texas magazine

Toms Shoes wants to give away 300,000 pairs of shoes to children in need. Alumna Melissa Chu makes sure they’ve got the money to do it.

Most children in the small, rural villages of Argentina have never owned a pair of shoes. Their feet are infected and covered in cuts from walking barefoot for miles to get water or go to school.

So when the Toms Shoes bus rolls into town to distribute crisp, clean new shoes and volunteers start unpacking the white and navy canvas espadrilles, the children surge forward, clapping, smiling, whistling. Parents linger behind their kids, grateful and sometimes crying. Slipping on a pair of shoes is, for most of us, a mundane daily routine. But for these kids it’s a gift that dramatically improves quality of life with every step.

And it’s that moment that compelled Melissa Chu, BBA ’06, to quit her job in Austin in August 2008, sell nearly everything she owned, pack the rest into her Honda Civic and hit the road for Los Angeles. Only she didn’t know it at the time.

Chu sports the classic Toms model in red.

“I just knew that I wanted a change– to be connected to something larger than just me,” Chu says.

After doing volunteer work for a few months, she responded to a job listing on Craigslist. It was an accounts receivable position with a small company, a little-known startup called Toms Shoes.

Toms’ mission: for every pair of shoes it sells, it gives away one pair to a needy child.

That one-for-one concept is a simple but revolutionary business model that has earned the company legions of supporters, from socially conscious college students to former President Bill Clinton.

Chu saw the job as a way to feed her interest in analytical challenges while also engaging in a wider social mission. She says it’s her responsibility to keep the company running efficiently so that it can meet the financial bottom line, which supports the shoe giveaways.

“We ran the accounts receivable report when I first started, and it was high across every category,” Chu says. “That means you have a lot of money sitting out there that’s yours, but you don’t have the cash in your hand. And that hurts us two-fold because we need to run the business, but also give away shoes.”

When Chu was hired, there was only one person managing the finances for Toms. Now she’s part of a robust financial operation that includes a CFO who came from private equity and a financial analyst who was previously at Goldman Sachs.

While many in retail are buckling under the pressure of recession, Toms is soaring. By last June it had already surpassed its sales goals for all of 2009. In April, AT&T featured the company in a national television ad, exposing the brand to millions of viewers and increasing its web traffic to 100,000 hits per day, up from a prior average of 15,000.

Chu sees the pedigree of the Toms staff and the success of the company as an indication of a shift in priorities, for both corporations and consumers.

“One of the benefits to what’s going on in the economy is it’s forcing people to reevaluate what’s important. For this generation, it’s finding the intersection between the social good and the business profit,” Chu says.

“The way Toms is set up, everyone who buys a pair of shoes is an investor in our mission. And that’s a much more sustainable model than a straightforward nonprofit. AT&T chose Toms for a reason, and that reason is because they realize the impact our message has.”

Now Toms is focusing on smart growth and establishing best practices.

“There are people that can tell you how to grow a shoe company,” Chu says, “but growing a company that gives away shoes, there’s not really a path to follow.”

In December, Chu went from the back office to the front lines and participated in her first Toms Shoe Drop in Argentina.

“Participating in the giving side was a culmination of everything I was looking for when I joined Toms. It inspired me to work harder with the understanding that everything we do every day contributes to our one –for-one mission.”

A reminder that for Chu, the bottom line is just the beginning.

By Tracy Mueller

View a slideshow of photos from Chu’s shoe-drop trip to Argentina. (To see captions, click the Full Screen button in the bottom right and then click Show Info.)