Start Something That Matters

by Blake Mycoskie

  Actually, one of the most successful recent uses of story in advertising came about by accident. In the late 1990s, the fast-food company Subway created a new line of healthy sandwiches and, along with it, an advertising campaign centered on an impersonal numbers-based product description: They were introducing seven subs that each contained less than six grams of fat.

  Few consumers cared. But then, in 1999, Subway accidentally discovered Jared Fogle, a onetime 425-pound college student who had been diagnosed with edema, a condition that can lead to diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and other severe health problems. Jared, who at the time had a sixty-inch waist, knew he had to lose weight to avoid serious illness; to do that, he started eating what he called “The Subway Diet”—a low-fat sub for lunch and another for dinner.

  Three months later, Jared had lost almost one hundred pounds and was on his way to losing more—so much that newspaper and magazine articles began to appear about his counterintuitive diet of sandwiches. A Subway franchise owner read one of these articles and sent it to Subway’s ad agency; they in turn tracked down Jared. Some company executives weren’t convinced that Jared’s story, memorable as it was, would sell sandwiches, so Subway tried a Jared-based advertising campaign in select locations as an experiment. The results were spectacular. Subway eventually rolled out a major national campaign built around the story of Jared.

  The seven-under-six campaign had gone nowhere, but the Jared story gave the company an 18 percent increase in sales its first year and another 16 percent the year after that, at a time when other chains were growing at less than half that rate.

  Frankly, I didn’t know this lesson when we started TOMS—but I learned it pretty quickly. In fact, I know the exact moment I realized that TOMS was a story as much as it was a product.

  Back in November of 2006, I was checking in to a flight at New York’s JFK Airport on my way to Los Angeles. At the time I wasn’t wearing my TOMS because I had come directly from the gym, in a rush to catch the plane, and still had on my sneakers. That was very unusual for me—I almost always wear TOMS.

  The trip had been difficult. At the time, TOMS was a very young company, and the tough and jaded buyers at the major New York fashion retailers didn’t yet understand our mission. I hadn’t made one sale in the city that week and was leaving feeling a little deflated.

  While I was checking in at the American Airlines automated kiosk, I noticed that the woman next to me was wearing a pair of red TOMS. Now, at this early point in TOMS’ history, I still hadn’t seen a single person outside of friends, family, and interns wearing our shoes. This was a big moment for me.

  Containing my excitement, I said, “I really like your red shoes. What are they?”

  It was as if I’d pushed a button on the kiosk; the response was that automatic. The woman’s eyes widened, her face came alive, and she said boldly, “TOMS!”

  Trying to be cool, I kept watching the ticketing kiosk, but the woman became so excited that she grabbed my shoulder, pulled me away from the machine, and, in an animated voice, told me the TOMS story.

  “You don’t understand,” she said. “When I bought this pair of shoes, they actually gave a pair of shoes to a child in Argentina. And there’s this guy who lives in Los Angeles who went to Argentina on vacation who had this idea—I think he lives on a boat and he was once on the Amazing Race TV show—and the company is wonderful, and they’ve already given away thousands of shoes!”

  At this point I was getting embarrassed and knew I had to tell her who I was—I couldn’t walk away from such excitement. So I said, “Actually, I’m Blake. I started TOMS.”

  She looked me right in the eyes and said, “Why did you cut your hair?”

  This wasn’t the question I’d expected. But it turned out she had seen the YouTube videos we’d created on a TOMS Shoe Drop—when I had much longer hair, which is why she didn’t recognize me. But it also showed how much attention the woman paid to the video and to our company.

  I gave her a hug and proceeded to my gate. Only when I was seated on the plane did the magic of what had just happened dawn on me: This woman was passionate about telling the TOMS story to a complete stranger. How many other people had she already spoken to? If she was willing to talk like this to me, she’d probably told her family and friends as well. She might even have uploaded a photo of her shoes to Facebook and shared the YouTube video with her friends. How many people had she influenced?

  I wondered, “What happens when we have ten thousand or one hundred thousand people wearing TOMS? If they all tell the story to only three or four others, and then those people tell the story …” Well, you can do the math.

  That’s when I fully realized the power of our story. And we’ve been focused on it ever since.

  The story helped us understand another important point. People who tell the TOMS story are more than just our customers, they’re our supporters. People who buy TOMS like to talk about their support of our mission rather than simply telling people they bought a nice shoe from some random shoe company. They support the product, and the story, in a way that a casual buyer will never do. Supporters beat customers every time.

  But gaining supporters starts with having a story worth supporting. Exxon Mobil can come up with a story if it wants, and if it pays enough PR companies enough money, it can put a positive spin on its business: Still, the focus of Exxon Mobil (or Union Carbide or Philip Morris or Goldman Sachs) will always be on making money above all else, a perfectly defensible capitalist motivation. But no one bypasses a Shell station to go to an Exxon because of the “Exxon story.”

