Allbirds: Tim Brown & Joey Zwillinger

Growing up, Tim Brown discovered he was very good at two things: design and soccer. While playing professional soccer in New Zealand, he was turned off by the flashy logos on most athletic gear. He started making simple canvas shoes for his teammates, but soon discovered a better material: soft merino wool from his country's plentiful sheep. Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, his future business partner Joey Zwillinger was frustrated that most companies lacked a genuine commitment to sustainability. In 2015, Tim and Joey teamed up to create Allbirds, a company with two ambitious goals: create the world's most comfortable shoes, and do it in a way that was completely carbon-neutral. Today, just three years after launch, Allbirds is worth $1.4 billion. PLUS, for our postscript "How You Built That," how Kirby Erdely saw a problem with flying beach umbrellas and developed a new kind of tent stake—with a twist. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Guy Raz?

  So I want to tell you that we're coming to the Twin Cities for a live event on Wednesday, July 17. I'll be talking with Dan and Angie Bastian, co-founders of Angie's Boom Chicka Pop. How a history teacher and a psychiatric nurse started making popcorn and eventually got it into stores from coast to coast. The show is supported by American Express, and our other live events have sold out fast, so to get tickets, go to nprpresents.org. And I hope to see you there. And one more thing before we start the show. I want to tell you about a brand new discount for the How I Built This Summit, which is happening this October in San Francisco. We have a new deal for group tickets through June. Buy four Summit tickets, get the fifth absolutely free.

• 0:44Guy Raz?

  So bring your co-founders, your leaders, your innovators, and your dreamers, and grow together at the How I Built This Summit, supported by American Express. To take advantage of group discounts, email [email protected]. And I hope to see you in San Francisco.

• 1:04Speaker 01

  I would find myself at dinners with friends who were kind of early 30s now, at the stage of their career where things are starting to take off. And we'd go out for dinner and we'd go around the table, and I would dread when it would come to me and people would ask what I was doing. My body would curl up into a little ball, and I would sort of say, wool shoes. And when we'd leave the dinner, people would pat me on the head and say, that's lovely that you're pursuing this little thing, and good luck with that little fella. And it was just, it was awful.

• 1:41Guy Raz?

  From NPR, it's How I Built This, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built.

• 1:52Guy Raz?

  I'm Guy Raz, and on today's show, how an environmentalist and a professional soccer player from New Zealand teamed up to create what's been called the world's most comfortable shoe, Albers.

• 2:10Guy Raz?

  So for every human being in New Zealand, there are six sheep. Let that sink in, a six to one sheep to human ratio. And that's down from a peak in 1982, when there were 22 sheep for every human in New Zealand. Now, as you probably know, New Zealand's population is pretty small, a little under 5 million people. But the country produces more than 10% of all the wool we use. And what New Zealand is particularly good at is producing a type of wool that is considered to be among the best. It's called merino wool, and it comes, as you might have guessed, from a merino sheep. It's softer, lighter, and less scratchy than the type of wool you might find in, say, a thick Christmas sweater.

• 2:54Guy Raz?

  Now, for years, Tim Brown was aware of his country's prized export, but it would take him more than a decade to realize that it was the perfect material to build light, comfortable, and breathable shoes, the kind of shoes you could slip on for a run or just wear around the house. In 2015, Tim partnered up with Joey's Willinger to figure out if they could actually find a market for these shoes. They raised about $1 million from investors to launch Allbirds in March of 2016, and almost instantly, Allbirds were dubbed "the world's most comfortable shoe" by Time Magazine. Today, just three years on, their shoe company is valued at $1.4 billion.

• 3:36Guy Raz?

  But what's also incredible is how unlikely it is that they even met in the first place. Joey grew up in Marin County in California. Tim, of course, grew up on the other side of the world, and even before he seriously got into shoes, he was playing soccer professionally. He even competed at the World Cup. Tim was raised in Wellington, New Zealand, in the 1980s and 90s. His mom was a nurse, his dad worked in nonprofits. And from a pretty early age, he found himself being drawn into the world of soccer, first as a fan, and then as a player.

• 4:10Speaker 01

  You know, it's a really popular sport in a nation that loves its rugby. So the joke always was, as this went on to be, become more, more a part of my life, that certainly some of my mum's family were disappointed that it was, it was soccer and not rugby. But it was something that, that I loved to do and, and kept doing it. And even when I look back, you know, by the time I was 16 and 17, that was my identity. And that was what my friends were doing. And I was starting to get a sniff, you know, of something that I could do well. And something where I could carve out, you know, if not a career, certainly a pathway. It was, gosh, if I could make the New Zealand under 20 team, you know, I could die happy.

• 4:50Guy Raz?

  Yeah, I mean, you must have been a, a super talented soccer player because you got a scholarship to, to come to the US to go, I guess to the, to the University of Cincinnati to play soccer. How did you end up there?

