How and Where it all began.

In 2006 Blake Mycoskie, an American traveller from Arlington in Texas, returned to Argentina for the second time in his life (the first in 2002) this time as a tourist. He began to notice that all the local polo players  wore slip on canvas shoes called ‘alpargatas’ and he began to wear these kind of shoes as well. The farmers of Argentina have been wearing shoes like this for hundreds of years and this inspired the first designs for Toms shoes. The One for One movement began when Mycoskie was doing volunteer work outside a town called Buenos Aires and he noticed that most of the children had no shoes and were running across the streets barefooted. He was struck by the poverty in the village and he decided he was going to try and help them.  He decided that he was going to create a product to sell in North America and that all the profits would go into funding shoes for the “shoeless youth” in developing nations, not just in Argentina but as many as possible.  He set up Toms headquarters  in Santa Monica, which he says ‘is short for a "better tomorrow."’ and he began to make and sell his shoes to North America.