Tomorrow Shoes

Blake Mycoskie of Toms Shoes fame says he never intended to wrap his brand equity in a charity, reports Christina Binkley in the Wall Street Journal (4/1/10). "I wasn’t out to do good," he says. "I’m an entrepreneur." It’s true: Before founding Toms Shoes, Blake occupied himself with a "drivers-ed company, a laundry firm and an attempt to create a reality-TV network" (he had been a contestant on "The Amazing Race"). He was bouncing around Buenos Aires, hankering after cheap polo lessons, when "he met wealthy urbanites who were donating used shoes in local villages."

As Blake explains: "It just hit me … Instead of a charity with handouts, why not create a company where that’s the whole purpose? I thought, you buy one pair of shoes today so we can give one tomorrow. We’ll call them Tomorrow Shoes. No, we’ll call them Toms Shoes for tomorrow." Over the past four years, Toms Shoes "has given away 600,000 pairs of shoes … selling their counterparts at roughly $55 each." That works out to about $33 million in shoes. These days, Blake hangs with Bill Clinton and Toms "was recently ranked #6 on Fast Company magazine’s list of most innovative retailers."

Next week, on April 8th, he’s planning a promotion, "One Day Without Shoes," which challenges "people to go barefoot and feel what it’s like to be among the world’s shoeless." His goal is to get 300,000 people to participate — so far he’s got 70,000 signed up at onedaywithoutshoes dot-com. While this appears to be a one-off promotion, Toms does go "a step further than most in blurring the difference between brand and charity; the brand doesn’t exist outside the charitable work. Its success shows that good works can be a powerful profit engine." Says Blake: "When you incorporate giving into your model, we’re proving it to be good for business."