For every pair of shoes sold, TOMS, the hipster brand out of Los Angeles, donates a pair to a child in need. It sounds like charity, but it’s not.
TOMS is a for-profit operation that uses its goodwill to attract customers, vendors and employees – and proud of it.
“Giving is a good business strategy,” founder Blake Mycoskie told the audience at SXSWi. “And there’s nothing wrong with that.”
It was an interesting point, especially in light of massive amounts of charity going toward Japan at the conference. His business strategy, after all, is the sole reason the shoe manufacturer was speaking at a web conference.
But Mycoskie didn’t really have much to say beyond that.
Even his surprise, never-before-heard announcement, turned out to be a dud – an announcement of an announcement.
He spoke of appearing on the globe-trotting reality television show Amazing Race with his sister nine years ago, and losing the million dollar prize by a mere four minutes. He told us about how he then went back to Argentina, the country he came second place in, and drank a lot of malbec. But he also saw children in need of shoes. He began volunteering to collect used shoes from wealthy families in Buenos Aires and deliver them to poor children in the outlying villages.
After that, in early 2006, he came up with his one-for-one business model, and began producing espadrilles, a type of shoe worn by Argentines, but with a North American sensibility.
He began producing and selling them, giving one pair to Argentinian children for every one pair sold to a Los Angelian.
TOMS Shoes, which is shortened from Tomorrow’s Shoes, has now given in excess of 600,000 pairs of shoes to underprivileged youth around the world.
Blah, blah, blah. All the above, which Mycoskie spent a good 25 minutes on, can be read on his Wikipedia page. For his keynote, he reused all his anecdotes, even down to the wording. His surprise announcement, which everyone believed would be a new TOMS product, was not here either.
Mycoskie said he’s going to apply his one-for-one model to another product beyond shoes. This, the one bit of new information that might’ve made his talk worth it, will be announced on June 7.
He did however have some compelling if common sense points on businesses. Some, like making giving a part of your business to increase bottom lines, were smart but not new. Others I took a liking to.
One is the creative dinner party. When Mycoskie first came back from Buenos Aires with prototypes of his North American version of the espadrilles, he called six women to his house, thinking they’d have opinions of the shoes. So, instead of dinner, he spread the shoes across the table, and asked for opinions. Price points, designs, colours, important retailers – his target market was telling him exactly what would make his product work.
Then he told them the stories of the poor children in Argentine villages, they fell head-over-espadrilles in love with his story.
I assume he eventually fed them – the least he could do – but that’s besides the point. He took that experience selling his six female friends on his shoe company and repeated it hundreds of times over. He’d tell the story of TOMS to anyone who’d listen.
And obviously it’s a good one, even if we’d all heard it before.
