Scott & Emma Do SXSW

Blake Mycoskie, founder of TOMS shoes speaks on business and philanthropy. 

Some Background, First… 

Blake went to Argentina and stumbled across a group who had been spending their time doing shoe drops. They invited him along. He went with them to villages & saw children so excited to get shoes like it was Christmas morning!

That night, Blake had trouble sleeping because he was worrying about replacement shoes for these children. What happens when they wear down the shoes?

So he began asking himself, why does a charity have to be responsible for this problem? Why not a for-profit business? He kept thinking about this but the “buts” keep coming up!

Blake went back to the US but decided he needed some more time to think about this. So he left for Argentina for another month. There, he made 250 pairs of shoes.

At this point, he didn’t know anything about shoes: retail, pricing, how to produce, etc. So, to get started he had what he called “A creative dinner party.”

He invited 6 girl friends over and let them try it on the shoes and ask for their feedback. THEN told them the reason for these shoes, this idea of a 1:1 business where, for every shoe sold, he would donate a pair of shoes for a child in need.

Well, he IMMEDIATELY sold all 6 pairs.

So, he spent the next bit of time trying to get his shoes into stores. Eventually he got one store to take them and they asked him how he wanted to tell the story. So, in the window display, the store put up picture of him and a child and an explanation of what TOMS Shoes stood for.

A couple of weeks go by, and a fashion writer called Blake to cover this for a story. He does the interview, and then a couple of weeks later, he finds himself and TOMS Shoes on the cover of calendar of LA Times!

By 2pm the day the story came out, he had sold 2,200 pairs sold.

He had set up the website to send him an email every time someone ordered a pair of shoes. The results, that day? His phone died.

Quickly realized he couldn’t do this alone, so put up ads for interns. After a month, they were up to 800 pairs produced a week.

Then… Vogue magazine called. Blake got a great piece in their mag. Suddenly all stores worldwide started calling, including Nordstroms (the Holy Grail of stores). And they don’t just call, they wanted the shoes RIGHT AWAY. But Blake didn’t have any shoes at the moment - he was completely sold out. They demanded to be put in touch with sales department which was funny because a. they were unaware they were talking to Blake, the founder of the company and b he didn’t have a sales department. It was literally him, and 4 interns sitting in his apartment.

One of the interns motioned to Blake to hand her the phone. She picked it up and said she was Lena in Sales. She calmed down the buyer and was able to take an order in a month. Nordstrom is now their biggest client.

In that first summer they sold 10k pairs of shoes. By this point it was time to go back to Argentina and do his first show drop. Blake says that when he went back for the first time, his life changed forever.

Blake says he saw his mom help put on a pair of shoes to a child and just lost it. But later in the day, as they were leaving, a woman with 3 boys in tow came running over to the car, crying and shouting and he couldn’t understand her. Blake got his friend to translate and what she was saying was that those 3 boys had been sharing a single pairs of shoes to walk to school. Which meant that the oldest would go to school on Monday and then have to wait until Thursday to go back to school and because of him, all three boys could walk to school together, every day. 

For Blake, it was a point of no return.

Philanthropy as a Business Strategy

Blake turned his talk to overarching philosophy. For him, giving doesn’t just feel good, it is a solid business strategy.

If you incorporate philanthropy into your core business pillars, in a really authentic way, your customers will become your ambassadors. Suddenly, you dont need a marketing budget and you also tend to attract and maintain the most amazing employees possible.

For Blake, every business can afford to give their employees one day off a month to go volunteer. You attract the most amazing partners - for example: Ralph Lauren finally collaborated with TOMS Shoes after 40 years of never collaborating with another brand.

Questions

One question Blake always gets is, “Who is Tom?”

There is no Tom. TOM stands for “tomorrow” - as in, it will be a better tomorrow if we sell a pair of shoes.  

What is next for TOMS Shoes?

Blake has never answered this question, but he’s known the answer since 2007 when he saw extreme poverty in South Africa.

TOMS will no longer a shoe company, it is now a one-for-one company and its next one-for-one product will launch on June 7, 2011 and be the next step in the one-for-one market.

Follow the conversation at:

Facebook.com/TOMSshoes

Twitter.com/TOMSshoes