Who is toms shoes

TOMS tells you that you that making the world a better place is all about you: that you know best how to help poor people, and that you are so powerful that it will take barely any effort on your part to make a huge difference in the world. There are numerous products that promise to save the world through a buy one, give one model for everything from underwear to eyewear.

And there are many other awareness campaigns that rely on the same kind of yes-man messaging that emphasizes the importance of the person doing the helping over the person being helped. At worst, it promotes a view of the world's poor as helpless, ineffective people passively waiting for trinkets from shoe-buying Americans. While the shoes themselves probably won't lead to any kind of disaster, that worldview can lead to bad policies and real, serious harm.

TOMS has a compelling origin story. When founder Blake Mycoskie was traveling in Argentina in , he "witnessed the hardships faced by children growing up without shoes. More specifically, create a for-profit company that funds free shoes for poor children without relying on donations.

On the surface, this idea makes sense. Shoes seem important! They protect your feet and are a basic requirement for participation in a lot of public life.

Not having them sure sounds like a big problem. Getting free shoes sure sounds like a great solution. So great, in fact, that it has spawned a slew of imitators. For instance, a new line of underwear called THINX has been spamming my inbox for weeks to let me know that every time someone purchases their "period-proof" panties, THINX donates menstrual pads to girls in Uganda.

It's easy to see why that's a really appealing idea. If the lack of minor consumer goods is causing big problems for people in the developing world, then that's easy to fix by just buying the items in question and handing them out.

And if they're relatively inexpensive items, like shoes that cost just a few dollars or menstrual pads that cost only pennies, then the story gets even better: We, as Western consumers, are so rich that the price of changing a poor person's life is just a rounding error on our fashionable accessories. Improving a poor child's well-being or clearing a young woman's path to education can be offered as a free gift with purchase, a sort of altruistic version of a McDonald's happy meal toy.

And that's pretty exciting for the people doing the buying. They get to play the fairy godmother, telling poor children that they shall go to the ball after all. An ordinary shoe-buying experience gets transformed into a magical fairy tale.

It might be easy to miss, but there are two really big logical leaps in the story that products like TOMS tell you: that the hardships the poor kids were facing were due to their lack of shoes, and that giving them shoes was therefore the best way to address those problems. Neither of these, unfortunately, is correct.

When TOMS worked with an outside research team to evaluate the impact of its shoe donations, the researchers were unable to find a way in which the shoes had much of a substantive impact on poor kids' lives. The kids liked the shoes, and used them to play outside a little more often. But there was no significant improvement in their school attendance or self-esteem. The research team found that the program wasn't actually that significant. Bruce Wydick: TOMS was really quick to take the results of the study into consideration so they talked to us about giving away the shoes as a reward for school attendance so kids actually feel like they earned them and they began to develop more alternative kinds of shoes that would last longer.

Narrator: TOMS continue to grow its giving program to be more effective. In , TOMS expanded its brand to include sunglasses.

Sales from sunglasses went directly to people in developing countries, for treatments like cataract surgery. Bruce Wydick: As a person that has pretty high prescription glasses, I can attest to the fact that, personally, like a lot of people, this is a really impactful intervention for many people. Cataract surgery can restore a life. It said it would donate a week's worth of clean water for every bag of coffee it sold.

The next year, TOMS teamed up with anti-bullying organizations with a line of backpacks. But despite all these changes, when most people saw TOMS, they only thought of it's original product and program.

So, TOMS had a hard time growing beyond its hero product and its sales struggled. The company had a harder time regaining control over its business because it had relied so much on wholesale when it first started out. Doing this had helped TOMS build it's brand recognition even faster because its shoes were sold at big department stores like Macy's and Bloomingdale's and even at Whole Foods. But a direct to consumer model has a lot of long term advantages. You have more control over your marketing and inventory and most importantly, over prices.

All this can help you control your profit margins. Something that's kind of important when your sales are starting to slump. But instead, TOMS didn't pivot its business model as quickly or strongly as it should have. Its outlook continued to decline in TOMS had a million dollar loan due in Credit rating agencies expected it wouldn't be able to pay up.

So, is this the end for TOMS? So, TOMS is definitely looking to rebuild itself. But is there a place for it? Russ Winer: TOMS biggest obstacle right now is just the fact that there is so much competition in the shoe business and some brands have in fact gone bankrupt. If you look at brands like Rock Port, right? Which is a well known brand, take a look at Pay Less Shoes which is a retailer.

There's just a lot of competition in this market and very difficult to make a sustainable business. Russ Winer: I think the smartest strategy for TOMS right now actually is to focus less on the corporate social responsibility angle and focus more on product.

I think they need to develop more product variety, styles, colors that consumers want to buy and I think that's the area they should focus on. Just 15 days later, the House passed H. In , Richard Branson asked Blake to join The B Team, a group of worldwide leaders that support and promote a better way of doing business, advocating for the well-being of people and the planet.

In , Blake was awarded the Cannes Lion Heart Award, which honors a person or a company that has made a positive impact through the innovative use of brand power. Detailing his personal story, the book serves as a call to action for others to incorporate giving into business and, more broadly, to invest in their passions. In Blake founded the Social Entrepreneurship Fund, which invests in innovative and socially-conscious companies that exist to create change. To date, the fund has invested in 15 for-profit companies in industries ranging from technology and education to food equality.

Blake is an avid reader, traveler, and golfer. He is passionate about inspiring young people to help make tomorrow better, encouraging them to include giving in everything they do.