WHAT does it mean to Stand For Tomorrow? This is exactly the question I asked Lisa Hogg – Senior Director of Marketing and Giving at Toms, a company celebrated for its one for one philosophy, providing a pair of shoes to a child in need for every pair you purchase. The company also sells glasses and optical frames, with each purchase funding medical treatment, prescription glasses, or sight-saving surgery, having provided for 600,000 sight-restoration surgeries across the globe.
In their latest campaign, Toms expands their activism further, investing and working alongside charities in Europe, giving much-needed support to the homeless, victims of human trafficking, and refugees. Divided into smaller movements, each targeting a different social issue, Toms Stand for Tomorrow looks to provide long-term financial aid for the worlds most marginalised groups, proving themselves to be a company with giving at its core.
Joshua Combes, Toms changemaker and hairdresser
The brand evokes the belief that small changes can be the most important. The first changemaker, a term Toms created for people they believe are transforming the social landscape, is #DoSomethingForNothing founder and hairdresser Joshua Coombes. Started in the belief you should do something for nothing (as in no payment) to help someone, Coombes embodies the ethos of the Toms brand. Collaborating with Tom’s on a specialised art show Light & Noise, showing across Manchester, Paris, Amsterdam, and Berlin, the show, through visual art and multimedia content, aims to give a platform to the stories of homeless people in these cities.
Ella Grace Denton, Toms changemaker and musician
Tom’s also partnered with musician Ella Grace Denton and the Helen Bamber Foundation to create a safe space for women and give vital support to survivors of human trafficking. Hosting a series of women’s circles across London and Manchester in April, Toms has also given financial support to the Helen Bamber Foundation, while raising awareness of this often stigmatised social issue.
Lisa Hogg is the woman behind the campaign. The South African-born mother of two joined the company in 2016, and has since been the head of each campaign in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. As it turns out, to stand for tomorrow you just have to be open-minded, progressive, and caring – the key principles the company was founded on. In the midst of her busy schedule, Lisa sits down with Glass to discuss the ins and outs of Toms latest campaign.
Lisa Hogg, Senior Director of Marketing and Giving at Toms
With Toms incredible One for One scheme, providing shoes and clean water for millions of people across the world, philanthropy seems to be a big part of the brands ethos. As senior director of marketing and giving, what’s your role in the campaign?
The campaign is actually just a first opportunity for us to talk about evolving our giving model, because we’re expanding our impacts investments, taking 50 percent and retaining that on the One for One model, and then putting the other 50 percent into impact investment that are specific to different markets. My role as in leading marketing is to look into what we call the issue areas. So what are the issues our consumers care about? We are the bridge between them and benefactors of how our business works. Spending time on qualitative research to make sure the decisions we make around our impact investments really reflect what our supporters and consumers want to invest in. So that’s the giving component – finding out what we should be supporting, then finding the most appropriate and impact driven non profits to do investments with. Then the marketing side is obviously just all the story telling, so the nice thing is it’s just a really cohesive journey from impact investments into the story telling, and how we do that.
What’s the significance of the name of the campaign – Stand For Tomorrow?
A lot of people don’t know that Toms stands for tomorrows shoes. We weren’t started by a guy called Tom, the brand was started by a guy called Blake. But when he was creating the products, putting tomorrows shoes on a label was impractical, so he just condensed it down to Toms. For us thinking as a brand we intrinsically think we can impact tomorrow and make a better tomorrow through the projects and the efforts we do. The “Stand For” came two years ago, when the world started to change and unfortunately not for the better, e.g. Trump getting voted in, so we got to a point where we felt like it was even more important as a brand to stand for the things we really care about, and not to be silent on issues we felt were really important.
We’ve always been very active in the space, but it’s a much more active participation point of view, and not just for us but a call to action for our consumers. Passive participation is great, but what we’d like to do is have that but then actually inspire active participation, so that we’re not trying to change the world on our own, but our consumers are actually really actively involved in that process as well.
What is the overall aim of the campaign?
I guess, like many other brands there’s a challenge of retaining relevance with a younger audience. Our USP was super strong when we first started as we were the only One for One company, there’s been a massive proliferation of purpose in business, which is amazing, but it means we’ve lost a really sharp point in our USP. We’re not the only One for One company anymore, we’re not the only full profit company that’s focused on purpose, there are quite a few options, good, bad, and ugly to be honest. Some people are doing it on a superficial level, but the consumer doesn’t necessarily know that, so we wanted to start connecting them with our purpose on issues we felt they would connect with, and also shifting to a point of view of giving locally globally, so doing lots of projects but in the markets where we’re actually doing a lot of our business. I think we just really want to improve our relevance.
It’s definitely an acquisition campaign, to start getting more people into the fold so we can start communicating more around the issue areas. Conversion and selling products is always paramount, because the more we sell the more impact we can make, but it is getting Toms to the front of mind again, for this really specific conscious consumer.
The campaign works with the homeless, and women who’ve experienced trauma, such as human trafficking. How exactly does it provide support for these people?
We did in SS19, three investments, one in youth homelessness, we made an investment to Centrepoint UK. The change maker we worked with, Joshua Coombes, he’s focused on supporting being a hair dresser and helping the issue of the homeless people, and a lot of what he does it to use the arts in order to tell a story and connect and empower homeless people. He has a collective called Light & Noise, so we activated that as part of our activation program, for the campaign, and with CentrePoint UK we now made a contribution allowing them to open an arts program, an outreach program in Manchester. It’s the first outreach opportunity that they’ve ever had in Manchester, if you look at the stats Manchester has a really prevalent homelessness issue.
