Mike Zimmerman September 30, 2009

THE IDEA WAS GENIUS, really. Blake Mycoskie, at the time best known for a 2002 stint on the reality show The Amazing Race, was looking to start something. He’d already started half a dozen businesses, from laundry to billboards, but nothing had inspired him. Mycoskie wanted to inspire. Add to the world, not take from it. He was young, motivated, overflowing with entrepreneurial spirit… and without an idea. He had some cash, but where to put it? His muse finally arrived in Argentina, of all places.

He’d gone there in January 2006 to learn how to play polo— Argentina has some of the best polo farms in the world. But in the backcountry, he saw other things: many poor children, shoeless, and some of the locals wearing simple yet incredibly comfortable farming shoes. So he was sitting on that Argentinean polo farm one day “and that’s where the epiphany happened,” he says. Cool shoes… a style not seen in the States… redesign them, bring them north, and for every pair you sell, give a pair away to one of those shoeless children.

TOMS Shoes—and high-profile “philanthropic capitalism”— was born. He has created an entire business model that inspires. “Ultimately, I’m trying to create something that’s going to be here long after I’m gone,” he says.

Business has thrived. As the fashion industry and consumers have embraced the many styles of TOMS Shoes, “shoe drops” organized by the company in Argentina, Ethiopia and South Africa have distributed 140,000 pairs of shoes to needy kids. The shoes, priced from $44 to $70 (and $98 for a women’s boot), are the ultimate feel-good purchase. The charitable business model has attracted famous business partners as well (there are now limited-edition Dave Matthews Band shoes, for example).

Through all this, Mycoskie maintains a weird double-life. Half his time is spent on the business, meeting with style mavens and fashionistas, working on fresh designs, and getting the word on the street through personal appearances and projects like his ubiquitous AT&T commercial. The other half is spent in desolate countries handing out shoes to smiling kids—the aforementioned “shoe-drops.” The company plans to give away 300,000 shoes in 2009. (Finish reading here).