What Is a Social Enterprise? From TOMS and Bombas to Right Here in Nashville

You've probably bought from a social enterprise without knowing that's what it was called. You just knew the shoes felt good to buy, or the socks were worth the splurge, and somewhere on the tag there was a line about who it helped. That's the whole idea, and it's a better idea than the jargon makes it sound.

We run one, so we think about this a lot. Here's the plain version of what it means, the big names that made the model famous, who's doing it well right here in our city, and where we fit into all of it.

So what actually is a social enterprise?

A social enterprise is a business built to make money and do a specific good, treating those as the same job rather than opposite ones. It's not a charity that fundraises. It's not a regular company that writes one check to a nonprofit after a good year and calls it giving back. The mission is baked into how the business earns its money in the first place.

That distinction is the whole thing. A traditional company donates after it profits, if it profits. A social enterprise builds the good directly into the product, so every sale employs someone, or diverts waste, or feeds a person, or gives an item to someone who needs one. Sell more, do more good. The two lines on the graph climb together instead of fighting each other.

And here's what nobody warns you about when you start one: it's hard. You're running a real business with real margins, real payroll, and real competition, while carrying a mission that costs money by design. Trust us, nobody feels a difficult economy more than a small business, and a social impact brand feels it twice. Which is exactly why the ones that pull it off are worth paying attention to.

The names that made it famous

Most people's first brush with the idea came from a few big brands that put it on the map.

TOMS is the one that popularized "one for one." For years, every pair of shoes you bought sent a pair to a child in need, and that simple math taught a whole generation of shoppers that a purchase could do two things at once. (They've since shifted to giving a share of profits to grassroots good, but the original model is what lit the fuse.)

Bombas took that same one-for-one idea and arguably perfected it. Every item you buy means one donated to people experiencing homelessness, and socks happen to be the single most-requested item in shelters. They've now given away over 200 million pairs of socks, underwear, and tees. They're the closest cousin to what we do, just with feet instead of couches.

Patagonia proves a social enterprise doesn't have to be one-for-one at all. Their mission is the planet, full stop. They pledge a slice of sales to environmental work, famously told customers not to buy their jacket if they didn't need it, and the founder eventually gave the entire company away so its profits fund fighting climate change. Wild, and kind of beautiful.

Ben & Jerry's showed you can bake activism right into an ice cream company, taking public stands and building sourcing values into the business long before it was trendy for brands to have a conscience.

They go about it in completely different ways, but the business itself is still the engine for the good.

Nashville is quietly stacked with them, too

You don't have to look nationally to find this. For a mid-size Southern city better known for music and hot chicken, Nashville punches way above its weight, enough that there's a whole Nashville Social Enterprise Alliance holding the scene together. A few we admire:

Thistle Farms is the one many people name first, and for good reason. They employ women survivors of trafficking, addiction, and prostitution to make home and body products, and they've become a national model for survivor-led business. Walk into their Charlotte Ave cafe and you feel the whole thing at once.

ABLE makes leather goods, shoes, and jewelry while working to end generational poverty through fair wages for women. They've been loud in the best way about it, even publishing what they pay to push the rest of the fashion industry to do better.

Strings for Hope takes something Nashville produces more of than almost anywhere, used guitar strings, and turns them into jewelry made by women in recovery from addiction, domestic violence, and trafficking. The most Nashville upcycling story we can think of.

Cement6 upcycles discarded cement and feed bags into durable bags and wallets, working directly with artisans in Cambodia. They pay their artisans fairly and refuse to mass-produce, and somehow they turn literal trash into something you'd actually want to carry.

Humphrey's Street Coffee roasts small-batch coffee as a social enterprise of Harvest Hands, creating jobs and mentorship for youth in South Nashville. Just Love Coffee built a roasting business with giving woven through it. And Lazarus Goods makes leather and lifestyle pieces with restoration and second chances at the heart of the brand.

And that's not even the whole list. It's a real community, and we're lucky to be in it.

Where we come in

We're Faircloth, formerly the Nashville Blanket Project. We started in 2018 in a roughly 600-square-foot apartment, with an almost embarrassingly simple idea: what if every time someone bought a good blanket, another blanket went to a neighbor sleeping outside in the cold?

So that's what we do. We design 100% cotton blankets, woven in the USA, made to last decades instead of going fuzzy-then-crunchy after three washes. And when you buy one, one is given to a neighbor in need. We've done that over 12,000 times now, which still knocks us flat.

Same principle as everyone above. Bombas does it with socks, we do it with blankets. The one you keep pays for the one someone else desperately needs, and the better we do, the more we give. There's no end-of-year check and no separate charity arm. The good is just built right into the thing itself.

That's the quiet magic of a social enterprise. You buy something you were going to buy anyway, something genuinely nice, and it quietly does a second job on the way to your door. From TOMS to Bombas to the shops down the street from us in Nashville, more businesses are working this way every year. We're proud to be one of them.