• 5:01Speaker 01

  I, I ended up getting about six scholarship offers. And then I found in Cincinnati a design school, which was the subject that it was starting to really connect with me. And so Cincinnati was where I, was where I headed. And I hadn't visited. And it was, it was probably, I feel like the first adult decision, big decision I'd made where my, my mum and dad were like, we'll make it, we'll make it work. And I remember as part of the application, they put their mortgage, you know, they put their house as part of the, the credit that sort of said, you know, he's good for this. You want to do it, go, we'll back you 100%. And so off I was on a plane to Cincinnati as an 18-year-old.

• 5:39Guy Raz?

  Okay, so you end up in Cincinnati on the soccer team. And what, what was, what was school like? Was it intense? Was it, you know, because you're doing soccer for 40 hours a week and school.

• 5:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, the, the design program was difficult. I, it was a five-year program. They wanted to break you down and build you up over five years, literally in the first foundation year, cutting paper and not using a computer and literally going through a very, very traditional sort of design education. Um. And it was difficult because the whole athletic department kind of had their trainings in the afternoon. And I had a studio every, just about every day from nine to twelve and then from two to five. And I can still remember sprinting across campus, changing, and I'd structured some agreement with a coach. That I could kind of be a little bit, I could miss the warm up or something and then I could do the studio and somehow made it work.

• 6:36Speaker 01

  But it was, it was intense from the beginning.

• 6:38Guy Raz?

  Hmm.

• 6:38Speaker 01

  When I look back on it, I, there was, I was, there was, it was a fair amount of pressure, but I, I'd found something. That I, I was in love with.

• 6:47Guy Raz?

  What was it about art and design that connected with you?

• 6:52Speaker 01

  Uh, it was the, it was the solving of problems. I'd found a place that was like a catch all for my curiosity. And was a process that I, it took me a little while, but I, you know, with the help of a couple of these professors, I realized this was. The design was, was actually not about the, the output. It was a, it was a process of problem solving. And if you applied it, you could apply it to all sorts of different things.

• 7:16Guy Raz?

  All right, let's pause there for a sec. Um, and I'm going to turn to Joey for a little bit.

• 7:20Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 7:21Guy Raz?

  So Joey, you grew up in, in the Bay Area.

• 7:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 7:24Guy Raz?

  And when you, I mean, you know, you grew up here and then you end up at Berkeley, which is a great school, but was that, was that your? Sort of idea? You wanted to stay in this area? You wanted?

• 7:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, I wanted to go to a great place that challenged me, wanted to do engineering. And I also wanted to try and play soccer. And so those are the two guiding factors that ended up leading me by deduction to get to Berkeley.

• 7:45Guy Raz?

  Were you a good soccer player?

• 7:46Speaker 02

  I was all right. Yeah. I ended up playing, I played at Berkeley as well, uh, until I got injured.

• 7:52Guy Raz?

  Wow. So you were also a great soccer player as a kid?

• 7:56Speaker 02

  Well, yeah, we, we, Tim and I go in the, go in the alley and, and challenge anyone that will take us as our customers.

• 8:01Guy Raz?

  I got you. Okay. All right. So you were, um, you finished Berkeley and you. What do you want to do with your life at that point? I mean, you know, twenty two, twenty three, whatever, most people don't really know. Were you thinking, maybe I'll go to law school? Maybe I'll do something like, you know, like that? Or did you have a sense of what you want to do?

• 8:20Speaker 02

  You know, I really, I really didn't. And then to some point, I just, I latched on to this concept of business consulting, which I think was marketed to me as if you don't know what you're doing, this is a great way to get a taste for a lot of things. So I was like, okay, cool. That sounds good because I definitely don't know what I'm doing. And so I just went to a couple of those little info sessions that they have on campus and thought this company, Deloitte, sounded amazing. I ended up jumping into there and did their consulting group.

• 8:51Guy Raz?

  You know, a lot of people that we've had on How I Built This did consulting work. They, they saw, you know, they had experienced sort of consulting with different industries. And that's sort of how they got their ideas. What was some of the consulting work you were doing?

• 9:06Speaker 02

  Probably my most transformative one was I worked for, a client was a garbage, a garbage company. It was the second largest garbage company in the country. And I was, I looked at fuel, I was looking at something esoteric like fuel surcharges.

• 9:22Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 9:23Speaker 02

  And I was negotiating all these trucking fleet contracts. I was literally doing deals in landfills. I would go to a landfill and it would, you know, you'd walk in and the guy who was running the landfill would be like, yep, smells like money. Because it would smell really bad, but that was what they thought was, was business success. And it was really, I was really eye opening. It was very scrappy and it was, it was something I, I actually really loved it. And, and I ended up, I ended up leaving consulting because I, that, that really early taste of entrepreneurial business just got me, and, and being in the Bay Area, you almost can't help it.

• 9:56Guy Raz?

  Sure.

• 9:56Speaker 02

  You kind of like, and this was in, I guess, 2005. And I latched on to this concept of environmentalism through business and using business for good and doing it for the environment. And so I decided that business school would be a good opportunity to kind of refine my interests and help really focus on getting into that sector.

• 10:20Guy Raz?

  So I guess you go to Penn, to the Wharton School. Were you, I mean, was business school, like, did you love business school? Was business school like a sandbox where you thought, you know, I'm just gonna come up with some ideas and then get out of here and create it?

