From TOMS Shoes to TOMS Shades

Photo: TOMS shoes

Founder Blake Mycoskie and his crew at TOMS have decided redefine their shoe company into a “One for One” company with the introduction of TOMS Eyewear. Now, your latest sunglasses purchase can provide medical treatment, prescription glasses, or sight-saving surgery to a person in need.

TOMS has partnered with the Seva Foundation, who has over 30 years of experience in the treatment of vision impairment in the regions of Nepal, Cambodia, and Tibet. With this partnership, they seek to diminish the statistics.  Blindness and visual impairment is the 7^th largest health disability in the world. 165 million people suffer from visual impairment, most of which is usually curable via surgery. By improving vision, TOMS will immediately improve a person’s quality of life. Simplicity remains at the core of the TOMS model.

Yet if this model smells like teen spirit to you, Mycoskie is the first to disagree. He tells CBS news, “What’s important to look at is the fact that young people are making this a part of our everyday lives. If we don’t start taking care of our environment and others we’re going to destroy the world. The problem isn’t going away. So I don’t think that as kids grow older, this way of thinking is going to fade. If anything I think it’s going to change consumer behavior. Maybe social enterprise is a fad, but there are a lot of things that start as fads and stick. I think social responsibility and sustainability are going to be the norm for good business. Just as we the civil right movement started, social enterprise is just going to be a part of life.”

Fad or otherwise, the TOMS company has never been lacking in vision. It is great to see its expansion and efforts to meet another of the world’s many needs.