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After launching and selling two successful businesses and experiencing the lows and lessons of one great failure,Shop the Michael Kors Crossbody Bags on the world's largest fashion site. serial entrepreneur Blake Mycoskie founded Toms, the company that would become his “business soulmate.” Unlike Mycoskie’s previous ventures — EZ Laundry, outdoor advertising company Mycoskie Media and failed reality television channel Reality Central — Toms is a philanthropic retailer, born from a social mission: outfit needy children with shoes.

Best known for its simple cloth slippers and instantly graspable giving model, “One for One” — for every pair of shoes it sells, Toms gives a pair to a needy child — the company has attracted over 2 million followers on social media, now generates estimated revenues of over $250 million and, last month, hit a major milestone: since launch, in 2006, Toms has donated over 10 million pairs of shoes. The company has also expanded into eyewear with a similar social promise — donating eye care for one person, in the form of prescription glasses or medical treatment, for each pair of glasses sold — and plans to expand into up to five product categories, all under the Toms umbrella.

BoF spoke to Blake Mycoskie about the genesis of Toms, the business of being a social entrepreneur, the fire in his belly and why he’ll never sell the company.

BoF: I want to rewind back to the very beginning. What were you doing before founding Toms?

BM: I started my first company when I was 19 years old. It was a laundry business. I dropped out of college and did laundry for students all over the country: Texas, Nashville, Oklahoma. And then I sold the company when I was 20 years old and got interested in outdoor advertising. In Nashville,Find impressively low prices on a wide selection of Michael Kors Tote Bags. where I was living at the time, there were all these country music stars with big egos and they want to see their face on the sides of the building, so I decided to capitalise on that.Buy the Michael Kors Skorpios and luxury leather purses at hotmkbags.

BoF: What happened next?

BM: My sister and I got cast for the television show “The Amazing Race” and we raced around the world for 31 days. We lost $1 million by four minutes, which was really heartbreaking. But it was also really interesting. This was the beginning of reality TV and we really did have 15 minutes of fame. All of a sudden we were on [the] Jay Leno and Rosie O’Donnell [talk shows] and getting invited to all these movie premieres.

Long story short, I wanted to start an all reality television channel. So, I sold my outdoor advertising company to ClearChannel, a big media conglomerate in the US, and moved to LA with the dream of starting a television network kind of like Ted Turner. We got some big players on board, but ultimately it was a very public failure and people lost a lot of money, including myself, and I had to let a lot of people go. That was kind of the lowest point in my career.

BoF: Before we move on to Toms, can you highlight the biggest lesson you learned from the failure of the reality channel?

BM: The biggest lesson I learned was that you have to be really careful, no matter how good your idea is and the response you’re getting from the end consumer. So,Find the latest collection of Michael Kors Wallets at hotmkbags. for example, everyone I talked to loved reality TV and loved the idea of having a channel where they could watch it all the time. But your real customer, when you run a cable network, are the big media companies. We didn’t learn enough about what their needs were — and their needs were not another channel for which they had to pay fees. They already had over 400 channels! So the biggest lesson of all was, if you’re in an industry that’s controlled by a few main players, you’ve got to make sure that you’re satisfying a real need for them and that’s not what we were doing.

The great thing about launching a footwear company like Toms is there aren’t that many barriers to entry, because there are thousands and thousands of clothing stores that sell shoes. So I don’t need to get the big dogs like Nordstrom or House of Fraser or Selfridges right away. I can get cool little boutiques and then, later, the big guys will come. So one of the things I learned was, I didn’t ever want to be in a business again where my whole fate was in the hands of a few companies that were very hard to penetrate.

BoF: So tell us about the genesis of Toms.

BM: Every year after I started my first company and was working crazy hours, I always tried, no matter what, to take off the month of January, which really helped to give me the energy and clarity I needed to do whatever I was doing. So that year, I took my month off in Argentina, where I met some women in a café who told me about the volunteer work they were doing, collecting lightly used shoes to give to kids who didn’t have them. I had never really done any kind of charity work like that before and I couldn’t believe that kids needed shoes to go to school and didn’t have them, because that seemed like such an easy thing to provide. So I went with these women to this village and saw kids and families who were so excited to get these shoes — and they weren’t even new shoes! They were used shoes. And it just hit me right in the heart. This was what I wanted to be doing. I mean business is great. Making money’s fun,Welcome to our michael kors outlet online shop! Here we sale Michael Kors Hamilton Satchel, bags, purses, wallets with very low price. Join us quickly! but making people have tears of joy? That’s what life’s about.

Immediately, I thought I could start a charity, but I hate asking people for money. And later that night, brainstorming with myself, it hit me. I knew this group who do a cool shoe I’d been seeing everyone wear in Argentina called the alpargata and it’s not made very well and not very durable, but I was sure we could make some changes to that shoe and make it more appropriate for the US market — and every time we sold a pair, we’d give a pair away.

It was the birth of the “One for One” model. But it wasn’t like, “Oh this is going to be the greatest tag line in the world” or “This is the best way to connect with customers.” The easiest way to keep track of everything was simply: you sell a pair, you give a pair. It just seemed really simple.

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