• 10:35Speaker 02

  Yes, actually. I was searching with all the engineering schools at Penn to find a clean tech-oriented company that I could help take the technology out of the university and start the business. And then I also got to just come out to the West Coast where most of the clean tech style of business was happening right now, right then. It was solar, wind, biofuels, biochemicals, and that was a big shaping experience, too.

• 11:03Guy Raz?

  All right, so you are, you graduate with an MBA and you went and got a job with a, like, an environmental technology company back in the Bay Area, right?

• 11:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, the company was called Solazyme. And Solazyme was doing something really unique in the biofuel space. They were using microalgae and doing it in a totally different way. They were growing this microalgae in huge fermentation vessels. And I was completely captivated by the technology. The vision was to basically be the next source of liquid fuel and chemicals for the entire world.

• 11:43Guy Raz?

  You could make oil sort of a biofuel from algae?

• 11:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, you could turn it into fuel. And it was, you know, potentially incredibly high impact for the world if we could get the technology right and get the cost down to a place that was meaningful.

• 11:58Guy Raz?

  What was the response to your idea?

• 12:01Speaker 02

  The response for the company was incredible. I mean, we were, I joined in 2009 and we ended up going public in 2011. We raised over a billion dollars of money for the business. And it was, it was, it had a legitimate shot of doing something special. And, you know, towards the end of my time there, I think I Learned a huge amount about what not to do and it ended up, I think, unequivocally being a pretty big failure.

• 12:31Guy Raz?

  What was a failure?

• 12:32Speaker 02

  The entire business. It went bankrupt and then has been acquired since for some of the remnants of the technology.

• 12:39Guy Raz?

  So the investors lost their money on that essentially?

• 12:42Speaker 02

  A lot of money.

• 12:43Guy Raz?

  And you and the other people who made a commitment to that company probably lost out as well, right? Because you probably got some equity and then...

• 12:52Speaker 02

  Sure, yeah. I mean, we had dreams of fortunes, I suppose. But yeah, what I took away from that experience was incredibly rich. And towards the end of that, I started looking around at a ton of different opportunities because I had refined what I wanted to do and I saw what I thought was a path to make a different kind of a company where the output of that business was really high impact.

• 13:16Guy Raz?

  Okay, Joey, let's just pause for a sec because I want to turn back to you, Tim, because you eventually would graduate from the University of Cincinnati and then you went to, I guess, to Virginia to play soccer professionally, semi-professionally for a while.

• 13:31Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 13:32Guy Raz?

  But then you eventually go back and play professional soccer in New Zealand, right?

• 13:36Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I found myself signed on a multi-year deal to play professional sport in my hometown and I was now a part of a New Zealand team that had set its target of qualifying for the World Cup in 2010 and I was kind of on my way.

• 13:50Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 13:51Speaker 01

  And I wasn't the quickest and I wasn't the most technical, but I'd found a way where I could carve out a career that involved me doing a couple of things really, really well.

• 13:59Guy Raz?

  What were they?

• 14:00Speaker 01

  Being fit and running around a lot, kicking people and tackling people and getting the ball off the opponents and giving it to the good players on our team.

• 14:10Guy Raz?

  You were a defender.

• 14:11Speaker 01

  I was a midfielder, but I had a kind of a sort of a defensive responsibility that was about tackling and about aggression and about running around and getting the ball. And then it was about scoring goals.

• 14:23Guy Raz?

  Were you getting lots of penalties called against you?

• 14:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:25Guy Raz?

  Were you getting kicked out of games?

• 14:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:27Guy Raz?

  Because you don't strike me as an aggressive kind of guy.

• 14:32Speaker 01

  The competitiveness was something that burned in me. Whatever it took to win, that's...

• 14:42Speaker 01

  You know, that was within me and it took a little while to realise that. But it was, it was there and I was just, was competitive.

• 14:49Guy Raz?

  So you were, I mean, this is in your sort of twenties and into your thirties. Like, how did you think about structuring your life? Did you think, okay, I'll play soccer and then I'll get into like soccer management or something like that?

• 15:01Speaker 01

  You know, I hadn't thought about that. I was probably starting, I was singularly focused on this, on the sporting career. And, um, you know, I was being paid a good living, better than my friends that had gone to university and were getting consulting jobs. And it became a job for the first time.

• 15:17Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 15:18Speaker 01

  And I got a taste of playing for my country and what that meant. We, you know, we had a small group of players that realised that we had a, a potential shot at a World Cup. And that was the, the special source that drove me to kind of get through the, the humdrum, you know, routine of professional sport and keep driving and keep improving and keep working. Because there was this larger prize there and this larger sense of purpose.

• 15:40Guy Raz?

  And the prize was getting to the World Cup in South Africa in 2010.

• 15:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, for my country.

• 15:45Guy Raz?

  But this was also the period in your life, I guess, when you sort of start to come up with the idea for what would become Allbirds.

• 15:53Speaker 01

  I, uh, one of the other cool things that happened is I got a sponsorship deal from one of the big, uh, sportswear companies that shall not be named. And I, that felt like a moment and I could go into the shop and get what I wanted.

• 16:05Guy Raz?

  Really?

