty alleviation
are education and jobs. And we now have the resources to put
investment behind this. Maybe five years from now, we'll be able to
say it's really good for business. But the motivator now is, How can
we have more impact? At the end of the day, if we can create jobs
and do one-for-one, that's the holy grail."
Toward that end, the company has sought to improve the
effectiveness of its work throughout the supply chain. All of Toms's
consumer shoes today are made in China, as are the vast majority
of its giveaway shoes (a small number of which are distributed
there). "Toms would not be what it is today without China," says
Toms president Laurent Potdevin. "We wouldn't have the resources
we have now. It has been the easiest, most cost-effective place to
make shoes."
Three years ago, Toms began to make giveaway shoes in Ethiopia,
which has a small but burgeoning shoemaking sector. Within the
next couple of years, it expects to add shoemaking in India, Kenya,
and Haiti, where an artist collective is already customizing
Chinese-made Toms for a limited-edition line. Potdevin
emphasizes the challenges of such ventures: "Getting a factory up
and running, retention, training, finding local management--every
aspect is more difficult in a place like Haiti." But separately, Jung,
the supply chain chief, notes that it's not all altruism and sacrifice.
"Let's not lie to each other," he says. "If you're creating product for
the local market, you're spending less to distribute it. No sea

freight. No duties." Staying local is especially important in Africa;

Ethiopia and Kenya both belong to a free-trade zone that includes
nearly every African country where Toms shoes are given away.
Head of giving Sebastian Fries adds that Toms is upgrading the
quality of its manufacturing jobs. He rattles off a list of
improvements: higher wages; tutoring for workers' children;
company-provided take-home meals for working moms; financial
education; an on-site preschool at a Kenyan factory where Toms
hopes to begin production later this year. "The jobs we help
create," he says, "should be in line with what Toms stands for."
At the other end of the business, Toms has lately decided that it
ought to learn whether its giveaways work. In August, researchers
from the University of San Francisco are expected to release
results of a two-year study, funded by a $225,000 Toms grant, of
giveaways in El Salvador. Fries, who in 2011 was hired away from
Pfizer, where he had been devising products for consumers in
low-income markets, says that more such research is planned.
Most of the data the company has gathered so far is anecdotal.
Fries has pushed his team to act on the findings anyway. Toms is
working with giving partners to integrate shoe drops into health
and education programs; in Malawi, for instance, the respected
NGO Partners in Health uses shoes to coax parents to bring
children to clinics for checkups. It's targeting areas of clearer need;
with Save the Children, Toms will give 100,000 pairs of shoes this
year to displaced Syrians at the massive Zaatari refugee camp in
Jordan. And in response to a common critique that the giveaway
shoes don't always meet children's needs, this fall, Toms will begin
distributing a winter boot in Afghanistan, India, Kyrgyzstan, Nepal,
Pakistan, and Tajikistan. But as usual, Toms's impromptu ways
might have hurt the effort a little; when it came time to test
prototypes, winter was already over. "We found someone in Los
Angeles to make artificial snow and ice," Fries explains. "People
walked in it for about four hours to make sure they would hold up.
But we should have tested it in the winter months."
The question is whether the quality of Toms's giving is as high a
priority as the quantity. When the company advertised last summer
for a new director of impact assessment, the job's main
responsibility was described as "the building of a body of evidence
that illuminates and supports the positive and compelling role of all
aspects of Toms's giving strategy." What happens, though, if the
evidence is not entirely positive or particularly compelling?

In those exhilarating six months after Mycoskie returned from

Argentina with his story and his samples, Toms sold 10,000 pairs of
shoes, and in the fall of 2006, he went back to the country for the
first round of giveaways, which took place mostly in Misiones, a
northeastern province near the Brazilian border. The company has
returned multiple times since then to give away more shoes.
Without Toms's knowledge, Fast Company recently went to
several Misiones communities to see what, if any, lasting effects
those giveaways have had.

