Blake Mycoskie is the Founder of TOMS and the brains behind the brand’s One for One® model
Mycoskie was born in Arlington, Texas, to Mike Mycoskie, an orthopedic surgeon, and Pam Mycoskie, an author.
After first attending Arlington Martin High School, he graduated from St. Stephen's Episcopal School in Austin in 1995.
His mom enrolled him in an agency that put him in a Kmart ad, as well as a couple of episodes of “Dallas,” where he featured as a playmate of JR’s son.
Mycoskie began playing tennis when he was 10.
He attended Southern Methodist University on a partial tennis scholarship in 1995 and elected a dual major in philosophy and business.
But after his freshman year at college back in the mid-1990s, he needed a summer job. He’d won a partial tennis scholarship to SMU (Southern Methodist University) in Dallas and his father had a word with him, Mycoskie told CNBC’s “The Brave Ones.”
“I had this discussion with my dad that night at dinner. And he couldn't argue with it. I think that's when he first realized, like, I was going to look at things a little bit differently than the traditional path. “’Tennis is great, but I don't think you're going be the next Andre Agassi’,” his father had said. “’You've got to … learn some work ethic beyond this incredible work ethic as an athlete.’”
Mycoskie figured that waiting tables at a mid-level restaurant could be a job that made the most amount of money in the least amount of time. “High enough checks that you get good tips, but also tables that turn fast enough that you're not, like, at a fine dining where you're there all night,” he said. But memorizing menus at the local Pappadeaux seafood restaurant wasn’t for him.
A chance conversation took him to the first job that would make him good money: tennis coaching, which he would carry out on the family’s court. He delivered flyers to a three-mile radius. “Within the next week, I was fully booked up, and I was making like, you know, hundreds of dollars an hour, because I had multiple kids paying $25 each.”
After an Achilles tendon injury he sustained as a sophomore, which effectively ended his tennis career, Mycoskie left SMU and launched his first business, EZ Laundry.
It was 1996 and Mycoskie was 19. “We bought an old truck from a FedEx junkyard for, like, 1,600 bucks. And I had money, that was my money from teaching tennis the summer before.” At first, no-one trusted them with their clothes.
“We had to create kind of this illusion that there were more customers, because no one wanted to be first … We only had maybe like 10 or 15 customers that first semester. And we basically, every time we had to deliver their laundry, delivered it, like, six times. So people would just see the truck moving around the campus, and us going forward and backward all the time.”