  Conscious capitalism is about more than simply making money—although it’s about that too. It’s about creating a successful business that also connects supporters to something that matters to them and that has great impact in the world. As consumers, customers will want your product for the typical reasons—because it works better, because it’s fashionable, because the price is competitive, because it offers an innovation—but as supporters they also believe in what you’re doing; they’ve bought into your story because it taps into something real, and they want to be a part of it.

  This is why the woman at the airport matters. Every company needs supporters like her. Customers and employees come and go. Supporters are with you for the long haul.

  For more than sixty days, I crisscrossed the country in an Airstream trailer telling the TOMS story. This photo was taken outside a Nordstrom parking lot where we camped for the night.

  A T&T entered the TOMS story at just the right time: The company played an enormous role in our growth—and in helping tens of thousands of children receive shoes in 2009. The relationship came about through a serendipitous act of storytelling.

  FEET FIRST

  When we started TOMS, I used to wear one shoe from each of two different pairs wherever I went. On my left foot I’d wear a red one and on my right, a blue one. (Sometimes I’d don a tie-dyed one on the left and a black one on the right.) The point was to make people notice, so that when they asked about my mismatched shoes, I could tell them the TOMS story. It worked: I was able to tell the story so many more times than if I was just wearing a matching pair of TOMS.

  In 2008, I had filmed a minute-and-a-half television interview for LXTV, an NBC affiliate, in which I talked about the TOMS story. The segment wound up running on video screens in the backs of 5,000 New York City cabs and was viewed by hundreds of thousands of riders.

  One of those taxicab riders happened to be an executive from the ad agency BBDO, which does a lot of work with AT&T. The people at BBDO thought that the TOMS story would be a great fit for an AT&T campaign they were putting together, so they sent an email to info@TOMS.com (our customer-service email account). Once they found out that I actually used AT&T to run my business from overseas, the company asked me to film a commercial. Directed by Oscar nominee Bennett Miller (Capote), the shoot took place over a week’s stretch, mostly at TOMS headquarters in Santa Monica and on location
at a Shoe Drop in Uruguay.

  The commercial ran throughout 2009 and was an enormous success, both for AT&T and for TOMS. AT&T benefited from their connection to our story—TOMS gave them an inspiring, human-scale way to connect to people (just as Jared did for Subway in a very different sort of campaign). And TOMS benefited from the exposure of being a part of a global brand’s massive ad buy. The lesson: The power of your story isn’t just a way to connect to your ultimate consumer but is also a means of making you attractive to potential partners who want to attach themselves to something deeper than buying and selling.

  Now think about how to find your own story. Here are some tips to do just that.

  THE POWER OF AFFINITY

  There’s a new vodka called Tito’s that is ubiquitous in Texas restaurants because, in a world already full of premium vodkas like Grey Goose, Smirnoff, and Absolut, it’s the only one actually from Texas. Company founder Bert Butler Beveridge II, aka “Tito,” was able to use this distinction to enter the premium-vodka market, which everyone else felt was already overly saturated. Instead of just creating another high-end vodka to compete with the established brands, Bert created a story—the only Texan vodka—and quickly received support from restaurateurs around the state who, out of Texas pride, wanted to help him.

  Everyone belongs to some community, whether it’s based on your background, your home state, your college, or your favorite sports team. By identifying all the possible communities to which you belong, you may well find an affinity group—and a story—that helps get your business off the ground, secures your dream job, or lets you achieve whatever goal you are pursuing.

  Almost everyone has a passion for something, but sometimes we have trouble saying what it is. It’s surprisingly easy to lose touch with our true passions—sometimes because we get distracted with everyday living; sometimes simply because in the usual stream of small talk or transactable business, no one ever asks us about our dreams. That’s why it’s so important that you first find a way to articulate your passion to yourself. When you discover what your passion is, you will have found your story as well.

  If you’re not sure about your passion, here are three questions I sometimes ask people:

  • If you did not have to worry about money, what would you do with your time?

  • What kind of work would you want to do?

  • What cause would you serve?

  Once you answer these questions, you’ll have a good idea of what your passion is. Take your time—you might need to let the questions sit with you for just a moment before you reconnect to your truest answers. But once you figure out what your passion is, you have the core of your story and the beginning of your project.

  The more strongly you feel about what you do, the more likely you are to push yourself to be good at it and find a way to make a success of it. If you organize your life around your passion, you can turn your passion into your story and then turn your story into something bigger—something that matters.

  Once you figure out your story and begin your project—be it a business, a philanthropic organization, or even a job search—how do you spread it? The most important thing is that you commit to telling that story at every opportunity. It’s not an incidental part of your business; it has to be a major area of focus—otherwise, you won’t spend the time you need to promote and share it.