I'VE LEARNED THAT THE

KEYS TO POVERTY
ALLEVIATION ARE
EDUCATION AND JOBS. AND
WE NOW HAVE THE
RESOURCES TO PUT BEHIND
THIS.

The economy in Andresito

revolves largely around the yerba
tree, whose leaves are dried to
make yerba mate, the strong tea
that Argentines drink constantly.
The sprawling municipality,
hacked from virgin jungle just 40

years ago, is dotted with pockets of poverty. From the sleepy town
center--there's just one restaurant and one guesthouse, catering
mostly to passing truckers--you have to bump along red dirt roads
for 40 hilly kilometers, past orchards and pastures and fields of
mandioca, to reach School No. 436, one of the first that the Toms
team visited in 2006.
That visit, says school director Sergio Dario Gonzalez, "was a gift
from heaven." Typically, the only foreigners who come through
Misiones are en route to Iguazu Falls, one of the seven wonders of
the natural world, on the Argentine-Brazilian border. "They pass by
in cars and buses, some take photos of the school, and then leave,"
Gonzalez says. "But this was real interaction." After distributing the
shoes, some volunteers played basketball and soccer with the kids,
while others sang, danced, and played other games.
The fleet of motorcycles parked outside indicates the region's
improving fortunes--five years ago, most students came to school
either on horseback or on foot, but today, many of the landowners'
kids arrive by "moto." One of the most important, if unexpected,
functions of the shoe drops tugs in the opposite direction of that
richer-kid fleet: the erasure of a visible sign of income inequality.
"It was really great to have these students next to each other with
the same shoes--as equals," Gonzalez says. "The kid of the
tobacco farmer had the same shoes as a kid whose mom can't
always feed her kids. That was powerful. It was really a special
moment for the kids, especially for their self-esteem." Adds

Fabiana Ramos, a sixth-grade teacher: "At the time, it was really the
only shoe that many of these kids had." Though most pairs lasted
no more than three months, some of the students, she recalls,
"washed and dried them until they broke." Those shoes lasted six or
eight months.
About a four-and-a-half-hour drive south of Andresito, in the even
poorer municipality of San Pedro, Toms has given away more than
20,000 pairs of shoes since 2006. In a destitute San Pedro village
called Alacrin, where the population is entirely indigenous Guarani,
residents have become dependent on donations--not just shoes
but also clothes and school supplies. Toms's gifts were very
welcome. Alacrin's rudimentary one-room schoolhouse, cobbled
together from wood and scrap metal, bursts with chatty, smiling
kids of all ages, many of whom go barefoot even in winter.
"Mothers in need ask for two basic things for their kids: milk and
shoes," says Mirta Allgayer, a San Pedro civil servant who helped
coordinate visits by Toms in 2006, 2008, and 2010. "These are the
basics. Especially in families with seven, eight, nine children."
Toms's legacy in Misiones is measurable in smiles, tears, and
memories. Celia Romero, the head of School No. 341, which got a
shoe drop in 2006, was moved as she recalled the Toms visit. "It
was more than a gift," she says. "There are kids here who come to
school with their toes sticking out of their shoes. The families
came to watch and be part of it. It was very exciting. Everyone was
happy." Allgayer, who still gets choked up at her memories of the
shoe drops, says, "It was amazing to see the faces of these kids
when they see someone giving them a gift one time in their life.
The kids said, 'Someone is going to give me something?'"
But Toms's giveaways haven't been as transformative as the
company might have liked. Though much of Misiones has grown
rapidly in recent years, the improvement is mainly an outcome of
the generous, vote-stoking subsidies of Argentine president
Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner's populist government. Many of the
shoes Toms distributed at the seven Misiones schools that Fast
Company visited went to children who would not be considered
poor; according to Clara Alicira Hirschfeld, director of the 370student School No. 144 in San Pedro, all of her kids have always
had shoes. ("But it was so much fun," she says, "like a party.") And in
Misiones's poorest villages, like Alacrin, a shoe drop once every
two years can't keep kids shod for long. The region's soil--rocky,
red-stained, and prone to glooping into sole-sucking mud during
winter rains--is devastating to the alpargatas' already limited life

