Many entrepreneurs will tell you that what they are doing now is not what they initially set out to do. Making major career changes, even mid-career or late-career, can often lead to more satisfying and successful outcomes. That’s what our series The Pivot is all about. Every month, we talk to founders, business leaders, and entrepreneurs about how and why they changed course and found success in an entirely different industry. Here we talk to Tim Brown, co-founder and CEO of the wool shoe brand. all the birds.
Growing up in Wellington, New Zealand, Allbirds co-founder Tim Brown harbored two distinct ambitions: to become a professional soccer player and a designer. As a young man he played in various soccer teams such as the Miramar Rangers, but at the same time he grew up attending film festivals and plays with his mother and began to dream of a profession where he could be creative.
Brown’s coaches always stressed how unlikely it was to have a successful career in professional sports, but his incredible drive and desire to prove people wrong earned him a football scholarship to the University of Cincinnati at age 17. Academically, he studied design. “I knew somehow that this was what I would be doing for the rest of my life,” he says.
But Brown’s sporting career began to gather momentum after graduation when he joined Australia’s professional football club Newcastle Jets in 2006. There he met manager Ricki Herbert, who had played on the New Zealand team that went all the way to the World Cup. World. in 1982. Herbert proposed that with years of hard work and training, Brown could be part of a team that qualified New Zealand for the World Cup in 2010.
Brown emigrated back to New Zealand and began to pursue his new dream with fervor and dedication. “That feeling of being part of a group chasing something was really powerful,” she says. Years of hard work paid off: Brown was vice-captain of the New Zealand team that played in the 2010 World Cup.
After achieving his goal, he decided to leave football and play pivot. In 2012, Brown retired from the sport and enrolled at the London School of Economics, where he planned to learn the business skills necessary to launch the wild idea he had been working on for years: wool trainers.
The idea started in 2007, after Brown read a magazine article about how New Zealand’s wool industry was in steep decline. In 1983, its “peak sheep” years, the country was home to 70 million sheep, but that has since dropped to 39 million. due to factors like a declining global wool industry and stiff competition from abroad. He began to dream of a way to boost the industry again. As an athlete, Brown was used to being sent synthetic shoes with heavy logos by athletic brands, and he began to envision the opposite: a minimalist running shoe whose most distinguishing feature was its simplicity. He wanted the shoe to be made from biodegradable natural wool. He applied for, and won, an innovation grant from the New Zealand government to develop a woolen fabric for use in footwear.
By the time he found himself on an exchange at Northwestern University in the old Walmart.com In CEO Carter Cast’s entrepreneurship class, he had already gone through several prototypes of the wool sneaker. After Brown presented his vision, Cast took him aside and said that while he didn’t think the business idea was very good, he seemed to have more determination about his project than most of the students. “He said, ‘Why don’t you put it on Kickstarter so you can fail and move on?'” recalls Brown.
Following Cast’s advice, Brown filmed a video of himself talking about the sneakers amidst a herd of sheep and the green hills of New Zealand, and uploaded it to Kickstarter in 2014. Brown managed to sell 1,000 pairs of sneakers in four days. He found a shoe manufacturer in Portugal on the Internet that produced the shoe. “I ended up with $20,000 in sales before I had to close,” he says. There was only enough fabric in stock to make all 1,000 pairs.
While the initial concept of a comfortable merino wool sneaker resonated, Brown describes the early years as hard work. “Making shoes is hard, but doing it when you don’t know what you’re doing and don’t have capital is even harder,” he says. He had spent all of his savings on the idea and, although he had an investment offer, he wasn’t sure there was a way forward for his business.
Just as he was planning to throw in the towel, a guiding light appeared in the form of one of Kickstarter’s earliest customers, San Francisco-based biotech engineer Joey Zwillinger. (Brown and the Zwillinger wives were friends.) Concerned about sustainability, Zwillinger saw potential in Brown’s idea, and shortly after discussing investment opportunities, Brown was on a plane to visit Zwillinger and the couple spent several days envisioning what the business might look like. “I had a very clear vision for the product, and he had an equally clear vision for a world that was going to need to fundamentally rethink the products they used every day,” says Brown.
Together, they predicted that the global apparel and footwear industry, the latter being it is expected to reach 440,000 million dollars by 2026—would need to become more sustainable, so they decided to go with Brown’s idea. Soon after, Brown and his wife moved to San Francisco, and Zwillinger and Brown went to work. The couple raised US$2.7 million in seed capital and launched Allbirds in 2016 with a single product: the fleece runner, available in several different colors.
The company was a Certified B Corporation from the start, meaning its mission was to “balance profit with purpose.” The shoes quickly developed a cult following among the startup crowd. the Wall Street Journal proclaimed them “Silicon Valley’s favorite sneaker,” a status symbol for the kind of person inclined to “[beg] for an invitation to the Clubhouse and [worship] Elon Musk.”
At the same time Google founder Larry Page was sporting a pair of Allbirds, Brown was learning how to build a team, define company culture and plan retail strategy. “He was a whirlwind,” says Brown. “We sold a million dollars in our first month and a million pairs in our first year and a half. We really tapped into a kind of desire.”
Allbirds opened its first retail store in San Francisco in April 2017 and, in less than six years, has expanded to more than 50 retail stores worldwide with a workforce of 1,000 employees. The business has also come a long way from the days of a single product, now offering a multitude of simple sneaker styles derived from natural materials such as eucalyptus fiber and sugarcane, as well as apparel. This year, the brand launched the world’s lowest carbon sneaker in collaboration with Adidas.
In November 2021, the company went public on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol BIRD and was valued at US$4.1 billion. Since then, stocks have fallen, but Brown isn’t worried. “That’s the fun of success, you have a little bit and then things get harder,” he says. Despite the challenges, Allbirds is in it for the long haul. The company has just launched its new Tree Flyer and Sugar series and continues to invest in materials that make the shoe production process more sustainable. Brown believes that with hard work, Allbirds has the ability to become a 100-year brand and build a legacy for generations to come. “I have never felt more clear about the way forward.”