Start Something That Matters

Blake Mycoskie, an entrepreneur and founder of TOMS Shoes, presents a combination of memoir and business guide built around six principles he believes are essential to launching a meaningful venture. The book draws on his own experience founding TOMS as well as stories from other entrepreneurs and social enterprises to argue that profit and purpose can coexist.

In 2006, at age 29, Mycoskie took a vacation to Argentina while running his fourth start-up, an online driver-education company. He had visited the country in 2002 while competing on the CBS reality show The Amazing Race with his sister, Paige, narrowly losing the million-dollar prize by four minutes. During his return trip, he discovered the alpargata, a soft canvas shoe worn widely across the country, and began considering its potential in the American market. The idea sharpened when he met an American woman volunteering on a shoe drive who explained that many children, even in relatively developed countries, lacked shoes, exposing them to blisters, infections, and disease. Her organization depended entirely on unpredictable donations that often arrived in the wrong sizes. Mycoskie considered starting a charity but realized donations would eventually dry up. Drawing on his entrepreneurial background, he conceived a for-profit model: for every pair sold, one pair would be given to a child in need. He named the company TOMS, shortened from "Tomorrow's Shoes," and recruited his Argentine polo teacher, Alejo, as a partner and translator. Together they found a willing shoemaker and produced 250 sample pairs, which Mycoskie brought back to Los Angeles. After gathering consumer feedback and pitching the story to a store buyer, a Los Angeles Times fashion article triggered over 2,200 orders in a single day, though he had only about 160 pairs in stock. He hired interns via Craigslist, returned to Argentina to manufacture 4,000 more pairs, and watched the brand gain coverage in Vogue, Time, and other major publications while expanding into retailers like Nordstrom and Urban Outfitters. The team sold 10,000 pairs out of Mycoskie's Venice apartment that first summer. Upon hitting that milestone, he brought family and friends to Argentina for the first Shoe Drop, traveling by sleeper bus from village to village over ten days to place shoes on children's feet. The experience transformed him. He sold his stake in the driver-education business, hired industry veterans, and committed fully to TOMS. He frames the rest of the book around six traits he considers essential to starting something that matters.

The first trait is finding your story. Mycoskie argues that a compelling narrative is more powerful than facts or traditional advertising. He opens with Adam Lowry and Eric Ryan, two friends who co-founded method, an eco-friendly cleaning-products company, after discovering that conventional cleaners contained harmful ingredients. Starting with almost nothing, they built a brand around their personal story, reaching approximately $100 million in sales by 2010. Mycoskie cites a 2009 Carnegie Mellon University study showing that students who read a story about a poor girl donated more than twice as much to charity as those who received only statistics. He describes his own pivotal realization at JFK Airport, where a stranger wearing TOMS passionately recounted the entire brand story before Mycoskie revealed himself as the founder. Recognizing the exponential marketing power of story-driven customers, he distinguishes between casual buyers and "supporters" who buy into a mission, and advises readers to identify their passions, use community affiliations, and get the story in front of influential connectors.

The second trait is facing fears. Mycoskie tells the story of his mother, Pam Mycoskie, a Texas stay-at-home mom who lowered her dangerously high cholesterol through dietary changes and decided to write a cookbook. Despite having no publishing connections and being deeply introverted, Pam self-published Butter Busters. Her first printer took $30,000 and failed to deliver, leaving the family $60,000 in debt. A new printer succeeded, and the book sold 450,000 copies in 16 months before a major publisher picked it up, eventually selling 1.4 million copies. Mycoskie explains that fear is a natural fight-or-flight response that cannot be controlled, but one's actions in response to it can be. His own "fear killers" include returning to his core motivation, surrounding himself with enthusiastic interns, reading biographies of entrepreneurs, thinking in small incremental steps (referencing the Japanese concept of kaizen, or continuous improvement), and writing fears on paper to externalize them. He describes turning down a lucrative job offer from mentor Carl Westcott, founder of 1-800-FLOWERS and other ventures, to pursue TOMS despite the terror of forgoing financial security.

