Social Responsibilty and Toms Shoes
Social Responsibility and TOMS Shoes
The founder of TOMS Shoes, Blake Mycoskie began his endeavor back in 2006. He was visiting Argentina and found that the children there had no shoes to protect their feet and he set out to help them. He became an overnight social entrepreneur who developed a company that would match every pair of shoes purchased with a pair of new shoes that would be given to a child in need. He returned to Argentina later that year with family, friends, and staff who, together, handed out 10,000 pairs of shoes made possible by TOMS customers (Mycoskie, 2011).
As mentioned above, Mr. Mycoskie is a social entrepreneur who has embraced the
concept of socially responsible business managing (Drayton, 2011). This means that he developed an innovative solution to help people through his personal ambition and persistence, while tackling major social issue and offering new ideas for wide-scale change (Drayton, 2011). Mr. Mycoskie has been able to bring the very essence of social responsibility to life in his company by maintaining good relationships with the consumers, as well as all the parties that are interested in the business managing of the company.
TOMS shoes has been a flourishing company since 2006 and is still continuing to develop and grow. First, this company provides a service to the community at large; it also provides a charity to many, many people who are in need, not only in one way, but in two ways. It provides shoes for children who are without and it also provides eye care for those that are in need of that, too. The reason that TOMS shoes is such a groundbreaking sensation is that many children in developing countries walk barefoot through dangerous terrain for miles to school, clean water, and medical help. This puts these hundreds of millions of children that do
this daily at risk for injury, infection, and soil-transmitted diseases, which is a leading cause of disease among these people. Also, many schools in these evolving countries require shoes for attendance, which makes this an ever more demanding commodity. This is why Blake Mycoskie started this establishment. He is using the purchasing power of individuals to benefit the greater good. Not only does TOMS provide these shoes to children in need, but they provide them throughout their childhood to help them stay healthy, not just once. They also rely on their giving partners to provide them with advice on their shoes’ fit and resilience, thereby ensuring continual progress. One interesting little tidbit to not about TOMS shoes is that there is no “Tom.” The abbreviation stands for “Shoes for a Better Tomorrow (Mycoskie, 2011),” but since they couldn’t get all of that on the back of a shoe, it was shortened to TOMS.
Since this company’s inception in 2006, they have given over 600,000 pairs of new shoes to children