Blog 2 When the Impact Case Becomes a Reality ​

In class, we discussed the importance of having an impact case is for the starting of a business, particularly when you are presenting your idea to investors that may not be particularly familiar with the problems your business could address if given funding to succeed, or the way your business may impact stakeholders. What I understood from our class discussion is that having a good impact case, with money-earning potential and a quantifiable social impact, is extremely important to investors. And since an impact case is just hypothetical, feeding investors scenarios made up by the startup pitchers, it is completely up to the business to portray themselves in a good way, which may not match up to reality. This could be the case in multiple ways, in class we saw the case of TOMs, which had a well-intentioned but poorly thought out impact case, where the giving of the free shoes ended up harming the local vendors and economies of the nations they were donating to. Plus, for many families in these developing nations, the issue isn’t even lack of shoes but lack of jobs available. TOMs is an example of a poorly thought out impact case.

I found that there is a company called Nisolo that uses shoes to address the actual problem at hand by selling high quality, handcrafted shoes from poverty stricken countries to the West. Unlike other places that use labor from developing countries like H&M, Nisolo’s product has a high profit margin by being a luxury shoe brand whose focus isn’t mass-production rather delivering quality products. Due to being a luxury product, Nisolo has a higher profit margin so they can afford to pay their workers a proper wage. In addition, by marketing themselves as an ethical and sustainable brand, they appeal to the bourgeoisie that want to feel like they are helping people in need by just buying a pair of shoes. Nisolo’s impact case is only that is marketable and actually has thought behind how the shoe brand would impact their stakeholders, the employees and the local governments of these developing nations.