expectancy. Of the dozens of people interviewed throughout

Misiones, only two said they still had hand-me-down pairs of Toms
in use, rare survivors from the 2010 shoe drop. (The company now
prefers to call the distributions "giving trips.")
Yet the giveaways don't appear to have damaged local businesses
as much as the critics said they would, either. An hour's drive south
of San Pedro, the El Gato alpargata factory makes shoes for all of
Misiones Province. Owner Graciela Mabel Katz claims never to
have heard of Toms, but thinks the shoe drops haven't hurt sales. El
Gato produces 800 pairs of alpargatas daily--a child-size pair goes
for about $3 retail--and sells out every two weeks. "They're seen as
something accessible for people with little money," she says.
Gladys Pitsch, who runs a shoe shop in Andresito, also has seen
little harm from the giveaways. "Alpargatas aren't really shoes," she
says. "It might have been different if Toms had given out
waterproof shoes or long-lasting ones."

A few weeks after visiting Toms headquarters, I flew to Austin,

where Blake and Heather Mycoskie moved last year. He still
typically spends a couple of days a week in L.A., but living in Texas
has given him the space to think bigger and more strategically. He
invited me to join him for a walk around Town Lake, the waterway
that bisects central Austin, and he was in a more philosophical
mood than when I'd seen him in California. Even his speech
seemed a little slower.
To Mycoskie, Toms will be a failure if we keep appending the word
shoes to the company name, because he's thinking much bigger
and for the long term. Even now, if you type tomsshoes.com into
your browser, you'll be redirected to toms.com.
One of Mycoskie's business heroes is Richard Branson, and he sees
a model in the British mogul's unprecedented propagation of the
Virgin brand. "Nobody has done that like he has," Mycoskie says.
"Here's my hypothesis: In the 1960s and 1970s, when Richard was
starting, he tapped into an energy and attitude that was
countercultural and irreverent and disruptive. He started with
music, which was perfect, and once the customer knew what the
Virgin brand stood for and trusted it, he was able to take that same
attitude into all different industries, and today, kids who listened to
music from Virgin Megastores are flying his business class."

Toms-wearing teens and twentysomethings are, in Mycoskie's

vision, today's equivalent of the Virgin kids of the 1970s and 1980s.
"They're buying clothing that's organic. They're giving up their
birthdays to raise money for Charity: water. They're shopping at
farmers' markets. And they wear Toms," he says. "We started with
shoes. Now we're doing eyewear. We're taking them along this
path where they can integrate giving."
Mycoskie is mulling three or four categories for Toms's expansion,
and the next could launch as early as the fourth quarter of 2013. "I
want to show people that one-for-one is not just for the lifestylefashion space," he says. "It can even be everyday products."
Though he won't say what industries or categories he is eyeing, a
search of the 200-plus domain names that Mycoskie LLC, Toms's
parent company, has registered over the past few years suggests
that he is considering everything from wine (tomswine.com) to
event ticketing (tomsticket.com, tickettogive.com) to financial
services (tomscreditcard.com, tomsinvesting.com,
tomsmortgage.com, tomsstudentloans.com).
In March, a lawyer acting on Mycoskie's behalf also filed a
trademark application for the tagline "You drink, we dig," which
may indicate that the company could expand its partnership with
Charity: water, the not-for-profit founded by Mycoskie's good
friend Scott Harrison. The lawyer also sought an expansion of
Toms's existing trademark "One for One," to cover "beers; mineral
and aerated waters and other nonalcoholic beverages; fruit
beverages and fruit juices; syrups and other preparations for
making beverages."
There's a scene in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's novel Cancer Ward in
which the patients stumble across "What Men Live By," a short
story by Leo Tolstoy, another author Mycoskie has read and
admired. The story is about a poor shoemaker who takes a naked
beggar into his home. The beggar, who becomes the shoemaker's
assistant, is eventually revealed to be a fallen angel. Before the
angel can regain his wings, he must learn lessons about mankind,
including the answer to the question, What do men live by?
When one of the Cancer Ward characters poses this question, his
friends offer divergent answers: air, water, and food; "their rations";
"by their ideological principles"; "professional skill." In the Tolstoy
short story, the right answer was "love"--which some of the