• 16:06Speaker 01

  But I was wearing logos all the time and as a, I was a, I was a minimalist.

• 16:10Guy Raz?

  Uh huh.

• 16:11Speaker 01

  Um, and I remember still, my dad, probably got this from my dad, but like picking logos off, off clothes. And so the idea that this was, there was logos over everything that I was wearing.

• 16:20Guy Raz?

  Sure.

• 16:20Speaker 01

  It was just like this weird, it was this weird thing. Completely the antithesis of everything I stood for from a, from a design point of view that had been ingrained to me at the University of Cincinnati. And I guess the other thing that was happening is I, I just had a, I had my afternoons free. I was training in the morning and I was incredibly focused on sport, but I had a lot of free time. And so I started to get curious about about this particular problem, particularly in footwear.

• 16:49Guy Raz?

  The problem of?

• 16:50Speaker 01

  The problem of something simple.

• 16:52Guy Raz?

  Mm hmm.

• 16:52Speaker 01

  It was impossible to find. And in New Zealand, it was sort of.

• 16:55Guy Raz?

  Just like a nice slip on or something.

• 16:57Speaker 01

  Like a lace up sneaker.

• 16:59Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 16:59Speaker 01

  It either had logos on it or you bought you bought a Chuck Taylor.

• 17:04Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 17:04Speaker 01

  And there was there wasn't too much.

• 17:05Guy Raz?

  And Chuck Taylors, they're great, but they're not super comfy.

• 17:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was. It was one of those ones I I just saw a problem that was was my own. I didn't write a business plan.

• 17:14Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 17:14Speaker 01

  And so in the off season of one of my soccer seasons, I want to say it was the two thousand and eight, two thousand and nine, you know, you get a month off at the end of the year where you kind of go off and you rest.

• 17:21Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 17:22Speaker 01

  And I I found a footwear factory online and I went and visited one.

• 17:29Guy Raz?

  Where was it?

• 17:30Speaker 01

  It was in Indonesia.

• 17:31Guy Raz?

  So you were serious. You were like.

• 17:33Speaker 01

  I'm not, no, I'm gonna go build this.

• 17:34Guy Raz?

  You're you're like, I'm gonna build a comfortable shoe.

• 17:37Speaker 01

  It wasn't about comfort at that time. It was a design. It was a design observation about a category that I thought was super complicated and overcrowded and over logoed.

• 17:45Guy Raz?

  And you just said, I want to make a shoe that's a sort of a high top, like a Chuck Taylor without logos?

• 17:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm gonna I'm gonna go do it. It was that simple. And I tried to do it in New Zealand and realized that that industry had long since disappeared from from.

• 18:00Guy Raz?

  Nobody was manufacturing. It was all it was all in Asia. It was all in in China.

• 18:04Speaker 01

  And I and so I said, well, okay, well, let's go. Let's go see if we can do this. And I had greatly underestimated, as I'm sure Joe would attest, how complicated it is actually to make a shoe.

• 18:14Guy Raz?

  By the way, did you know how to sew? I mean, you probably learned that. You didn't learn that in design school?

• 18:18Speaker 01

  No.

• 18:18Guy Raz?

  But but you make patterns, you cut them out, like you didn't have a sense of how to.

• 18:22Speaker 01

  We had like two D drawings that we'd made of just this form. And I had photos of other examples of of shoes that I thought were kind of close. But that was it. And I thought, you know, you could go make this. And I think if you could make it, you could sell it. And there's potentially a business here. And I had started to get really, really interested in this idea of entrepreneurialism and building a business and of making things.

• 18:48Guy Raz?

  This is why you're why you're still a soccer player?

• 18:50Speaker 01

  Still a soccer player. And I'm I'm kind of. Eighty percent, folks, I mean, on the World Cup.

• 18:55Guy Raz?

  Yeah, I bet.

• 18:56Speaker 01

  That was everything. It was training, it was diet, there was not room for much else, but this was my mental escape.

• 19:01Guy Raz?

  Hmm. This was in 2009. You would not actually really start to make a shoe for like five more years later, which we'll get to.

• 19:09Speaker 01

  Not really. I made shoes straight away.

• 19:12Guy Raz?

  You made shoes straight away?

• 19:13Speaker 01

  And I sold them to my teammates.

• 19:14Guy Raz?

  Okay, so you made them at this factory?

• 19:16Speaker 01

  I made them at this factory and they showed up and I had a store.

• 19:19Guy Raz?

  How many did you order?

• 19:20Speaker 01

  I think it was a thousand pairs the first time.

• 19:21Guy Raz?

  You ordered a thousand pairs of these shoes? So you actually put all your cash into this thing?

• 19:25Speaker 01

  I put some cash into it and my brother was helping with some of the selling.

• 19:30Guy Raz?

  What were they made out of?

• 19:30Speaker 01

  Canvas and, you know, some leather, some New Zealand leather that I was shipping over, which was another eye-opening experience where I walked into a tannery for the first time and started to understand like how bad that material is.

• 19:43Guy Raz?

  Right. All the chemicals that go into making leather, leather, right?

