Toms- Business That Gives Back to the Community

TOMS is a for-profit company based in Playa Del Ray, California, it also operates the non-profit subsidiary, Friends of TOMS. In 2006 Blake Mycoskie founded the company that designs and sells shoes based on the Argentine alpargata design as well as eyewear. The company name was originated from the word “tomorrow”, and evolved from the original concept, “Shoes for Tomorrow Project” (Miller, 2009). The concept later became known as “One for One.”

Blake Mycoskie first visited Argentina in 2002 while competing in the Amazing Race with his sister. He later returned there on vacation in January 2006, and noticed the polo players were wearing a form of shoes called alpargatas, a simple canvas slip-on shoe that Argentine farmers have been wearing for hundreds of years and were the inspiration for the classic style of TOMS’ shoes. They upper part of the shoes are made from canvas or cotton fabric and they have a rubber sole. While he was doing volunteer work in the outskirts of Buenos Aires, he noticed that many children were running through the streets barefooted. He later discovered that a lack of shoes was a wider problem in Argentina and many other developing countries and not just one community. Mycoskie learned that a lack of shoes was a serious problem with severe impacts upon the children, threatening their ability to go to school, prevent infections, and so on. He then decided he wanted to develop a kind of alpargata for the North American market, with the requirement that with every pair of shoes sold he would give a new pair of shoes to the shoeless children of Argentina and other developing countries.

The company began selling its shoes in May of 2006, he sold 10,000 pairs in the first six months. The first set of free shoes were distributed in October of 2006 to Argentine children, with the number equal to the number of shoes sold, 10,000 (Chansanchai, 2007). In 2011 TOMS launched its eyewear line, with every eyewear purchase TOMS will pay to restore or...