The third trait is being resourceful without resources. Mycoskie describes TOMS' earliest operations out of his Venice apartment with almost no money and a Craigslist ad for unpaid interns as the main recruiting tool. He recounts how a Nordstrom buyer called to place an order, demanded to speak to the sales department and then customer service, and discovered that all three contacts were the founder and two interns in one small room. Nordstrom waited and became one of TOMS' largest customers. Mycoskie argues that starting in small, improvised spaces is a common pattern among successful companies, listing examples from Apple's garage to Facebook's dorm room. He contends that limited resources force creative problem-solving that becomes embedded in a company's culture, offering cautionary tales of dot-com-era companies like Pets.com and Webvan that raised hundreds of millions in capital and collapsed, while companies like Amazon succeeded by building slowly. Practical tips include developing a free social media presence, using unconventional job titles to obscure a small organization's hierarchy, and leveraging free digital tools.

The fourth trait is keeping it simple. Mycoskie opens with Michele Sipolt Kapustka, a Chicago creative director who turned her habit of mailing rubber balls with Sharpie messages into SENDaBALL, a business that shipped over 20,000 balls by 2010 while resisting all pressure to expand beyond its core concept. He explains that TOMS' shoe design, based on the century-old alpargata, serves as a blank canvas for collaborations and fan creativity. He cites Apple's iPod and Google's obsessively word-counted home page as exemplars of design simplicity, and profiles companies built on simple ideas: Chipotle's streamlined menu, Netflix's mail-order DVDs, and Southwest Airlines' low-cost route conceived on a cocktail napkin. He connects professional simplicity to personal simplicity, describing his decision to sell most possessions and move onto a 200-square-foot sailboat after observing on Shoe Drops that people with the least often seemed the happiest.

The fifth trait is building trust. Mycoskie profiles Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, who built the online shoe retailer to over one billion dollars in annual sales before its acquisition by Amazon for approximately $1.2 billion. Hsieh fostered trust by encouraging employees to befriend one another, allowing uncensored tweeting, and treating vendors as partners. Mycoskie traces a historical shift from Frederick W. Taylor's early-20th-century model of close worker supervision to the modern trust-based workplace, and introduces "servant leadership," a concept coined by Robert K. Greenleaf in 1970 that emphasizes empathy and listening over authoritarian power. He recounts his own trust-building mistakes: creating 800 Airstream-themed shoes for a convention of retirees who preferred orthotic footwear and voluntarily disclosing a manufacturing defect to retailers before any had complained. He also profiles Scott Harrison, a former nightclub promoter who founded charity: water after volunteering with the medical aid organization Mercy Ships in Liberia. Harrison's "100 percent model" sends every public dollar directly to water projects, with GPS coordinates and photos showing donors exactly what their money accomplished. In five years, charity: water raised $22 million and provided one million people with access to clean water in 17 countries.

The sixth trait is that giving is good business. Mycoskie profiles Lauren Bush, a model and United Nations World Food Programme spokesperson who co-founded FEED Projects with Elle Gustafson. FEED sells eco-friendly bags that fund school lunches; by the time of writing, it had provided more than 60 million meals. Mycoskie argues that giving creates loyal customers who become active marketing partners, citing grassroots campaigns organized by TOMS supporters, including students who created "Operation TOMS Prom" across 35 high schools. He challenges economist Milton Friedman's assertion that a business's only social responsibility is profit, citing a Stanford study showing 97 percent of business students would forgo financial benefits for a company with stronger social responsibility. He surveys corporate giving programs at companies including Timberland and Home Depot, and recounts how employees at the Canadian bank CIBC organically grew a modest breast cancer fund-raiser sponsorship into a strategic initiative that raised a record $33 million by 2010.

Mycoskie closes with a letter from Tyler Eltringham, an Arizona State University student who founded OneShot, a nonprofit providing meningococcal meningitis vaccinations to college students while donating a matching vaccine to Africa's "meningitis belt," a region spanning 14 countries with the world's highest concentration of the disease. Despite having no business background, Eltringham's team won the $10,000 ASU Innovation Challenge and attracted support from the university and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Mycoskie reflects that his goal has shifted from building TOMS to inspiring others, emphasizing that none of the people profiled in the book were fully confident when they began. He urges readers not to wait for perfect readiness, recalling that TOMS started as a sketch in a journal. The book's final message is direct: The most important step is the first one, and its ultimate success will be measured not by copies sold but by the number of people it moves to act.