December 2, 2025 • 12 mins
Outlines the origins of TOMS, detailing Mycoskie's trip to Argentina, where he first encountered the alpargata shoe and the problem of children lacking footwear, which led to the creation of his "One for One" business model that pairs a sale with a charitable donation. Beyond the TOMS story, the text functions as a motivational and practical guide for conscious capitalism, offering anecdotes from other purpose-driven companies like Method, SENDaBALL, and VeeV, emphasizing the importance of storytelling, simple business models, overcoming fear, and building trust in a successful enterprise. The author also provides various tips and resources for entrepreneurs on topics ranging from frugal start-ups and leveraging social media to finding one's passion and incorporating giving into a business's core DNA.
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Produced by:
https://www.podcaistudio.com/
You can listen and download our episodes for free on more than 10 different platforms:
https://linktr.ee/book_shelter
Get the Book now from Amazon:
https://www.amazon.com/Start-Something-Matters-Blake-Mycoskie/dp/075354024X?returnFromLogin=1&linkCode=ll1&tag=cvthunderx-20&linkId=783a205767c1fd41014d9d27000d4cc0&language=en_US&ref_=as_li_ss_tl
Produced by:
https://www.podcaistudio.com/
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome back to the Deep Dive. You asked us for
something very specific today, a really detailed, story driven journey
through Blake Miikowski's book, Start Something That Matters. Right, You
want the full picture, the anecdotes, the messy startup life,
and you know the philosophy that really launched Toms.
Speaker 2 (00:19):
And that is exactly our mission here. Yeah, we're not
just reading a summary now, we're trying to extract the
blueprint the knowledge Blake gained from building this global phenomenon.
Speaker 1 (00:29):
It's all designed to inspire, right, Yeah, challenge you to
create your own impact exactly.
Speaker 2 (00:34):
And what I find so compelling is that he really
walks the walk. Fifty percent of his author proceeds actually
support to start Something that Matters fund So.
Speaker 1 (00:43):
The mission goes way beyond just the pages of the book.
Speaker 2 (00:45):
It really does.
Speaker 1 (00:46):
Okay, let's dive in. Let's set the scene for this
big breakthrough. The year is two thousand and six, right,
Blake is twenty nine years old, and he's already this
restless serial entrepreneur.
Speaker 2 (00:56):
He was on his fourth start up, he's fourth.
Speaker 1 (00:59):
And online company, and he just desperately needed a vacation.
Speaker 2 (01:04):
So he goes back to Argentina, a place he knew
pretty well, he'd raced through it four years earlier on
the Amazing Race.
Speaker 1 (01:09):
I always forget that part of the story, and that
he lost the million dollar prize by just four minutes.
Speaker 2 (01:15):
Just four minutes. But this trip wasn't about competition at all.
It was, you know, about slowing.
Speaker 1 (01:20):
Down, immersing himself.
Speaker 2 (01:22):
Yeah, learning the culture, playing polo, and wearing the local shoe,
the alpargata, just a simple soft canvas slip on.
Speaker 1 (01:30):
And it's funny how these huge ideas so often come
from just that simple cultural immersion. Because near the end
of his trip, this relaxing vacation takes a really sharp turn.
He meets an American woman volunteering on a shoe drive.
Speaker 2 (01:43):
And she explains this problem to him that he had
just never even considered, which was a shocking lack of
shoes even parts of Argentina, and for kids, this meant
constant exposure to you know, parasites, sores, infections.
Speaker 1 (01:56):
He actually went with her for a few days. Didn't
he just see a firsthand?
Speaker 2 (02:00):
He did. He saw the real debilitating effects, the blisters,
the pain.
Speaker 1 (02:04):
So what was wrong with that traditional charity model? Because
we know tom Ms was basically found it as a
reaction against it.
Speaker 2 (02:12):
Well, that model was the Achilles heel. It was all
based on these inconsistent donations from wealthy countries, unpredictable, totally unpredictable.
They had no control over the supply, and the shoes
they did get were often the wrong size or just
not right for the terrain.