• 19:46Speaker 01

  And just understand just generally, just, you know, where these materials were coming from. And I remember the samples would come and you'd open the box and it would smell like just, ugh. And I think that opened up the idea of exploring different materials.

• 19:59Guy Raz?

  What were your shoes called?

• 20:01Speaker 01

  At that particular time, I think the name was, were my initials, it was like 2B.

• 20:07Guy Raz?

  And the idea was a no logo shoe that was comfortable, made out of canvas?

• 20:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, there was a couple of different styles. There was a high top and a low top. And I sold them to my teammates.

• 20:16Guy Raz?

  For like 40 bucks or?

• 20:17Speaker 01

  No, I made them pay full price and.

• 20:20Guy Raz?

  How much was that?

• 20:21Speaker 01

  I think it was a hundred, 150 bucks.

• 20:24Guy Raz?

  And so you sold them, but you couldn't have sold a thousand pairs?

• 20:27Speaker 01

  We did a pop-up shop in Wellington and, you know, I think it was the beginning of an interest in this category. Because I realized too, in the process of selling the shoes, the design story was one part of it. I think it resonated with people, but it needed something more, both for me and for the product. The product was okay, but it wasn't differentiated.

• 20:48Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 20:49Speaker 01

  And, you know, I think I remember I was reading a magazine one day about the wool industry in New Zealand and we'd actually, we'd put some wool felt, experimented on some wool felt on the outside of some of the sneakers and. I was like, gosh, wouldn't it, why is wool not used in shoes? And, and, and what if we could do that? That would be hugely interesting. And so I, you know, with the help of, of, you know, some, some friends at the time, put together a grant on a whim to develop a, a woolen textile for, for, for making the upper of a shoe.

• 21:23Guy Raz?

  You applied to the New Zealand government for a grant?

• 21:25Speaker 01

  It was like a wool funding board.

• 21:27Guy Raz?

  Okay.

• 21:27Speaker 01

  And it was.

• 21:29Guy Raz?

  To research how you could turn wool into shoes?

• 21:31Speaker 01

  To, to actually make that textile.

• 21:33Guy Raz?

  Okay.

• 21:33Speaker 01

  Because it didn't exist. And, you know, I think the backdrop and the context around this was that New Zealand's probably famous for having lots of sheep. And it's a hugely important legacy industry in New Zealand that has, has gone through a really, really tough, a tough time. And, you know, I think they were, they were searching for new ideas and new categories. And it was kind of right time, right place with a, a random, maybe obvious idea that hadn't been done before and, and we got lucky. And so probably around the World Cup, a little bit before this grant, this research lab in Christchurch set about trying to make a fabric for us.

• 22:08Guy Raz?

  So wait, all of this is happening at the same time that your team is, is finally qualifying for the World Cup?

• 22:14Speaker 01

  Yes. So it was the second time New Zealand had ever qualified for the World Cup. So the first time in 1982 and the second time in 2010. So that was a big deal.

• 22:22Guy Raz?

  Did, did you guys get past the, the first round?

• 22:24Speaker 01

  We were undefeated. We're the only undefeated team at the World Cup.

• 22:27Guy Raz?

  Because?

• 22:28Speaker 01

  We drew three games and didn't get out of our pool. And Spain won the World Cup. And, uh, but it was, that was an enormous achievement. And this was a New Zealand team that, I mean, was ranked, I think we were the, the smallest nation at the World Cup. We were the lowest ranked and we went in there and, I mean, even to qualify was enormous.

• 22:45Guy Raz?

  Wow. So, okay, I, I want to bring, Joe, I want to bring you back into the conversation.

• 22:50Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 22:51Guy Raz?

  Because while Tim was playing in the World Cup, what, what were you up to?

• 22:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, you know, that was actually just about the time when we met. And

• 22:59Guy Raz?

  How did you meet?

• 23:01Speaker 02

  Well, Tim, Tim had started dating a lady named Lindsay, who he has subsequently married.

• 23:06Guy Raz?

  American.

• 23:07Speaker 01

  She's from New York.

• 23:08Speaker 02

  She is American.

• 23:09Guy Raz?

  How did you meet Lindsay?

• 23:10Speaker 01

  We'd, we'd met each other at a, at a wedding. I'd come back to visit one of my old teammates from Cincinnati and gone to their wedding and stopped by to see some friends in New York and sat next to Lindsay at a, at a dinner.

• 23:22Guy Raz?

  And Lindsay, Joey, Lindsay knew your-

• 23:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, I knew Lindsay because back in maybe 2000, early, early part of that decade, Lindsay and Liz, my wife, were roommates and dorm mates in college at Dartmouth.

• 23:39Guy Raz?

  Oh, wow.

• 23:40Speaker 02

  Yeah. And so they'd, they'd been super close friends for well over a decade. So I got to meet Lindsay and when, when Lindsay came around and introduced us to Tim, I thought he was a pretty good bloke.

• 23:54Guy Raz?

  So you guys had met, but you were doing your own thing. He was playing soccer and you just thought he was a nice guy. Tim, you, you retire from football, from soccer in 2012?

