Friday night we did just that! Our dear friend Luis put on an amazing event in Phoenix that was jam packed with adventure! Adventure including me dropping a huge event table on my bare foot, that was great for sure! haha! So many excited faces for TOMS and some reps from Invisible Children showed up as well. There were artist stations set up, where people could move from station to station to get their TOMS painted. My best, Sentrock, even painted some shoes to be raffled off for the night! Phoenix provided much needed respite seeing that I still have my apartment there. We re-charged our batteries and have now returned back to beautiful Southern California, only we almost got blown away at a dinosaur park yesterday.

Last night we had the pleasure of taking TOMS to Chapman University for the first time, and our rep Natalie was a brilliant host. In the first 15 minutes, 5 items had already been purchased. These guys were great at coming up with shoe names: my personal favorite was El Shoepacabra! Yes! Such creativity!

Right now, many of us Vagabonds around the country are watching The Rescue live in Chicago. Invisible Children is dear to our hearts and we all wish we could be there singing along. There are hundreds of people singing “In the name of love, Oprah come and rescue us” in hopes to be rescued after being out in the Chicago streets since Saturday afternoon. Our hearts are beating for Joseph Kony’s child soldiers.

Next week we get to meet up with all the other Vagabonds and dance the night away in Vegas. We are all so excited. I know I don’t speak alone when I say that a little bit of my heart is in each of those Vaga Vans across the country… it will be nice to have us all together once again.

Tour is winding down but we aren’t done yet. We have promises to keep and miles to go before we sleep!

A sample of Sentrock’s art work

A portrait of Blair our rep’s friend Greg did! Perfect! ha

Tiny Blair in the bottom left corner of the photo, about to get blown away and eaten by the T-Rex

hangin out with some Triceratops, no big deal

Wario got so scared at the dinosaur park, he was hiding for at least an hour

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After our Owasso High event. [Heather, Taylor and Jake rock!]

OK, now, for one week, I’m going to deviate from the normal “here we are, here’s where we’re about to go, and Wario just danced the Macarena” post. Many months ago, before I was even a Vagabond, I made a promise to Ana Maria. Ana Maria is our Friends of TOMS extraordinaire and she’s amazing. After my Shoe Drop, before being chosen for the Vagabond program, I texted her to tell her a funny story. I had surgery in November. To make a long story short, I told everyone in the surgery center about TOMS before I’d even completely woken up from the recovery room. I kept saying “no really, I’m not doped up, TOMS shoes dot com”. Ana Maria thought it was the funniest story she’d ever heard and said it’d be great to have a page on the site for people to tell their funniest TOMS stories. I told her if I ever got the position, I’d do it

Well here I am, in the 7th week of the Vagabond tour. Here we are with a web page right in front of me. So in honor of Ana Maria, here we go. Comment here and tell us your funniest TOMS story! The more hilarious the better. I tell people about TOMS while unconscious and on the way out of the surgery center, I fell into a trash can trying to hold my shoe up to show it. So tell us the silliest of the silly… We’re ready!

Utah, get ready for us. Next week, we’re dancing through!

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We spent Saturday in Azusa, CA for the Azusa Pacific University 5k run with free barbecue and live concert! If there’s one (or two) things Team Southwest loves, it’s some free grub and good tunes. Plus $8 from the sale of every shoe went to a donation pool benefiting three awesome local non-profits. We’re stoked on all the love we felt last time we were in Azusa – from all of the APU students and from our incredible campus rep Janay and her sweet roommates.

This

Team SW mascott Wario hanging with the merch!

week marks the last week that Team Southwest will be roaming around southern California, as we head down to San Diego to finish off the California leg of our tour. After that, we’re off to Phoenix where we can bring TOMS Shoes to the rad people of Arizona, Kelli’s stomping grounds. Get ready AZ, it’s gonna be TOMS ALL DAY!

Oh, and by request, here is the Team Southwest highway motorist tip number three:

Make sure you load your luggage into the van (even if you’re going back to the place you’re crashing at) every time you load up.

Otherwise, it’s not very pretty when you have to hit the brakes at a red light or stop sign. Unless you like having 20 boxes full of shoes hit you in the back of the head. In that case, onward and upward, folks.

xoxo

Krysten

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Get gas even if you think you have time later! If you don’t, you’ll end up in the middle of nowhere California with no gas station in sight and a beeping gas light!

No guys, we did not run out of gas. Did we almost run out of gas? Possibly! ha. We made it just in time, however, the drive to Lompoc proves to be more “remote” than one would think.

Speaking of Lompoc, HOW awesome is Justine Redding, our amazing campus rep! Her family was fabulous and we loved every minute of it. Her event was really chill and we coin phrased one of our newest favorite terms. Our new friend Ta Ta said “TOMS ALL DAY” and we loved it so much, it’s our new tag line!

We also went to some great retail stores along the way that show the diverse networks of people that buy TOMS. Dressed was a super stylin’ boutique, Esteem was a great surf shop with a laid back vibe, and the guy at Beach House was totally from Argentina and knew the alpargata well! The retailers are doing great jobs and as a broke Vagabond I really have to catch myself or I’d buy all kinds of cute stuff!

LMU was a beautiful campus and Betsy rocks TOMS well! The entire campus shuts down on Tuesday and Thursday and there’s an afternoon period where no one has class at all. It enables people to hang out on the alumni mall and our event got great foot traffic. The Style Your Sole was on fire, some of those girls were really creative with glitter and ribbon!

Yesterday we had to stop by headquarters to scan inventory and drop a few things off. Vaughn from next door had the craziest look on his face when he saw us drive up. We told him the tour was over. He wasn’t the only one that said “Wait, why are you back?” It was fun to see surprised faces.

For now I’ll leave you with some pictures:

Here we are at our launch party. This picture fits us perfectly. Blair’s happy, I’m completely overzealous, and Krysten is looking at me like I’m nuts.. hehe

Driving up the coast, a shot of the beach:

We Poked Sea Anemones

We visited an amazing cafe called Natural Cafe, this was on their tip jar

Jon from Esteem had a great TOMS painting that we loved

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Team Southwest is back for our weekly Friday blog!

First we need to give a small shout out to our pals at Falling Whistles for having us at their party last Friday night. They’re an amazing non-profit that we love and adore. Be sure and check them out and tell them you care!

We’re now in week two and feeling more a part of the TOMS family. We’ve helped stuff gift boxes for the TED conference and just now have been on hand to help out Tyler Ramsey with the set up for his web exclusive shoes! If you haven’t checked out his shoes yet, it’s most definitely a must! He’s so much fun and he never uses a brush for his work.

We also have new members of our Vagabond family, our tour managers Big John and his wife Michelle. They have amazing backgrounds in the music business and they are super excited to be here. We’re happy to have their guidance for sure! They are currently helping us route our tour in the most effective way and we’re quickly on our way to booking this wonderful journey we’re about to embark on.

Sean Scott, who handles production and design here at TOMS, held a very informative meeting with us today where we had the opportunity to ask questions about design, production and manufacturing. We had a lot of tough questions for him and were very impressed by what we learned. He does a wonderful job at TOMS and is a genuinely honest, hard-working guy with a lot of integrity. We’re excited to have had the chance to spend some time with him and hope to continue conversations with him in the future.

We can’t wait to start sharing more and more adventures with you in weeks to come and for now, we’ll leave you with a picture of us with our vagabond intern Justin at the office! He’s from Australia and we love him for working so closely with us!

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