Sustainable footwear company, Allbirds' CEO and co-founder Tim Brown spoke to Shoetrader about the inception of the business, sustainable footwear and corporate environmental responsibility.
What sparked the idea for Allbirds?
The Allbirds business is built around three insights. The first one occurred back when I was in New Zealand playing soccer – I had a career playing professional soccer, I played in the A-League in Australia and for a team in New Zealand – and I was sponsored by one of the big sportswear companies and everything I wore had logos and bright colours and I had a very clear sense that there was an opportunity in sneakers to do something simple, to do something less.
There's an assumption I think in fashion and with new products that you have to add lots of stuff...and in the case of footwear I felt that it was over-designed and overdone and it changed over time for really no reason. And so that was the singular design insight. We sell only a handful of styles; we focus very much on a refined product offering; and, on doing a couple of things really well – doing simple really well – and it turns out, that's hard.
The second insight was really around wool and the idea of comfort – we have seen what I think can only be termed as the casualisation of fashion – where more informal clothes and styles have sort of taken over apparel, yet it hadn't gotten to shoes, so I thought there was an opportunity to design a shoe around the idea of comfort. The way that we worked out how to do that was with wool.
It occurred to me that as I looked in to the footwear industry and came into it cold – naively as it turned out – with no knowledge of how shoes are properly made, it was clear that footwear defaults to making things out of synthetics and leather and not-very-nice-materials and there was an opportunity in the case of wool and as we've worked out more recently in the case of eucalyptus fibre, to use natural materials to make more comfortable products.
The third insight is that the fashion industry is a real poor performer when it comes to environmental impact – possibly outside of the fossil fuel industry, they [fashion] may be the worst category – and me and my co-founder Joey felt that there was an opportunity for a different type of brand; that at its core was about sustainable material innovation; that was about trying to make stuff in a better way; and, that is really at the core of what Allbirds is about.
What's interesting about the sustainable materials we're using is that we're using them not just because they're the right thing to use, which obviously is important, but because they make more comfortable, better products. So that's the sweet spot for us as a brand and what we've tried to do.
We launched on the first of March 2016 and now we're a couple years old and we've got about 115 people in San Francisco. We're taking a good crack at a big problem.
How did peoples disbelief (that shoes could be made from wool) affect you?
Well I was just talking about that today and I think whenever you're trying to do something differently – in our case make a shoe out of merino wool – there's a bunch of people that tell you not to bother and that it's a bad idea and that if that was a good idea someone would've done it already.
I think the process of innovation and starting a business of trying to bring something in to the world, you have to sort of embrace that type of feedback and gain energy from it and trust your instincts and try and make it happen.
So you've gotta be up for that fight I think and I think it's one of the things I'm most proud of in our team and our journey – we took on board a lot of feedback and we ignored a lot of it and we keep coming back for more.
We made a couple of hundred prototypes of the first shoe before it was right, and we were relentless and in pursuit of what we thought was a really good product and I think that focus and that desire to not give up is super important and if you talk to anyone who has started a business I think they'll tell you the same thing.
What challenges does sustainable footwear (or sustainable fashion in general) come up against?
The really interesting thing about sustainability is that if you ask people if they care about the topic, 99 people out of 100 will say yes, everyone realises this is the problem of our generation and they realise it's important. And yet, their purchase behaviour and they way they buy products and the way they behave belies that fact.
I think that disconnect or that paradox in the belief in that subject and the behaviour, is an opportunity for businesses like ours to come in and shift that. I think the second part of it is I really don't think people quite understand how they can help and what they should do.
Equally I don't think people buy sustainability, they buy great products and I think it's the responsibility of brands and manufacturers to make the best product they can, but to make it sustainably. I think it's about making sustainability a non-negotiable in your business and doing everything you can to improve, and that's what we've tried to do.
The conversation about sustainability is – the ultimate in-point to the conversation about sustainability is [when] we all stop talking about it – because everyone is behaving in the right way and doing everything we can. The problems we're talking about solving in terms of materials and supply chain are not insurmountable you just have to commit to them.
Why have you expanded to using tree materials?
Our direct-to-consumer business model gives us a direct relationship with our customers, whether it be through our website or our retail stores and that relationship is a source of enormous feedback and data on our customers; what they like; what they don't like; and, how we can improve the product.
I think famously, we've made 30-odd changes to our first product since we first launched and we continue to innovate and improve based on the feedback that comes back from our customers on how our product can be better.
Pretty early on a lot of the data was showing that about half of our customers were wearing our wool shoes without socks and that in the summer, when it go hot, that jumped to about two thirds, and when they were wearing them without socks in the summer, a lot of the feedback was 'hey the wool's not great, it's too hot, it doesn't work as well as it should – it's sub-optimal.'
So we set out to try and solve that with a view that our brand is about comfort and comfort is different when it's raining to when it's hot and sunny.
In the particular case of this situation, [the question was] how could we create a material or source a material that helps to create a comfort experience when the weather was warm?
We found eucalyptus fibre has a natural cooling property and we found a new manufacturing process that uses digital netting that allows us to create a breathable, mesh fabric. We launched our second material innovation with this eucalyptus fibre in March of this year and it's been a huge success.
It's an example of us continuing to listen; continuing to innovate; and, continuing to source new sustainable materials to solve different comfort problems.
Will Allbrids expand into new sustainable materials? What does the future of Allbirds and sustainable footwear look like to you?
I think that our thesis is that the footwear industry has got a little lazy when it comes to using sustainable materials and there's a lot of options out there if you're willing to look and if you're willing to invest, so I think the tree is the second of hopefully many more. We're continuing to invest in innovation and in a pipeline of products that look at the problem of comfort in different ways and through different materials, so watch this space – I'm not gonna tell you what's coming, but there's more stuff and more potential.
We've been humbled by the reaction to the business and the brand and our product in such a short space of time and we've had prime ministers and presidents and movie stars adopting and supporting the products. We've got a big opportunity so it's exciting for us to keep going and keep getting better and there's a long long way to go and I think that's the key final message from me on the topic of sustainability.
We've done some things well, we've had some wins in the short space [of time] we've been around, but we've got a long way to go, everyone does. Solving this problem is extremely complicated and it's going to take a lot of time and a lot of resources and effort from companies that are bigger than ours, but I really do think there is solutions there when you really do commit to it.
Allbirds' co-founders Tim Brown and Joey Zwillinger.
This article has been edited for clarity and brevity.