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How I Built This with Guy Raz

TOMS: Blake Mycoskie

How I Built This with Guy Raz

Guy Raz | Wondery

Business

4.831.1K Ratings

🗓️ 29 May 2017

⏱️ 55 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Blake Mycoskie started and sold four businesses before age 30. But only in Argentina did he discover the idea he'd want to pursue long term. After seeing a shoe drive for children, he came up with TOMS — part shoe business, part philanthropy. PLUS in our postscript "How You Built That," how a long-haired Southern Californian, Chris Healy, co-founded The Longhairs and created special hair ties for guys. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

Hey, Prime Members, you can listen to how I built this early and ad-free on Amazon Music.

0:07.0

Download the app today.

0:09.0

New Year's is here, and with it brings the possibility of change.

0:13.0

As one behavioral scientist put it, first starts are really powerful.

0:17.0

So as you head into 2023, LifeKit is a great resource to help you plan your life and tackle changes, both big and small.

0:24.0

Listen to the LifeKit podcast from NPR.

0:30.0

Well, I kind of freaked out.

0:32.0

And I got this small army of interns to help basically be customer service to email and call all these people.

0:39.0

Let them know that there was no chance that they were going to get their shoes in the four days or five days of the website.

0:45.0

Promise there was going to be more like a couple months.

0:48.0

And I literally, uh, food-of-point desire was to taxi to this guy's house, Juan Torres, who was making the shoes and his garage for us at the time.

0:58.0

And I walked in and with the little Spanish eye knew I said something like,

1:03.0

Muchos Zapatos Rapido.

1:06.0

From NPR, it's how I built this, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built.

1:21.0

I'm Guy Ross in on today's show, How Blake Mikoski turned a goodwill mission into a multi-million dollar shoe empire

1:31.0

and created a business model unlike anything anyone had seen before.

1:38.0

So I should probably let you know right at the outset here that today's show is going to be a little bit different.

1:46.0

Because normally in the first half of the show we hear the story of how an entrepreneur painstakingly builds his or her business from the ground up.

1:56.0

And then you know how it goes from there right and normally it's just one business.

2:03.0

But with Blake Mikoski, it is not just one.

2:06.0

Because before he even turned 30, he'd already launched four companies and some of them did pretty well.

2:13.0

And as for his best known business, Tom's shoes, we're not even going to get there for a while.

...

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