  At TOMS, our story is very simple: We make great shoes and give away a pair to a child in need for every pair we sell. And we recently began using our One for One model to help save and restore sight through the launch of TOMS Eyewear. For every pair of sunglasses or eye-wear we sell, TOMS helps give sight to a person in need through medical treatment, prescription glasses, or eye surgeries administered by our amazing eye care partner Seva.

  We spend every day thinking about new ways to spread our story. We’ve done everything from a seventy-day cross-country tour in an Airstream trailer to hosting events at Nordstrom stores to inviting fans and customers to join us on Shoe Drops around the world, and from creating a thirty-five-minute documentary we premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival to developing a TOMS campus department to support high school and college students who want to join the movement.

  We are also quick to use ideas that come from our supporters, rather than our own brainstorming. For example, in 2008, students at the TOMS campus club at Pepperdine University organized a barefoot walk on campus to raise awareness of what it feels like not to have shoes. We thought it was a terrific idea, and soon TOMS launched an official company program called One Day Without Shoes (ODWS), which takes place every April. We ask our customers and fans to go barefoot for one day—just as the students at Pepperdine did. ODWS walks have been organized at elementary schools, high schools, college campuses, companies big and small, and hundreds of other places. In 2010, more than 250,000 people around the world participated in ODWS, 1,600 of which were organized through our website. (Please come join us at www.onedaywithoutshoes.com.)

  Don’t ever think that good ideas will come only from within your organization—sometimes your supporters will think up ideas as good as anything your employees could ever invent.

  TOMS never stops thinking of new ways to tell our story, because we believe in it. People outside an organization can sense the difference between a story that is authentic and a story that was fabricated just to make money—but so can people within an organization. So can you, as the leader of your project, whatever it is, and if you doubt your own authenticity, it will sap your passion. But if you genuinely love your story, you will love to share it with others.

  Here are some other tips for spreading your story:

  Make a list of every group to which you have a connection and that could help get it out there. This list might include your social network online (e.g., Facebook friends, Twitter followers), an alumni organization, a weekend sports team, yoga class members, a church congregation, and so on. These are your communities, and they already have a vested interest (even if loosely) in what you are doing with your life.

  But don’t stop there. Talk up your story anywhere someone is likely to ask you, “So what do you do?” Some of my favorite places to engage in this kind of story-sharing are ski lifts, subways, planes, holiday parties, business networking events, and trade shows. Take the opportunity to let your passion run wild. Again, you’ll quickly see if your story is resonating or falling flat—not only are you spreading your story, but you’re also finding new ways to refine it.

  Stories don’t have to stand alone. If your story resonates with someone else’s, find a way to merge the stories, as AT&T did with TOMS.

  When you have a story that’s larger and more interesting than your product or service—or you—other people and companies will want to incorporate your story into theirs to share in the halo effect. For TOMS, those people and companies included the publisher of Vogue, who gave TOMS as a holiday gift to his extraordinary list of contacts (most of whom had not heard of TOMS at the time); Ralph Lauren, who created a line of limited-edition TOMS featuring special prints and patches and sold them in Rugby by Ralph Lauren retail stores across the country; and the high-end clothing store Theory, which featured TOMS on its sixty-foot “Icon Wall” at its flagship Manhattan store and on smaller walls at other locations. Each wall featured the word “GIVE” spelled out in giant capital letters, along with text retelling the TOMS story. Theory did all this with a simple objective: sharing a story they liked with their customers.

  If someone is interested in hiring you, or consulting with you, or joining your business, or even dating you, he or she will go online and Google you. Your Facebook page or your Tumblr or your Flickr feed will appear, and if they’re not compelling, if they don’t offer opportunities for others to feel a connection to your story, it will be very hard to stand out.

  The solution is not to try to scrub the Internet clean of your presence. Quite the opposite: You want prospective partners, employers, colleagues (and dates) to find you—your online
presence gives you a wonderful way to affirm the impression you make in person. But the key is to make sure that the online persona represents who you really are and is consistent with the themes of your story—and take care that you don’t put anything out there that you don’t want someone to find. Google doesn’t care if your search results embarrass you.

  As part of One Day Without Shoes, the TOMS staff and local fans walk barefoot along the Santa Monica Pier. In 2010, more than 250,000 people went barefoot on ODWS.

  In every niche there are the people Malcolm Gladwell famously labeled “connectors” in his book The Tipping Point, the bigmouths who are at the hub of their networks. Make sure to get your story in front of people who are in a position to tell it to others. Sharing your story with a hermit may earn you one new convert; sharing it with someone at the center of a social network will have an exponential effect.

  It’s important to know your audience. At its center, your story is about a specific idea or product or expertise that you’re offering. You can’t be all things to all people and still maintain your credibility and integrity. Make sure your story is crafted to appeal to the people you really want to become your supporters and that it draws from your core strength.