Speaker 1 (02:28):
So the need was constant, but the supply was just
all over the.
Speaker 2 (02:31):
Place, exactly. And that's when Blake realized this isn't a
charity problem. It's a business problem, a logistics problem. It
needed a business solution.
Speaker 1 (02:41):
And that's the light bulb moment, the one that's so
brilliant in its simplicity.
Speaker 2 (02:45):
Sell a pair of shoes today, Give a pair of
shoes tomorrow.
Speaker 1 (02:48):
No percentages, no formulas, just.
Speaker 2 (02:50):
A direct, simple, understandable promise.
Speaker 1 (02:52):
He immediately gets his polo teacher Alejo to join him.
Speaker 2 (02:56):
Can you imagine that conversation. Hey, we're starting to shoot
company from teacher and a shoe producer. It's amazing.
Speaker 1 (03:02):
And the name was born right then, TOMS short for
Tomorrow's Shoes.
Speaker 2 (03:06):
A promise for better tomorrow. But the startup says, I
mean it was pure resourcefulness. They were working out of
Aleho's family barn.
Speaker 1 (03:14):
Scrapy doesn't even begin to cover it, not at all.
Speaker 2 (03:16):
They're going to local shoemakers asking them to modify this
traditional shoe for the.
Speaker 1 (03:21):
American market, a more durable sol, a leather and sole,
new prints, and most.
Speaker 2 (03:27):
Of the shoemakers, Blake writes, just called them loco.
Speaker 1 (03:30):
Crazy for messing with this classic design. Right, and I
love the detail about his quality control. He didn't have
labs or anything. So how did he test for durability?
Speaker 2 (03:39):
He literally dragged his feet along the concrete streets of
Buenos Aires No way, Yes, while Alejo walked next to him,
just watching to see how fast the souls wore down.
It just shows it sometimes your best resource is your
own ingenuity.
Speaker 1 (03:53):
So he gets back to La with two hundred and
fifty of these prototypes and instead of hiring expensive consultants,
he just gathers his friends.
Speaker 2 (04:00):
His female friends, his target consumers. Yeah, and he just
asked them where would you buy this? What do you think?
Speaker 1 (04:05):
He realized his customers were his best consultants, and they.
Speaker 2 (04:09):
Led him straight to American Rag, a boutique in La.
The buyer there got it. Immediately she said, this is
more than a shoe, it's a story.
Speaker 1 (04:19):
And that was the first retail sale, the very first. Okay,
so this is where things get really wild. Sales were steady,
but then comes the tipping point.
Speaker 2 (04:27):
A Saturday morning. Blake wakes up and his BlackBerry, in
his words, was spitting around on a table like it
was possessed by demons.
Speaker 1 (04:35):
Total chaos.
Speaker 2 (04:36):
A fashion writer, booth Moore had featured Toms on the
front page of the La Times calendar section. By the
end of that day, they had twenty two hundred online orders.
Speaker 1 (04:45):
Twenty two hundred, I mean the pressure of that kind
of spike, but.
Speaker 2 (04:48):
They only had about one hundred and sixty pairs left in.
Speaker 1 (04:51):
His tiny Venice apartment. That's a full blown crisis. How
do you even begin to handle that with no capital?
Speaker 2 (04:57):
You double down on resourcefulness. Yeah, and this is key
radical transparency. He used Craigslist Craigslist to find in turns
willing to jump into the fire, and one of them, Jonathan,
who's still with tom MS, spent his time calling all
twenty two hundred customers one by one.
Speaker 1 (05:12):
He called them personally. What didn't even say, just.
Speaker 2 (05:14):
The truth, Hi, we're a Timey Company. We just got
featured in the paper. We have wee more orders than shoes.
You're going to have to wait eight weeks. And what happened,
Only one person canceled their order.
Speaker 1 (05:24):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (05:25):
It just proved that customers will forgive you for almost
anything if you're just honest with them.
Speaker 1 (05:30):
And that leads right into one of the book's core
ideas storytelling as currency. The mission wasn't an add on,
it was the product.