• 24:06Speaker 01

  I go to the World, I go to the World Cup and I have this great experience and I realized like this, that's the end of this. This is, this is the, the moment where I depart, seen, left and I, I tore up a two year contract and I, at this time, the idea of going back to school and studying all the subjects that I'd avoided was interesting and I, I'd always wanted to go back to London where I was born and where my father was from. And so the idea of being able to go back there and, and study was, was both a way out of sport in some ways and the best of ways and, and, and the opportunity to kind of step back and, and start this next chapter.

• 24:40Guy Raz?

  So you decide to do a degree at the London School of Economics with this idea for a shoe in your mind?

• 24:49Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I had a little bit of shoe making knowledge. So, you know, I'd made a couple of, couple of shoes.

• 24:54Guy Raz?

  You made a thousand shoes.

• 24:56Speaker 01

  And I showed up and, and did the first couple of semesters at LSE and then went off to Kellogg at Northwestern.

• 25:03Speaker 01

  And you were able to take the pick of classes that you wanted through the quarter that you were there, the period that you were there. So I show up at Evanston and I walk into an entrepreneurship class with a professor called Carter Cast, who is a former CEO of Walmart.com and this pretty special professor there. And he'd sent an email out and he said, everyone has to come in and that you've got three minutes to pitch an idea to the class. And we will form teams around the best 10 ideas and for the whole quarter, you will go after this business idea. And I came in and I pitched the idea of wool shoes. And I think people thought it was a little bit of a joke, but for whatever reason, it got selected. And I found myself immersed for three months.

• 25:48Guy Raz?

  On this idea?

• 25:51Speaker 01

  On this idea. And truly, you know, actually building this into a business.

• 25:57Guy Raz?

  So this idea of wool shoes, which you'd really been toying with since 2009, now, around 2012, 2013, it's starting to get some traction.

• 26:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:09Guy Raz?

  But I wonder, I mean, was anyone saying, like, how do you turn scratchy wool into shoes?

• 26:18Speaker 01

  Everyone said that. But there was something about the idea that people sort of said, oh, yeah, why has it not been done?

• 26:26Guy Raz?

  But how did you describe it to people? Because I'm saying to you, Tim, I don't get it. Like, here's my wool sweater. How do I translate that into shoes? How would you describe it?

• 26:35Speaker 01

  Well, first of all, I realized that wool to Americans meant hot and scratchy.

• 26:39Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 26:40Speaker 01

  So all of a sudden, you actually had to talk about merino.

• 26:41Guy Raz?

  Okay.

• 26:42Speaker 02

  It's a different sheep.

• 26:43Speaker 01

  It's a different sheep.

• 26:44Guy Raz?

  Okay.

• 26:45Speaker 01

  And it's a finer material and it's softer. And then you also had to talk about not just the material, you actually had to talk about the benefits of the material. So why? If you're going to do this, there must be a reason. And the reason is because wool has these miraculous properties. And then people go, okay, that's interesting. And then for what, as much as people kind of... Laughed at the idea, and this has been a consistent thread. I think on some level, they sort of said, that's interesting. And, but I got to the end of that course and, you know, I flew back to London after my time at Kellogg and decided I was going to launch wool shoes on Kickstarter.

• 27:19Guy Raz?

  Okay, but so to do something on Kickstarter, which you did in 2014, but to do something on Kickstarter, you need to have the prototype, you need to have a lot of things. Had you, what was it, what was it called? Was it called Allbirds?

• 27:32Speaker 01

  Uh, no, it was, at this stage, I'd renamed it again. It took another crack at naming and it was called Three Over Seven. And it was going to be very, very, you know, simple design, the original. And, and it was going to be made out of wool with this, this new material.

• 27:45Guy Raz?

  All right, so, but to get a Kickstarter, you still have to promise people that you're going to deliver them the shoe.

• 27:49Speaker 01

  I found another factory on Google.

• 27:52Guy Raz?

  Where was it?

• 27:53Speaker 01

  In Portugal this time. And I'd flown over and it was a tiny factory and I'd made, I think, I think it was eight pairs of samples. And I went home to New Zealand for Christmas and I shot it. I did, I needed to shoot a video.

• 28:07Guy Raz?

  Okay.

• 28:07Speaker 01

  And I'd organised with my dad's friend, who owned a sheep farm, not just outside of Wellington.

• 28:12Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 28:13Speaker 01

  We have one day to do this.

• 28:14Guy Raz?

  Okay.

• 28:15Speaker 01

  And my dad's friend, I remember showing up on the morning of. He went and got a bunch of sheep so they could be in the backdrop of this video. And I very nearly pulled out. I was writing this script and I just, it was one of those moments where you think, this is dumb. This is not going to work. And my brother literally dragged me along to the farm and said, just do it. What's the worst that can happen? And so we, we went, we went ahead with it and shot a, shot a video and ultimately, um, launched, uh, the Kickstarter. It went live on March of 2014.

• 28:48Guy Raz?

  So you make the video and you say, hey, I'm Tim and, and I want to tell you a little bit about merino wool and the shoes that I'm going to create.