novel's men find foreign, unsatisfying, even unacceptable. "No,"

one says dismissively, "that's nothing to do with our sort of
morality."
If you ask, what does Toms live by?, the reactions will be similarly
divergent. The model that Mycoskie pioneered, the mistakes he
has made in execution, the profits he has reaped, the good he has
done--all these will be read and received in different ways by
different people.
At times, Mycoskie seems at once emboldened and bewildered by
his success--and by people's reactions to it. "I had no experience
in fashion," he says as we walk around the lake. "I had no
experience in shoes. I had no experience being a public figure. I
had no experience in giving. I had no experience in development. I
never even read a book by Jeff Sachs!" He does appreciate some
of the criticism. "Toms will never be a perfect company.
Sometimes as entrepreneurs, we think of things and we sell them
to ourselves. But I've learned so much along the way, and we want
to think in a more holistic way about our impact."
I ask if the burden--of being Mr. Toms, of trying to do something
unprecedented--sometimes feels like too much, and he reflects
for a moment before answering. "The responsibility can at times
feel exhausting, and some days I don't want it. There are definitely
times I say, 'Is it even worth it?'" He smiles and then quickly adds:
"But I'm not asking anyone to feel sorry for me." I feel the pace
quicken just a bit. "I'm going to say this as humbly as I can: I believe
what we're doing is affecting the way businesses will be built for
hundreds of years to come," he says. "You stay true to what you
believe, and what your message is, and then you let the chips fall
where they fall."

DO GOOD, LOOK GOOD

Like Toms, makers of everything from scrubs to doggie treats are seeking to burnish their
image by giving away their wares.

Click to enlarge

1. FIGS SCRUBS
For every set of scrubs sold, donates a set to a health care professional in
need.
1,500 sets donated in Kenya, Haiti, Ecuador, Honduras, Botswana, and
South Sudan.
2. TWO DEGREES
For every natural vegan health bar sold, donates one to a hungry child.
More than 820,000 meals donated in partnership with AOL, HP, and Cisco.
3. DOG FOR DOG
For every dog treat sold, donates a Dogsbar to a shelter in the country of
sale.
54,000 dogs gratified.
4. ONE WORLD FUTBOL
For every soccer ball sold, donates one to organizations working with
disadvantaged communities.
325,000 soccer balls distributed in 160 countries; pledge from sponsor
Chevrolet to donate 1.5 million balls by 2015.
5. BOBS BY SKECHERS
Donates a pair of shoes for every pair sold.
More than 4 million pairs donated in over 25 countries.
6. THE COMPANY STORE
For every comforter sold, donates one to a child in need.
16,735 comforters donated last year in 33 states.

7. WARBY PARKER
For every pair of glasses sold, gives a pair (or funding)to not-for-profit
Vision Spring, which sells them at subsidized prices and trains low-income
entrepreneurs to provide vision care.
250,000 pairs given.

Reporting from Argentina by Jessica Weiss

Photos by Mike Piscitelli; Justin Fantl (shoes)
A version of this article appeared in the July/August 2013 issue of FAST
COMPANY magazine.

JEFF CHU
Jeff Chu writes on international affairs, social issues, and
design for Fast Company. His first book, Does Jesus Really
Love Me?: A Gay Christian's Pilgrimage in Search of God in
America, was published by HarperCollins in April 2013.
CONTINUE

June 17, 2013 | 6:00 AM

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