As you probably know, TOMS is a shoe company that loves to give back. The inside of their shoes read, “With every pair you purchase, TOMS will give a pair of new shoes to a child in need. One for One.™” TOMS puts on these events called “Style Your Sole”. Here is how it works. A person buys a pair of canvas TOMS and can get anything painted on them right there in the store. TOMS commissions local artists to come and paint the requests. A representative from TOMS used to work at Fossil too, and sent the request for local artists to a friend of mine. He then put me in contact with TOMS. So long story short, I got to be one of the five artists to paint TOMS at the Nordstrom in North Park Mall in Dallas this past Saturday. We literally opened shoe boxes and saw the requests of the customers written under the lid. Here are a few of my shoes. They restrict the artists to 10-15 minutes per pair. I used paint markers and acrylic paint applied with a small brush. All together, we painted 53 pairs in five hours.
Request: zebra print in silver metallic
Request: old school tattoo styled swallows in purple, blue, and red
Request: Texas Rangers “T” logo angled across the top
Request: Dallas Mavericks text on right shoe and horse icon on left shoe
Request: Eiffel Tower on top of both shoes
Request: Tennessee Volunteers “T” like Texas Rangers shoes you did
Overall, I had a great time. The Rangers shoes were my favorite, the Mavericks horse icon was the most intimidating, and the Swallows were the most unexpected. It looks like I might get to do it again soon, this time at Stonebriar Mall in Frisco. When I get details, I will post them here on the blog. Special thanks to Casey, Carter, Jamie, Jenni, Chris, Karen, Alex, and Gipper for stopping by to see me work.
