The eco-minded entrepreneur, 37, adds coffee to an empire first built on footwear.
Why java?
Our slogan is “coffee for you, water for all.” For every bag purchased, we give a week’s worth of clean water to a person in need, in places like Rwanda and Peru. We invest back into the communities the coffee comes from.
What do you look for when you’re interviewing someone?
If all their questions are about growth and profits, and none are like, “How do you know the kids get the shoes that you give [away],” that’s a pretty telling sign they’re not a good cultural fit.
Before TOMS, you were on The Amazing Race, in 2002.
Toward the end of the show, after racing for 31 days, my sister Paige and I were actually leading. Then we lost by four minutes because I wouldn’t stop to get a map. That was very difficult. But even today, I’ll meet a big fan of the show and they love to talk about it. It opened a lot of doors with store buyers.
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Online Extras: How Blake Mycoskie Got His Start—and more.
What was the first business you ever started?
I started my first company when I was 19. It was a laundry business. I was a philosophy major [at Southern Methodist University], and I knew nothing about business. But I quickly found that I loved the idea of entrepreneurship—using business to create new products, or solve a problem, or provide a service.
So how did TOMS begin?
After college, I had several companies over a 10-year span that made money. Outdoor advertising, a software business. But I wanted to do something more. Then I went to Argentina on an extended vacation in 2006.
A place you’d become intrigued with after seeing some of it as an Amazing Race contestant, yes?
That’s right. I met some children there that weren’t allowed to go to school because they didn’t have shoes. It seemed totally unjust to me. I wanted to do something, but I had no experience in charity. That’s kind of the irony of all this: The reason I started TOMS as a business, not a charity, is because I hated the idea of asking people for donations and then wondering if I was going to continue to get the donations. I felt a business would be a lot more predictable way to set up continuous giving.
Is that how the “one for one” concept got started, where you donate a new pair of shoes to a child in need for each pair of TOMS shoes bought by customers?
Yes. And that concept is at work in all our businesses. We’re now in coffee, footwear, and eyewear. And our mission is very simple: It’s to use business to improve lives. Not just the lives of the people we serve, but the lives of our customers, our employees, and our suppliers. That’s our first responsibility, our real responsibility.
What’s the biggest mistake you’ve made as a manager?
When we started TOMS, I made a decision that almost put us out of business. I thought that cardboard shoeboxes were a ridiculous waste. A lot of people don’t even recycle them. So I decided that TOMS was going to be a shoe company with no shoeboxes. We were going to sell all of our shoes in little linen-canvas recyclable bags. I was adamant about this. When some of the big retailers took us on as customers, they said, “We have to have shoeboxes. That’s the only way we can keep our shoes organized in our stockrooms, and if they’re not organized they won’t sell well.” I was so cocky I didn’t really understand or appreciate the need for the boxes.
So what happened?
We launched our company with bags and we got into one of the largest retailers in the country. Within a couple of weeks, all of our bags, just as they’d predicted, were a total tangled mess in the stockrooms. Impossible for people to sell. They kicked us out of their stores, and it took us two years to get back into that account. Of course, when we went back we had shoeboxes. So now I always say there are some rules you can break, and some rules are rules for reasons. As much as I still don’t like the fact that we waste boxes, it’s a necessary evil in the shoe industry.
What’s your best advice for young people starting in the workplace?
As you get older, it gets harder and harder to have the freedom to change career paths. So it’s really important, when you’re young, to explore options. Too many people take a job because they think, “Oh, this job is going to pay $5,000 more a year than that job.” That might seem like a big deal when you’re 22, or 25, or 28, but it’s really not in the larger scheme of things. You’re still going to live in a tiny apartment and have multiple roommates. But you’re going to learn a lot more if you’re passionate about something than if you’re just there for a paycheck. If it feels too much like a job, it’s probably not the right fit.
Check out Blake Mycoskie’s best-selling book, Start Something That Matters, here.