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.”

Related: TheBroken “Buy-One, Give-One”Model: 3 WaysTo Save TomsShoes

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 laid-

back, 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

could involve much more than your feet

and your eyes--he envisions a Toms

empire that encompasses all sorts of

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 early-

adopting 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-and-

lifestyle 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 like-

minded, 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-to-

consumer 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 TRUSTMycoskie'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.

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

“I'VE LEARNED THAT THEKEYS TO POVERTYALLEVIATION AREEDUCATION AND JOBS. ANDWE NOW HAVE THERESOURCES TO PUT BEHINDTHIS.”

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 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

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