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 DOESN’T 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. 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 “WITH HIS DEEP TAN, UNTAMED MESS OF CURLY BROWN HAIR, AND SOMETIMES- QUESTIONABLE HYGIENE, MYCOSKIE APPEARS ALMOST FERAL.”
16
Embed
4 Toms Sets Out to Sell a Lifestyle, Not Just Shoes (1)
This document is posted to help you gain knowledge. Please leave a comment to let me know what you think about it! Share it to your friends and learn new things together.
Transcript
FAST COMPANY
TOMS SETS OUT TO SELL A LIFESTYLE, NOT JUSTSHOESFOUNDER BLAKE MYCOSKIE HAS SET OUT TO SAVE THE WORLD
WITH HIS "ONE-FOR-ONE" TAGLINE. HIS CRITICS SAY THAT GIVING
ALONE DOESN’T SOLVE A THING.
BY: J EFF C H U
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.
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
“WITH HIS DEEP TAN,UNTAMED MESS OF CURLYBROWN HAIR, ANDSOMETIMES-QUESTIONABLE HYGIENE,MYCOSKIE APPEARSALMOST FERAL.”
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 370-
student 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 lifestyle-
fashion 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 GOODLike Toms, makers of everything from scrubs to doggie treats are seeking to burnish their
image by giving away their wares.
Click to enlarge
FIGS SCRUBS1.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.
■
TWO DEGREES2.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.■DOG FOR DOG3.
For every dog treat sold, donates a Dogsbar to a shelter in the country ofsale.
■
54,000 dogs gratified.■ONE WORLD FUTBOL4.
For every soccer ball sold, donates one to organizations working withdisadvantaged communities.
■
325,000 soccer balls distributed in 160 countries; pledge from sponsor
Chevrolet to donate 1.5 million balls by 2015.
■
BOBS BY SKECHERS5.Donates a pair of shoes for every pair sold.■
More than 4 million pairs donated in over 25 countries.■THE COMPANY STORE6.
For every comforter sold, donates one to a child in need.■
16,735 comforters donated last year in 33 states.■
Reporting from Argentina by Jessica Weiss
Photos by Mike Piscitelli; Justin Fantl (shoes)
WARBY PARKER7.For every pair of glasses sold, gives a pair (or funding)to not-for-profitVision Spring, which sells them at subsidized prices and trains low-income
entrepreneurs to provide vision care.
■
250,000 pairs given.■
A version of this article appeared in the July/August 2013 issue of FAST
COMPANY magazine.
J E F F C H U
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
Y OU MI GH T A L SO L I K E
[?]
See The Effects of DrugUse Unfold BeforeYour…Er…What Was ISaying?CO.CREATE
WikiLeaks VolunteerAlso Worked As PaidInformant For The F.B.I.FAST COMPANY