Speaker 2 (05:39):
Yes, And he had this amazing moment at JFK Airport
that really crystallized.
Speaker 1 (05:44):
It for him, the JFK story.
Speaker 2 (05:46):
He sees a woman wearing red tom Ms, which was rare.
Then he asks her about them, and she physically grabs
his arm and just animately tells them the entire tom
Ms story.
Speaker 1 (05:57):
She tells him his own story, the.
Speaker 2 (05:59):
Whole thing, the Art Argentina trip, the one for one model,
even details like him living on a boat and being
on the amazing race.
Speaker 1 (06:05):
So she wasn't just a customer.
Speaker 2 (06:07):
No, she was a supporter, an evangelist. He realized they
weren't just creating transactions, They're creating a movement. The story
did all the marketing for.
Speaker 1 (06:15):
Them, but dealing with that kind of sudden success or
you know, the fear of failing to deliver That takes courage, a.
Speaker 2 (06:21):
Ton of courage, and Blake connects this directly to the
fear his own mother, Pam McCaskey, had to overcome.
Speaker 1 (06:28):
She wanted to write The Butterbuster's Cookbook.
Speaker 2 (06:30):
Right, and she was terrified of everything, flying, public speaking,
approaching publishers. But her desire to create was just stronger
than her anxiety.
Speaker 1 (06:41):
And she had a really painful financial setback at the start,
didn't she.
Speaker 2 (06:44):
Oh, it was crushing. She self published, took out a
big loan and gave sixty thousand dollars to a printer
who just vanished, took the money and disappeared.
Speaker 1 (06:53):
Sixty thousand dollars for a passion project that would make
most people just quit, But she didn't.
Speaker 2 (06:59):
She got a second loan and went on to sell
one point four million copies.
Speaker 1 (07:03):
So Blake took that lesson to heart.
Speaker 2 (07:05):
He did when he faced his own fears. He surrounded
himself with enthusiastic people and just focused on the actions
he could control, not the fear itself.
Speaker 1 (07:13):
He had that Eleanor Roosevelt quote, you must do the
thing you think you cannot do exactly.
Speaker 2 (07:18):
The idea is to see your big goal not as
one terrifying leap, but as a series of small, manageable steps.
Speaker 1 (07:25):
So after they sell this first ten thousand pairs, it
was finally time to fulfill the promise the first shoe drop.
Speaker 2 (07:31):
And this must have been just a profoundly emotional moment.
He took his family, his parents, his siblings, and his
first interns back to Argentina.
Speaker 1 (07:39):
They rented a big sleeper bus and just went village
to village for ten days.
Speaker 2 (07:43):
And they weren't just dropping off boxes, they were hand
placing the shoes on kids feet. Blake says he cried
many times. It was the moment the idea.
Speaker 1 (07:51):
Became real, and that experience really solidified the next principle,
Keep it simple.
Speaker 2 (07:56):
Mm hmm. The basic Albergatta designed is like a blank canvas.
It's perfect for things like their style, your soul parties,
or getting celebrity collaborations.
Speaker 1 (08:05):
The business model itself is super simple, and Blake even
applied it to his own life.
Speaker 2 (08:08):
Right he did. He moved on to a two hundred
square foot sale boat and got rid of most of
his stuff. Simplicity was everything, okay.
Speaker 1 (08:14):
So If simplicity is one pillar, resourcefulness is the other.
We have to go back to those legendary stories from
the early days. The Venice apartment.
Speaker 2 (08:22):
Oh, the apartment was chaos, pure chaos. They had to
hide all the shoe inventory in closets and under the
bed whenever the landlady came.
Speaker 1 (08:29):
By because her rattling muffler would announce.
Speaker 2 (08:32):
Her arrival exactly. And their entire company was being run
from one dying cordless.
Speaker 1 (08:37):
Phone, which leads to the famous Nordstrom buyer call. The
buyer wants to speak to the sales department of this
hot new brand, and the.
Speaker 2 (08:45):
Intern sitting in this mountain of shoe boxes just calmly answers, Hi,
this is the sales department.
Speaker 1 (08:52):
That's amazing.