• 28:54Speaker 01

  And I chased some sheep around and it's, it's a little, uh... It's kind of a little flood of the Concorde-esque, maybe. I don't know, a little weird and funny. But tried to really hone in on sort of, you know, why this is different and why it matters. And click live on it. And I was back in London and I remember my phone just started going crazy.

• 29:15Guy Raz?

  When you put it on Kickstarter?

• 29:15Speaker 01

  I put it on Kickstarter. It got picked up by some New Zealand media.

• 29:19Guy Raz?

  OK.

• 29:19Speaker 01

  And then it went on the Kickstarter's homepage and on their mailing list, where they send out sort of interesting projects. And it went to $120,000 in four days and I had to stop it because I didn't have enough.

• 29:32Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 29:33Speaker 01

  And I had to stop this thing. And I was like, oh, my gosh, I can't believe this.

• 29:37Guy Raz?

  Because you didn't have enough wool.

• 29:39Speaker 01

  And Lyn's had sent this out to all her friends and, you know, hey, you know, my boyfriend's doing this project and maybe you can support him. And Joey was one of the earliest customers.

• 29:52Guy Raz?

  And what was your, what would you have to pay, like $100?

• 29:55Speaker 02

  $100 or $120?

• 29:57Guy Raz?

  $120 is going to get you a pair of these shoes.

• 30:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, first wool runners ever created.

• 30:02Guy Raz?

  First wool runners ever created. All right, so you do the Kickstarter, you're one of the contributors. Joey, Tim, you raise more money than you need and which sounds like a great thing, but actually it wasn't. It was actually stressful?

• 30:17Speaker 01

  Oh, it was one of those moments that sometimes from the outside, when you've had the moment of greatest success, that's the moment where you're most unsure or you're most scared. And I remember being scared. Like, we have to go deliver on this now and execute it. And this is going to be really, really hard.

• 30:38Guy Raz?

  When we come back in just a moment, how Tim reached out to Joey for help and how Joey went from being a customer to a partner to helping build Allbirds into a billion-dollar brand. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz and you're listening to How I Built This from NPR.

• 31:07Guy Raz?

  Hey, welcome back to How I Built This from NPR. I'm Guy Raz. So it's 2014, and Tim Brown has launched his idea for a new kind of wool shoe on Kickstarter. And people respond right away. They raised $120,000 in just a few days, which means that Tim now needs to get to work fast to start filling orders.

• 31:30Speaker 01

  I had a couple of young guys kind of working for me, and we'd found a little office space in London. And I spent probably the worst year trying to make this thing happen.

• 31:39Guy Raz?

  Why was it the worst year?

• 31:41Speaker 01

  I mean, every mistake you can imagine. And I remember the factory, the young guy had gone over to the factory, and he called me up one day, and he goes, "We've got a problem. The factory's made the men's and women's shoes exactly the same size."

• 31:55Speaker 01

  I go, "That's bad. There's like a one and a half, there's quite a big difference."

• 32:00Guy Raz?

  Sure.

• 32:01Speaker 01

  "What are we going to do? We've got no choice. We're going to have to just, we're just going to have to send these out."

• 32:06Guy Raz?

  Joey, you are a customer of that Kickstarter campaign.

• 32:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, I was one of the lucky customers who ordered a men's 10 and got a women's 10.

• 32:14Guy Raz?

  And it was fine?

• 32:16Speaker 02

  No, it was not fine. It was a pretty bad fitting shoe. And when I pinned customer service, which was Tim Brown, he just recommended that I take out the insole and make a little more room for myself.

• 32:31Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 32:32Speaker 02

  And since he didn't have any more wool, there was no exchanges or anything like that, so, you know.

• 32:36Guy Raz?

  Can you explain something to me? When you make $120,000 off Kickstarter, which sounds amazing, that's a lot of cash, it probably did not pay for all of the orders you had to fulfill, right?

• 32:47Speaker 01

  No, the whole thing was not even close. And so I was tapping into my savings that were rapidly dwindling at the time and living in London. And then, right at the end of that, we'd sort of, the factory in Portugal... Decided to go bankrupt right at the end of this, shortly after we just delivered it. So the idea that we were going to kind of try and make more and build this business and go forward to the next phase of things.

• 33:11Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 33:12Speaker 01

  I had to do a mercy dash to Portugal to go rescue the 10 meters of wool and from the factory.

• 33:19Guy Raz?

  Okay, when you finished fulfilling those orders, were you like, okay, now I've got to create a business? Or were you like?

• 33:26Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, I was.

• 33:27Guy Raz?

  Or were you like, I'm done with this?

• 33:29Speaker 01

  It was kind of somewhere in between. And I, that year was awful. And it was, I would find myself at dinners with Lyns and her friends who were kind of early 30s now at the stage of their career where things are starting to take off. And we'd go out for dinner and we'd go around the table. And I would, I just, I would dread when it would come to me and people would ask what I was doing. And Lyns would make fun because my body would curl up into a little ball and I would sort of say wool shoes. And when we'd leave the dinner, people would pat me on the head and say, that's lovely that you're pursuing this little thing. And good luck with that little fella. And it was just, it was awful. And it became clear too, that doing this by yourself was really hard. And that I was good at some aspects of it. And there was a bunch of things that I was not

• 34:14Speaker 01

  good at.

