Tom shoes was born out of Blake Mycoskie's visits to Argentina -where he noticed plenty of shoeless children roaming through the streets during the 2001-3 economic meltdown-.
He also discovered an old local shoe still used by the gauchos at the countryside named Alpargatas -on behlaf of the original manufacturer- and started to think in improving from a 4 dollar shoe with a socially-focused business model: Tom would give one shoe to shoeless children in Argentina and every other country where it operates for each shoe sold in the US or to paying customers.
He started by himself, in a warehouse and with only 4 collaborators. In 6 months, Tom's social business model became popular in New York and at the end of the first year, the company was breaking even, delivering 50,000 shoes, with 50 million-plus dollars sales and 45 full time employees.
Tom's marketing was all "viral" -mostly using You Tube videos like these, created and uploaded by fans and crew-
Mycoskie didn't stop there his connections with Mega, and started to sell Tom's eco-shoes (made of recycled materials) at Whole Foods and launched women's strap boots inspired in Polo horses' vendages with equal success.
Is this a sign that Mega has become mainstream?
Do you know of other examples?
How can you aply Tom's model's ideas and principles to your PII project?
Posts
0 comments:
Post a Comment