Another Perspective On Shoes

I was reading on the Reader’s Digest website about shoes today. I haven’t thought about shoes in this way, it struck me so hard. You can read the whole article if you’re interested, but I’m only going to focus on the 3rd part, titled “Shoes As a Better Business Model”.

The idea for Toms Shoes hit Blake Mycoskie on a trip to Argentina in 2006: Sell a pair, give a pair to a needy child. “I met so many kids there who didn’t have shoes and had nasty scrapes on their feet,” he recalls. Mycoskie launched a line of simple, colorful canvas slip-ons modeled on the traditional alpargata worn by local farmers. Within a year, the concept had taken off (especially after celebrities like -Renée Zellweger started wearing Toms)–and Mycoskie organized his first “shoe drop,” a tour of rural Argentina on which he handed out 10,000 pairs. Since then, he’s given away another 100,000 on four continents. “The joy the kids express is hard to describe,” he says. “They laugh and cry-and run around playing soccer.”

This is such an amazing story, and showed me again what change a single person could make.  I wish I could find the ideas and ways and means to make something like this happen, and then I realize that it is within my reach, I just have to grasp it.

Source: Readers Digest