Allbirds eCommerce Success Story

Sports and casual footwear is a segment that is extremely competitive. This does not surprise you to read, which is why it is so refreshing when a competitor comes along that stands up to those brands we all have in mind.

That is Allbirds: a challenger that has managed to find its niche and not only survive, but also become a benchmark in many areas within the market.

Get ready to discover how they did it and what their strategy and business model are based on. I am sure it will not leave you indifferent.

If you have read any of our eCommerce success stories, you know that we have a soft spot for products that come from the founders’ own experiences.

Allbirds is one of those cases where two personalities with different roles converge: the user and the technician.

It was the year 2016 when Tim Brown and Joey Zwillinger crossed paths. The former was a former professional Australian football star; the latter, an engineer and entrepreneur.

After years of playing sports, Tim realized he did not like any “commercial” sneaker. Mainly for two reasons:

So, we have Tim Brown, a football player who wanted to make sneakers with the design he would have liked to wear, and with sustainable materials that would not harm the environment.

Brown applied for a grant from the New Zealand government to study how to use merino wool in footwear manufacturing.

Some time later, the second Allbirds founder appeared on the scene, Joey. He was an engineer specialized in the use of sustainable materials, who believed in the ex-footballer’s vision from the very beginning.

Working together, both entrepreneurs created the brand’s first prototype and model: the Wool Runner sneakers.

Although the name and silhouette might remind you of running shoes, they are actually a versatile type of footwear designed more for everyday use than for competition. Their main characteristics are:

There are many other virtues, such as being machine washable and, of course, using raw materials with guaranteed origin and responsible animal treatment.

The grant helped Brown design that minimum viable product, but he needed more funding and, perhaps even more importantly, to test whether the market would respond to his new business model.

What is the best way to do that? For Brown, it was crowdfunding, specifically through the Kickstarter platform. There, he launched a campaign to find backers, users interested in pre-ordering a pair of lightweight, eco-friendly, and comfortable sneakers.

The results were a complete success. Tim “only” wanted to reach $30,000, but in just 5 days, he had quadrupled that amount. Over 970 backers contributed a total of $120,000.

The success also drew the attention of the media. Thanks to articles published in outlets like The New York Times, it became clear that there was more than enough justification to build a company around this idea. But this meant scaling everything up, from production to distribution, and that would require more hands and, why not say it, more brains.

With the certainty that he needed a business partner, Tim Brown met Joey Zwillinger. As mentioned, Zwillinger was a biotechnology expert and actually worked in that industry. He listened to the idea, saw the prototype, and together they created the washable wool fabric with animal welfare certification that Allbirds still uses today.

In fact, this could be considered the true beginning of the brand, since that is when it took on a legal and corporate form.

So, let’s keep moving forward in our story.

By 2016, Allbirds entered the market with its brand-new Wool Runner. Driven by those early press articles — which even called these shoes “the most comfortable in the world” — they entered the market on the right foot.

You could say they quickly went viral in New Zealand, but especially in the United States.

That said, they were determined to grow wisely so as not to die of success. They decided to control as much as possible each pair of shoes sold, not only for quality or customer experience reasons, but also because they understood how important it was to maintain control over how and with what those sneakers were made.

A little over a year later, Allbirds continued to grow, in sales, but also by investing resources and money in R&D. As a result of that effort, new materials were added: eucalyptus fiber, and sugarcane-based soles called Sweetfoam.

At a business level, this was the moment when they began exploring the retail channel, opening physical stores in New York and San Francisco.

In the following years came an expansion of the catalog, not only in sneaker models but also in other sustainable products like socks or basic casual clothing, as one might expect.