Obviously the long-term impact is hard to quantify, but at least having that spot or moment in time, where homeless youth in Manchester actually have a place to go. From the women’s empowerment point of view, we made a contribution to an amazing organisation called the Helen Bamber foundation. We have an investment that funds the holistic rehab program for 33 women, which can take anywhere from a year to more as they rehabilitate to a point of having an independent life in the UK. The third one we did was about social impact entrepreneurship and we funded a change make exchange with Ashoka, and there’s a small accelerator component to it as well.
So those are the three, and obviously our intention with that is to empower and inspire already amazing social impact entrepreneurs – to continue the hard work that they are busy with, because they’re very isolated and are at a huge risk of burnout, and giving up. There were 20 change makers that work on a vastly broad group of projects, so those are the initial investments, and we’re really just out the gate on these programs, we’re hoping it will be long-term projects, but for now it’s very specific project investments on specific fixed KPI projects.
Toms Stand for Tomorrow changemakers
The campaigns to raise awareness of the homelessness issue – why do you feel it’s such a neglected issue, especially in the UK?
It’s not necessarily neglected when you look at the non profits that work in the space, it’s just big. I think the statistic we had for lasts years campaign was 103,000 young people in the UK registered with the government for help against homelessness, and you can assume that if those are the people who have registered, there’s still a lot of people who haven’t. So it’s a really big problem. If you look at Europe in general, the decline of the economy in certain markets, which then directly impacts the youth unemployment rates, education is not necessarily the equalizer it used to be.
Homelessness is a bigger topic, as there are multiple reasons why young people end up on the streets, whether it’s issues at home, or education not working out. The fact is they need mentorship and support, so I wouldn’t say it’s a neglected issue, it just needs more support. The non-profits we’ve spoken to and are working with. It’s a never-ending journey basically. When we did our research, things like education and economic empowerment, were the broader framework topics, and then obviously under the economic empowerment, homelessness is a massive contributor to the issue.
Toms makes a big social impact, what advice would you give to smaller businesses that want to make a change?
A lot of businesses do want to bring purpose into their portfolio now, because the world just requires so much more support in the current climate, but also because consumers are starting to demand it. They will either accept or reject a brand based on what they stand for, so I think it’s really important. My advice to any brand that wants to bring purpose to their business it to look at their core skill set, what is core to the personality of their brand, what value do they bring, and then find a purpose which is very closely connected to that. Because what happens if you go somewhere wildly different and outside your skill set or personality as a brand, you could be really bad at it, or it can come across as wildly superficial.
Also, realise that if you don’t want to step into the space of making a while big project and a whole different team or whatever, there are other ways like, to repurpose your business we work with a media company called good loop, and they have a one for one model. But then through the media player you can contribute to non-profits. So I think with the proliferation of purpose in business, there are also more options where you can more simply get involved, if the rest is too difficult just going back to the primary piece of advise, do something that is really natural to you. Also don’t just talk about it, raising social consciousness is not enough anymore, you can’t just talk about it you have to do something.
Alongside Stand for Tomorrow, you use the name Giving Evolution for the larger campaign. Why Giving Evolution?
I think in the press release we spoke about the Giving Evolution, as we had the giving model with shoes, sight and water for the most part of 13 years, so basically we realised we’d got to the point where we had to evolve/innovate in our space. It’s basically just the fact we’re taking out business model and evolving it into a new space, which is what i mentioned before – the 50/50 splits, so never stepping away from our traditional gives as I like to call them. Retaining that but also going into a new space and exploring different topics that are relevant to the local consumer. so you’ll actually see from a global perspective, quite different projects showing up in different regions, but that’s just because we want to make sure that it’s locally relevant.
For the upcoming change makers in the summer, and through your next campaign, what kind of social issues are you hoping to address?
Slipping into a more provocative space, in full winter, the broader scope lines were next generation activism, mental health for men, and gender equity and the markets we are focusing on are France, the UK and Holland. So in France we’re working with a really cool group of girls called Gucci Gang, they’re Parisian It girls who’ve started a social platform called SafePlace, which is providing a platform for young people, male and female, encouraging them to ask difficult questions around the topic of sex. The way they got there was because young people don’t have a lot of info on what is appropriate sexual behaviour and what’s not. They wanted to provide a space where the main focus is women, but we realised on all topics even if it’s focused on one gender, the other gender always has a role to play, and how we solve it.
So that’s around the topic of sexual abuse and we found an amazing non-profit that I won’t mention as we’re still refining the contract, and then with men’s mental health we’re working with James Mcvey from The Vamps. Then, for Holland we’re working with an amazing young feminist named Milou Deelen, and she’s very active in the space, she’s a journalist, she writes for Vice and Broadly. She became topical when she did a video on her Facebook about slut shaming, so what we’re looking at with her is topics of sexual freedom for women. Things like how we are in charge of what we do with our bodies, how safe we feel, and ensuring that the environments around us are not toxic, once we make those choices.
So kind of wildly different from Spring, but I think that’s the benefits of the project investments, is not to say that we’ll dip in and out of issues, because we are looking at longer term partnerships with the non profits that we work with in the space.
Stuff that’s at the front of our minds and isn’t necessarily getting addressed enough, to our consumers or for our consumers. So yes I think it’s going to be a really interesting stand for campaign, we’ll continue into fall. The overarching thing is stand for tomorrow, but also obviously with Joshua, Ella Grace Denton, and Sara Nuru, we had different stand fors. With Joshua and homelessness it was stand for dignity, with Ella it was stand for connection, and with Sara it was stand for progress. but as we get into fall then there’ll be a different stand for, one that works across all three stories.
by Emma Hart
For more information on Toms Stand for Tomorrow campaign, please click here