Case Study: TOMS Shoes achieves digital material-development transformation and 20–30% time savings with Airtable

How TOMS Shoes digitally transformed its material development

TOMS Shoes, the mission-driven footwear retailer, needed to digitize and scale its material development process after the pandemic forced remote work. Misty Curtis’s team reviews 700–1,000 new materials each season across the U.S. and Asia, but previously relied on slow, fragmented workflows—swatches on internal servers, manual spreadsheets and presentations—that could take up to two weeks per round and required multiple repeats. TOMS Shoes turned to Airtable to modernize this process.

Airtable implemented a single cloud-based materials library (gallery view cards, searchable metadata, comment/approval workflows and automated daily digests) so teams across time zones can review, approve and find swatches instantly. The Airtable solution reduced tools from six to one, cut search time from ~30 minutes to ~30 seconds, reclaimed the equivalent of six weeks of work and returned an estimated 20–30% of team time, while enabling future predictive ordering to save additional time and cost.

TOMS Shoes

Misty Curtis

Director of Material Development