Speaker 2 (08:53):
The buyer eventually figured it out and just laughed. She
realized how lean, or as they called it Friegel, the
company was.
Speaker 1 (09:00):
Frugal and free, free goal. I love that, and they
had French for a free lunch.
Speaker 2 (09:05):
It's more than just funny words. It was their culture.
It showed they prioritized the mission over comfort, and.
Speaker 1 (09:10):
That reversefulness lets you build the next crucial thing.
Speaker 2 (09:14):
Trust In a model like this, trust is everything it's
your ultimate currency, and that has to be both internal
and external.
Speaker 1 (09:21):
So for internal trust, he tells the story of the
airstream shoe.
Speaker 2 (09:25):
Disaster, a huge mistake. He ordered eight hundred pairs of
shoes customized for an airstream trailer.
Speaker 1 (09:32):
Convention, a convention for retirees.
Speaker 2 (09:34):
Not exactly the TiO men's demo. They sold five pairs,
but Blake took one hundred percent responsibility. He owned the
failure and that built huge trust with his team.
Speaker 1 (09:45):
And externally, there was the time they found a major
flaw in thousands of shoes.
Speaker 2 (09:50):
Yeah, six thousand pairs had faulty, slippery soles, a massive
financial problem for a young company.
Speaker 1 (09:56):
It could have sunk them.
Speaker 2 (09:57):
It could have, but Blake immediately ordered a proactive recall,
pulled every single pair from major retailers like Nordstrom. It's
a huge financial hit, but he knew preserving brand integrity
was worth more.
Speaker 1 (10:08):
They were really modeling their transparency on groups like charity water.
Speaker 2 (10:12):
Absolutely Scott Harrison's one hundred percent model, where every dollar
donated goes to projects and you can see it with
GPS coordinates online.
Speaker 1 (10:19):
So TOMS did the same by inviting people on shoe
drops exactly.
Speaker 2 (10:23):
Customers, media, anyone. Come see the giving for yourself, make
it tangible, make it verifiable.
Speaker 1 (10:28):
Which all proves the book's core thesis. Giving is good business.
The giving part isn't charity. It's the engine that drives
the whole thing.
Speaker 2 (10:36):
You see it in other models too, like Lauren Bush's
feed projects.
Speaker 1 (10:40):
One bag sold feeds a child for a year. They've
provided something like sixty million meals.
Speaker 2 (10:45):
And there's that incredible story of their wanding girl who,
because she was getting a meal at school, felt empowered
enough to say she wanted to be president one day.
Speaker 1 (10:54):
That emotional investment is what money can't buy.
Speaker 2 (10:57):
And it attracts talent. Over seventy percent of Americans say
they'd rather work for a company that supports a good cause.
The mission becomes your best recruitment tool.
Speaker 1 (11:06):
And the customers become a marketing army. The toms for
prom campaigns, the campus events that was all grassroots.
Speaker 2 (11:12):
It was, which brings us to the final step. Blake
outlines in the book.
Speaker 1 (11:17):
He tells the story of Tyler Eltraham, a college kid
who started One shot.
Speaker 2 (11:21):
Tyler was totally inspired by the one for one structure.
He wanted to apply it to preventive medicine.
Speaker 1 (11:26):
So he created a one for one model for meningitis vaccines.
Speaker 2 (11:31):
Every vaccine given to a college student here in the
US pays for one to be donated to Africa's meningitis belt,
where it's a huge problem.
Speaker 1 (11:38):
He just started small, won ten thousand dollars and proved
that this big life saving idea could come from just
applying that simple.
Speaker 2 (11:46):
Structure, and that's really Blas's ultimate goal. It shifted from
just running times to inspiring stories exactly like that one.
His definition of success became knowing even one life has
breathed easier because you have lived.
Speaker 1 (12:00):
So if we pull this all together, TAMMS is really
this definitive case study. It shows how simplicity, radical transparency,
and a powerful story can just completely redefine modern business.
