The Idea

In early 2006, Blake Mycoskie was a 29-year-old serial entrepreneur on holiday in Argentina, learning to play polo and drinking Malbec. He had already built and flipped a handful of small companies and was running an online driving school back in California. Then he met a group of volunteers running a shoe drive for children who had none, and spent days travelling village to village, watching kids walk to school barefoot. His polo instructor asked the question that stuck: who gives them the next pair when these ones wear out?

Charity drives ran dry. A business wouldn't. What if he sold the comfy canvas alpargatas he kept seeing everywhere back home, and gave a new pair to a child in need for every pair someone bought? He called it One for One. He named the shoes after "tomorrow". He had roughly $3,000 and no plan. This was the beginning of TOMS.

The Execution

• May 2006: TOMS launched out of Mycoskie's LA apartment with 250 pairs of Argentine alpargatas. A Los Angeles Times feature that spring drove 2,200 orders in a single day, against the roughly 100 pairs he had left. He flew straight back to Argentina to find a factory.
• Late 2006: He kept the promise fast. On the very first giving trip, TOMS handed 10,000 pairs of shoes to children across Argentina, turning the pitch on the box into something customers could actually see happening.
• 2007 to 2009: The story sold the shoes. Vogue ran a spread, then Time, People and Elle followed; Keira Knightley, Scarlett Johansson and Tobey Maguire were spotted in them; Nordstrom and Urban Outfitters started stocking a $40 canvas flat. TOMS barely paid for advertising, because every buyer did the marketing.
• 2011: Mycoskie stretched One for One beyond footwear into eyewear, donating sight-saving treatment for every pair sold, and published Start Something That Matters, a New York Times bestseller. The model was now being copied by a generation of "buy one, give one" startups, Warby Parker among them.
• August 2014: He sold 50% of TOMS to Bain Capital at a valuation of roughly $625 million, keeping his Chief Shoe Giver title and pocketing an estimated $300 million, half of which he pledged to a social-entrepreneurship fund.
• By 2019: TOMS had given away more than 100 million pairs of shoes and become the most-copied giving model in retail. But cheaper rivals had cloned the idea and the One for One novelty was wearing thin, and sales flattened.
• December 2019: Carrying a $300 million loan it couldn't repay, TOMS ceded control to its creditors, led by Jefferies, Nexus Capital and Brookfield. Mycoskie walked away with no equity in the company he founded.
• 2020 onward: He stepped fully out of the business and, by his own account, spent years in a deep depression before resurfacing in 2026 with the No Magic Pill podcast and a wellness venture called ENOUGH. The founder who built a company on giving had to relearn how to sit still.
• Today: TOMS still trades under its new owners with 100 million-plus pairs given over its lifetime and a giving model that now pledges a share of profits to grassroots causes.

The lesson?

TOMS never really sold shoes. It sold a $40 way to feel like a good person, and stitched the marketing budget straight into the product: give a customer a story worth repeating, and they'll do your advertising for free. One for One got cloned to death precisely because it worked so well. The build is the masterclass. Just remember the thing you build is not the thing that decides your worth.