Five years after he lost his shot at winning $1m in the first season of The Amazing Race, Mycoskie returned to Argentina to explore the country – and Malbec. Few days into his trip, he found himself joining in on a shoe drive, collecting shoes in a better-off areas and then driving them to places outside the city to be distributed to the poor. “When we started pulling out the shoes, you’d have thought it was Christmas day. These kids were so excited to get these shoes and they weren’t even new. They weren’t even in the package.”
Mycoskie was excited, too. Until he realized that come next year, the 250 children they had outfitted with shoes would need a new pair again. Taking few extra weeks in Argentina, he came up with a plan: he had a local shoe maker make about 250 pairs of shoes, he would sell them back in California and then use the money to get another 250 pairs to give the kids.
Simple, right?
That’s until the Toms shoes, as he called them, actually took off. After being rejected by a couple of places, a store agreed to sell about 80 pairs of Toms shoes. Mycoskie had sold another 30 to friends and relatives, through a website he had created, with one or two orders coming in each week. The day after an article appeared in the LA Times, Toms received orders for 2,200 pairs of shoes by 2 o’clock that afternoon.
“But I only had 140 pairs in my apartment. This was the first of my many supply chain problems to come,” says Mycoskie. “I did what I think a lot of entrepreneurs do in a time of dire need – I started posting as many ads for interns on craigslist as possible. And that strategy worked.”
Within a week, he had three interns contacting all the people who placed their and whose cards were already charged, to let them know that they were working on filling their orders. At the same time, Mycoskie was on a plane to Argentina to figure out how to make more shoes.
The new supply chain, consisting of six to seven guys making about 800 to 900 shoes a week, worked– that is, until Anna Wintour’s office called. Vogue Magazine [made] it look like I know exactly what I am doing,” Mycoskie says of the article. “This does not look like a guy who is selling shoes out of his apartment with interns and they are making them in garages all throughout Buenos Aires and because it was Vogue magazine – all of a sudden everyone through we were a real company.”
That year Toms ended up selling 10,000 shoes out of Mycoskie’s apartment. Since then Toms’ ‘One for One’ has grown beyond shoes to eyewear and coffee.
Says Mycoskie in interview: II am a very curious person and I need to be stimulate, to stay engaged. If I was just doing shoes all the time and working on just giving shoes, I think I’d get bored. Part of the reason we do these other products is, one, so we can help people in more ways and that’s very gratifying.
I think companies are starting to realize that there is real opportunity to address needs and build sustainable, profitable businesses at the same time.
Did you anticipate that consumers would be so enthusiastic about your social mission?
No, of course not. We figured out early on that people were interested in what we were doing but never did we anticipate the demand that we’ve had.
What are some of the more interesting things you are hearing from your customers? Do they want to do more?
The most interesting thing is that customers really want to be connected, not just at a time of the purchase, but through the life cycle of the purchase.
Is there anything you would have done differently?
I wish that I had more experience on the retail side.
Hiring:
As the company grows there is this pressure to hire all these people that have the right things on their resume and have done the job before and all that stuff. But the truth is there is not so much about doing the job before, it’s about being the right mentality and attitude so that you can learn the job and you can do it with the right spirit.