Speaker 2 (12:11):
And it's all rooted in that Japanese idea of kaisen,
small constant improvements leading to massive change. Every scrappy action
from the craigslist in turns to dragging a seat on
the pavement was a form of kaisen, which.
Speaker 1 (12:24):
Really leaves us with this final thought for you to consider,
if you see your biggest idea not as some terrifying,
giant leap, but as one small, simple.
Speaker 2 (12:32):
First step, and you remember that your story is your
best currency.
Speaker 1 (12:35):
What is the easiest action you can take right now
to just tie your shoelaces and start your own meaningful journey.
Speaker 2 (12:42):
Thank you so much for sharing these sources with us
and letting us take this deep dive. It's a truly
powerful story.
Welcome back to the Deep Dive. You asked us for
something very specific today, a really detailed, story driven journey
through Blake Miikowski's book, Start Something That Matters. Right, You
want the full picture, the anecdotes, the messy startup life,
and you know the philosophy that really launched Toms.
Speaker 2 (00:19):
And that is exactly our mission here. Yeah, we're not
just reading a summary now, we're trying to extract the
blueprint the knowledge Blake gained from building this global phenomenon.
Speaker 1 (00:29):
It's all designed to inspire, right, Yeah, challenge you to
create your own impact exactly.
Speaker 2 (00:34):
And what I find so compelling is that he really
walks the walk. Fifty percent of his author proceeds actually
support to start Something that Matters fund So.
Speaker 1 (00:43):
The mission goes way beyond just the pages of the book.
Speaker 2 (00:45):
It really does.
Speaker 1 (00:46):
Okay, let's dive in. Let's set the scene for this
big breakthrough. The year is two thousand and six, right,
Blake is twenty nine years old, and he's already this
restless serial entrepreneur.
Speaker 2 (00:56):
He was on his fourth start up, he's fourth.
Speaker 1 (00:59):
And online company, and he just desperately needed a vacation.
Speaker 2 (01:04):
So he goes back to Argentina, a place he knew
pretty well, he'd raced through it four years earlier on
the Amazing Race.
Speaker 1 (01:09):
I always forget that part of the story, and that
he lost the million dollar prize by just four minutes.
Speaker 2 (01:15):
Just four minutes. But this trip wasn't about competition at all.
It was, you know, about slowing.
Speaker 1 (01:20):
Down, immersing himself.
Speaker 2 (01:22):
Yeah, learning the culture, playing polo, and wearing the local shoe,
the alpargata, just a simple soft canvas slip on.
Speaker 1 (01:30):
And it's funny how these huge ideas so often come
from just that simple cultural immersion. Because near the end
of his trip, this relaxing vacation takes a really sharp turn.
He meets an American woman volunteering on a shoe drive.
Speaker 2 (01:43):
And she explains this problem to him that he had
just never even considered, which was a shocking lack of
shoes even parts of Argentina, and for kids, this meant
constant exposure to you know, parasites, sores, infections.
Speaker 1 (01:56):
He actually went with her for a few days. Didn't
he just see a firsthand?
Speaker 2 (02:00):
He did. He saw the real debilitating effects, the blisters,
the pain.
Speaker 1 (02:04):
So what was wrong with that traditional charity model? Because
we know tom Ms was basically found it as a
reaction against it.
Speaker 2 (02:12):
Well, that model was the Achilles heel. It was all
based on these inconsistent donations from wealthy countries, unpredictable, totally unpredictable.
They had no control over the supply, and the shoes
they did get were often the wrong size or just
not right for the terrain.
Speaker 1 (02:28):
So the need was constant, but the supply was just
all over the.
Speaker 2 (02:31):
Place, exactly. And that's when Blake realized this isn't a
charity problem. It's a business problem, a logistics problem. It
needed a business solution.
Speaker 1 (02:41):
And that's the light bulb moment, the one that's so
brilliant in its simplicity.
Speaker 2 (02:45):
Sell a pair of shoes today, Give a pair of
shoes tomorrow.
Speaker 1 (02:48):
No percentages, no formulas, just.
Speaker 2 (02:50):
A direct, simple, understandable promise.
Speaker 1 (02:52):
He immediately gets his polo teacher Alejo to join him.
