In 2006 an American businessman named Blake Mycoskie was traveling in Argentina when he met a woman who was part of a volunteer organization that provided shoes for poor children. Mycoskie spent some time with the group as they traveled from village to village. That trip dramatically changed his perspective. “I knew somewhere in the back of my mind that poor children around the world often went barefoot,” he later recounted, “but now, for the first time, I saw the real effects of being shoeless: the blisters, the sores, the infections.”