Today, April 10, thousands of people will go barefoot around the world for the second annual “One Day Without Shoes.” It’s an event organized by Toms Shoes –the company that built a brand around the buy-one-give-one charity model–to raise awareness about the impact a pair of shoes can have on a child’s life.

But the day will also shine a light on the Toms model, which is facing two existential flaws that threaten to undo the company’s social impact and business success.

The Toms buy-one-give-one model does not actually solve a social problem.

First, the Toms buy-one-give-one model does not actually solve a social problem. Rather, the charitable act of donating a free pair of shoes serves as little more than a short-term fix in a system in need of long-term, multi-faceted economic development, health, sanitation, and education solutions.

“What’s wrong with giving away shoes?” you might be thinking. “At least they’re doing something.” The problem, we’ve learned, is when that “something” can do more harm than good. As Time recently noted, an increasing number of foreign aid practitioners and agencies are recognizing that charitable gifts from abroad can distort developing markets and undermine local businesses by creating an entirely unsustainable aid-based economy. By undercutting local prices, Western donations often hurt the farmers, workers, traders, and sellers whose success is critical to lifting entire communities out of poverty. That means every free shoe donated actually works against the long-term development goals of the communities we are trying to help.

The fact is, Toms isn’t designed to build the economies of developing countries. It’s designed to make western consumers feel good. We can see that in the company’s origin story, as the Toms website proudly tells it, in which founder Blake Mycoskie saw the problems barefoot children in Argentina faced and decided to start Toms. Mr. Mycoskie didn’t ask villagers what they needed most or talk to experts about how to lift villages out of long-term poverty. Instead, he built a company that felt good and that was good enough for him and Toms’s nascent consumers.

Toms isn’t designed to build the economies of developing countries. It’s designed to make western consumers feel good.

And that brings me to the second flaw. From a business perspective, Toms is at risk. Our research with leading consumer-facing companies has shown that there is a finite and unpredictable market for the feel good value proposition–consumers are fickle when it comes to committing to brands based on nonfunctional attributes. Toms’s core value to its customers is being replicated by an increasing number of companies who can promise the exact same return: feeling good about your purchase. Without a stronger, more differentiated and less replicable product offering, Toms will likely fall out of fashion in the coming years.

And therein lies the real peril. Those “helped” by Toms are, in the long-term, no more able to afford shoes or address the real social, economic, and health issues that they face than they were before. Once their free shoes wear out in a couple years, the children Toms “helped” will be just as susceptible to the health and economic perils associated with bare feet as they were before.