Speaker 2 (02:56):
Can you imagine that conversation. Hey, we're starting to shoot
company from teacher and a shoe producer. It's amazing.
Speaker 1 (03:02):
And the name was born right then, TOMS short for
Tomorrow's Shoes.
Speaker 2 (03:06):
A promise for better tomorrow. But the startup says, I
mean it was pure resourcefulness. They were working out of
Aleho's family barn.
Speaker 1 (03:14):
Scrapy doesn't even begin to cover it, not at all.
Speaker 2 (03:16):
They're going to local shoemakers asking them to modify this
traditional shoe for the.
Speaker 1 (03:21):
American market, a more durable sol, a leather and sole,
new prints, and most.
Speaker 2 (03:27):
Of the shoemakers, Blake writes, just called them loco.
Speaker 1 (03:30):
Crazy for messing with this classic design. Right, and I
love the detail about his quality control. He didn't have
labs or anything. So how did he test for durability?
Speaker 2 (03:39):
He literally dragged his feet along the concrete streets of
Buenos Aires No way, Yes, while Alejo walked next to him,
just watching to see how fast the souls wore down.
It just shows it sometimes your best resource is your
own ingenuity.
Speaker 1 (03:53):
So he gets back to La with two hundred and
fifty of these prototypes and instead of hiring expensive consultants,
he just gathers his friends.
Speaker 2 (04:00):
His female friends, his target consumers. Yeah, and he just
asked them where would you buy this? What do you think?
Speaker 1 (04:05):
He realized his customers were his best consultants, and they.
Speaker 2 (04:09):
Led him straight to American Rag, a boutique in La.
The buyer there got it. Immediately she said, this is
more than a shoe, it's a story.
Speaker 1 (04:19):
And that was the first retail sale, the very first. Okay,
so this is where things get really wild. Sales were steady,
but then comes the tipping point.
Speaker 2 (04:27):
A Saturday morning. Blake wakes up and his BlackBerry, in
his words, was spitting around on a table like it
was possessed by demons.
Speaker 1 (04:35):
Total chaos.
Speaker 2 (04:36):
A fashion writer, booth Moore had featured Toms on the
front page of the La Times calendar section. By the
end of that day, they had twenty two hundred online orders.
Speaker 1 (04:45):
Twenty two hundred, I mean the pressure of that kind
of spike, but.
Speaker 2 (04:48):
They only had about one hundred and sixty pairs left in.
Speaker 1 (04:51):
His tiny Venice apartment. That's a full blown crisis. How
do you even begin to handle that with no capital?
Speaker 2 (04:57):
You double down on resourcefulness. Yeah, and this is key
radical transparency. He used Craigslist Craigslist to find in turns
willing to jump into the fire, and one of them, Jonathan,
who's still with tom MS, spent his time calling all
twenty two hundred customers one by one.
Speaker 1 (05:12):
He called them personally. What didn't even say, just.
Speaker 2 (05:14):
The truth, Hi, we're a Timey Company. We just got
featured in the paper. We have wee more orders than shoes.
You're going to have to wait eight weeks. And what happened,
Only one person canceled their order.
Speaker 1 (05:24):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (05:25):
It just proved that customers will forgive you for almost
anything if you're just honest with them.
Speaker 1 (05:30):
And that leads right into one of the book's core
ideas storytelling as currency. The mission wasn't an add on,
it was the product.
Speaker 2 (05:39):
Yes, And he had this amazing moment at JFK Airport
that really crystallized.
Speaker 1 (05:44):
It for him, the JFK story.
Speaker 2 (05:46):
He sees a woman wearing red tom Ms, which was rare.
Then he asks her about them, and she physically grabs
his arm and just animately tells them the entire tom
Ms story.
Speaker 1 (05:57):
She tells him his own story, the.
Speaker 2 (05:59):
Whole thing, the Art Argentina trip, the one for one model,
even details like him living on a boat and being
on the amazing race.
Speaker 1 (06:05):
So she wasn't just a customer.
