Blake Mycoskie brought it all home last week. TOMS Shoes, his hugely successful line of canvas slip-ons and the new “wrap boots” now sell tons of national retailers like Nordstrom, Urban Outfitters, American Rag and Greenloop. TOMS Shoes has a philanthropic business model, giving one pair of their canvas slip-ons to a child in need for every pair they sell. Up until now, founder Blake Mycoskie and team have done their “shoe drops” in exotic locales like Argentina, South Africa, and Ethiopia to personally fit kids with brand new pairs of TOMS. So far, they have distributed 85,000 free pairs of shoes worldwide.

Since in the US most kids have access to shoes, doing shoe drops abroad seemed to make the most sense. Blake recently realized though that some American children, like victims of natural disasters, were stuck with ill-fitting hand-me-downs or had to share shoes with siblings. So TOMS arranged a handful of their DIY shoe parties, dubbed Style Your Sole, at four different school districts around New Orleans still recovering from Katrina. Each child received their very own pair of white canvas TOMS to paint in their own unique way; needless to say, they were very excited!

Another brilliant idea from TOMS.

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