Speaker 2 (06:07):
No, she was a supporter, an evangelist. He realized they
weren't just creating transactions, They're creating a movement. The story
did all the marketing for.
Speaker 1 (06:15):
Them, but dealing with that kind of sudden success or
you know, the fear of failing to deliver That takes courage, a.
Speaker 2 (06:21):
Ton of courage, and Blake connects this directly to the
fear his own mother, Pam McCaskey, had to overcome.
Speaker 1 (06:28):
She wanted to write The Butterbuster's Cookbook.
Speaker 2 (06:30):
Right, and she was terrified of everything, flying, public speaking,
approaching publishers. But her desire to create was just stronger
than her anxiety.
Speaker 1 (06:41):
And she had a really painful financial setback at the start,
didn't she.
Speaker 2 (06:44):
Oh, it was crushing. She self published, took out a
big loan and gave sixty thousand dollars to a printer
who just vanished, took the money and disappeared.
Speaker 1 (06:53):
Sixty thousand dollars for a passion project that would make
most people just quit, But she didn't.
Speaker 2 (06:59):
She got a second loan and went on to sell
one point four million copies.
Speaker 1 (07:03):
So Blake took that lesson to heart.
Speaker 2 (07:05):
He did when he faced his own fears. He surrounded
himself with enthusiastic people and just focused on the actions
he could control, not the fear itself.
Speaker 1 (07:13):
He had that Eleanor Roosevelt quote, you must do the
thing you think you cannot do exactly.
Speaker 2 (07:18):
The idea is to see your big goal not as
one terrifying leap, but as a series of small, manageable steps.
Speaker 1 (07:25):
So after they sell this first ten thousand pairs, it
was finally time to fulfill the promise the first shoe drop.
Speaker 2 (07:31):
And this must have been just a profoundly emotional moment.
He took his family, his parents, his siblings, and his
first interns back to Argentina.
Speaker 1 (07:39):
They rented a big sleeper bus and just went village
to village for ten days.
Speaker 2 (07:43):
And they weren't just dropping off boxes, they were hand
placing the shoes on kids feet. Blake says he cried
many times. It was the moment the idea.
Speaker 1 (07:51):
Became real, and that experience really solidified the next principle,
Keep it simple.
Speaker 2 (07:56):
Mm hmm. The basic Albergatta designed is like a blank canvas.
It's perfect for things like their style, your soul parties,
or getting celebrity collaborations.
Speaker 1 (08:05):
The business model itself is super simple, and Blake even
applied it to his own life.
Speaker 2 (08:08):
Right he did. He moved on to a two hundred
square foot sale boat and got rid of most of
his stuff. Simplicity was everything, okay.
Speaker 1 (08:14):
So If simplicity is one pillar, resourcefulness is the other.
We have to go back to those legendary stories from
the early days. The Venice apartment.
Speaker 2 (08:22):
Oh, the apartment was chaos, pure chaos. They had to
hide all the shoe inventory in closets and under the
bed whenever the landlady came.
Speaker 1 (08:29):
By because her rattling muffler would announce.
Speaker 2 (08:32):
Her arrival exactly. And their entire company was being run
from one dying cordless.
Speaker 1 (08:37):
Phone, which leads to the famous Nordstrom buyer call. The
buyer wants to speak to the sales department of this
hot new brand, and the.
Speaker 2 (08:45):
Intern sitting in this mountain of shoe boxes just calmly answers, Hi,
this is the sales department.
Speaker 1 (08:52):
That's amazing.
Speaker 2 (08:53):
The buyer eventually figured it out and just laughed. She
realized how lean, or as they called it Friegel, the
company was.
Speaker 1 (09:00):
Frugal and free, free goal. I love that, and they
had French for a free lunch.
Speaker 2 (09:05):
It's more than just funny words. It was their culture.
It showed they prioritized the mission over comfort, and.
Speaker 1 (09:10):
That reversefulness lets you build the next crucial thing.
Speaker 2 (09:14):
Trust In a model like this, trust is everything it's
your ultimate currency, and that has to be both internal
and external.
Speaker 1 (09:21):
So for internal trust, he tells the story of the
airstream shoe.
Speaker 2 (09:25):
Disaster, a huge mistake. He ordered eight hundred pairs of
shoes customized for an airstream trailer.
Speaker 1 (09:32):
Convention, a convention for retirees.
Speaker 2 (09:34):
Not exactly the TiO men's demo. They sold five pairs,
but Blake took one hundred percent responsibility. He owned the
failure and that built huge trust with his team.
Speaker 1 (09:45):
And externally, there was the time they found a major
flaw in thousands of shoes.
Speaker 2 (09:50):
Yeah, six thousand pairs had faulty, slippery soles, a massive
financial problem for a young company.
Speaker 1 (09:56):
It could have sunk them.
Speaker 2 (09:57):
It could have, but Blake immediately ordered a proactive recall,
pulled every single pair from major retailers like Nordstrom. It's
a huge financial hit, but he knew preserving brand integrity
was worth more.
Speaker 1 (10:08):
They were really modeling their transparency on groups like charity water.
Speaker 2 (10:12):
Absolutely Scott Harrison's one hundred percent model, where every dollar
donated goes to projects and you can see it with
GPS coordinates online.
Speaker 1 (10:19):
So TOMS did the same by inviting people on shoe
drops exactly.
Speaker 2 (10:23):
Customers, media, anyone. Come see the giving for yourself, make
it tangible, make it verifiable.
Speaker 1 (10:28):
Which all proves the book's core thesis. Giving is good business.
The giving part isn't charity. It's the engine that drives
the whole thing.
Speaker 2 (10:36):
You see it in other models too, like Lauren Bush's
feed projects.
Speaker 1 (10:40):
One bag sold feeds a child for a year. They've
provided something like sixty million meals.
Speaker 2 (10:45):
And there's that incredible story of their wanding girl who,
because she was getting a meal at school, felt empowered
enough to say she wanted to be president one day.
Speaker 1 (10:54):
That emotional investment is what money can't buy.
Speaker 2 (10:57):
And it attracts talent. Over seventy percent of Americans say
they'd rather work for a company that supports a good cause.
The mission becomes your best recruitment tool.
Speaker 1 (11:06):
And the customers become a marketing army. The toms for
prom campaigns, the campus events that was all grassroots.
Speaker 2 (11:12):
It was, which brings us to the final step. Blake
outlines in the book.
Speaker 1 (11:17):
He tells the story of Tyler Eltraham, a college kid
who started One shot.
Speaker 2 (11:21):
Tyler was totally inspired by the one for one structure.
He wanted to apply it to preventive medicine.
Speaker 1 (11:26):
So he created a one for one model for meningitis vaccines.
Speaker 2 (11:31):
Every vaccine given to a college student here in the
US pays for one to be donated to Africa's meningitis belt,
where it's a huge problem.
Speaker 1 (11:38):
He just started small, won ten thousand dollars and proved
that this big life saving idea could come from just
applying that simple.
Speaker 2 (11:46):
Structure, and that's really Blas's ultimate goal. It shifted from
just running times to inspiring stories exactly like that one.
His definition of success became knowing even one life has
breathed easier because you have lived.
Speaker 1 (12:00):
So if we pull this all together, TAMMS is really
this definitive case study. It shows how simplicity, radical transparency,
and a powerful story can just completely redefine modern business.
Speaker 2 (12:11):
And it's all rooted in that Japanese idea of kaisen,
small constant improvements leading to massive change. Every scrappy action
from the craigslist in turns to dragging a seat on
the pavement was a form of kaisen, which.
Speaker 1 (12:24):
Really leaves us with this final thought for you to consider,
if you see your biggest idea not as some terrifying,
giant leap, but as one small, simple.
Speaker 2 (12:32):
First step, and you remember that your story is your
best currency.
Speaker 1 (12:35):
What is the easiest action you can take right now
to just tie your shoelaces and start your own meaningful journey.
Speaker 2 (12:42):
Thank you so much for sharing these sources with us
and letting us take this deep dive. It's a truly
powerful story.
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