• 34:15Guy Raz?

  Joey, you, you know, you're doing your, you know, your friend a favor and you just want to support them. But I have to imagine that at least initially, you're not thinking, this is what I want to do. I want to leave my job and go do this. Or, right?

• 34:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, if you'd asked me at the time, I would have laughed at you.

• 34:30Guy Raz?

  You would, I mean, you would just thought, I'm just going to support this guy.

• 34:33Speaker 02

  No chance. I mean, yeah, not just supporting. I mean, I did think it was, it was really cool. And I mean, looking back at that video as I, as I once in a while do when we're showing new employees now of Allbirds, you know, a lot of the things that Tim intuitively saw and talked about in that video are exactly the same things that we talk about today. And I think, you know, Tim is, Tim is just one of those unbelievable intuitive marketers that just connects with, with people and understands what is missing in the market. And, and that was clear from, I think, day one.

• 35:06Guy Raz?

  So Tim, I read that after the Kickstarter ended and you fulfilled those orders and you're kind of exhausted and you have this nightmare, nightmarish year. And you're trying to think, what am I going to do with this thing? You were contacted by an. Investor who said, hey, there's something here. Would you let me buy into this thing?

• 35:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, I found myself on a plane to New York, speaking with someone from within the footwear world who had seen the traction and the product.

• 35:34Guy Raz?

  And liked it?

• 35:35Speaker 01

  Liked it. And I went to New York and spent a lot of time with them and we went through every aspect of it. And they put a, they put a deal in front of me.

• 35:41Guy Raz?

  And that must have been pretty gratifying. I mean, I have to assume you were getting a little bit nervous about your financial situation. So they're putting a dollar figure in front of you. It must have been quite nice.

• 35:49Speaker 01

  I was starting to think, what do I do next? And I've been through this really difficult year and I was like, why, why am I, what am I doing? We're making wool shoes. Why, what does this even, why am I doing this? And so there was a lot of those questions kind of going through, through my mind and, but we get this investment offer. And I, I knew enough to understand the deal.

• 36:11Guy Raz?

  But she, but it was complicated.

• 36:12Speaker 01

  It was complicated.

• 36:13Guy Raz?

  And how much time did you have before you had to give them an answer?

• 36:15Speaker 01

  Uh, you know, just.

• 36:17Guy Raz?

  Couple of weeks.

• 36:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, this thing's on the table and, and Lyn's, she, she goes, you need to speak with Joey about this. He comes from this world. He's, he's a customer of the project and he, you know, he'd be an interesting person to sort of put this in front of. And so, and so I did, and everyone had given me their kind of 10 minutes on this.

• 36:35Guy Raz?

  Were most people saying, take it?

• 36:37Speaker 01

  Everyone was like, oh, it's good and it's bad and you don't really have anything else. So do you want to shop this round or what do you really want?

• 36:43Guy Raz?

  Can you, can you give me a rough sense of what they're offering you?

• 36:46Speaker 01

  It was, it was some upfront capital that would convert to equity, depending on how the business performed. And it involved kind of moving to New York and they would, you know, they were going to take a, a big chunk of it, a large, large chunk of it.

• 37:00Guy Raz?

  Majority.

• 37:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, a majority of it and.

• 37:03Guy Raz?

  So you'd be left with like 20, 15%.

• 37:06Speaker 01

  Something like that. And so Joey, Joey took a look at this thing for me and, and he jumps on the phone and he hasn't just looked at this thing. He, you know, I had really, really good friends, close friends that had looked at it, that kind of looked at it.

• 37:20Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 37:20Speaker 01

  He'd gone through, he'd read it.

• 37:22Guy Raz?

  Wow. What did you think when you saw it, Joey?

• 37:25Speaker 02

  I thought, you know, I didn't think that there was any ill intent from the guys who had sent the deal, but it was, it was vulturous in the way I read it. And I thought that it was taking advantage of a great idea and trying to sink their talents into, into this business. And what Tim would have been left with was not great. So I think I told him at that time, I was like, look, I wouldn't take the deal and I wouldn't run the business this way.

• 37:54Guy Raz?

  But what was his alternative?

• 37:56Speaker 02

  I said at that time, and look, there was, this is a moment in my life too, that I'd been at Soul Design for six years.

• 38:01Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 38:02Speaker 02

  And I had a very consistent experience. And I mean, I kind of look back and laugh a little bit now, like algae oil kind of sounds like the like 2000s version of snake oil salesman. But I was going to big multinationals and chemical companies, big brands. And there was like a couple of these just seminal moments where I would, I would have an idea, I would go talk to the right people you'd want to talk to if you had an amazing new material that happened to be really sustainable for the planet. I pitched it in, had multiple meetings, and everyone at first is like, I'm super, this is amazing. It's an exciting idea. We love the sustainability mission. And then you'd be like, okay, well, let's do this.

• 38:44Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 38:45Speaker 02

  And then it turns to like this really inane sourcing conversation where they're like, just do what we do now and do it cheaper. Like, we don't really, we don't really care about the sustainability part. Is not the words they use, but that's the sentiment that's conveyed. And so I just realized through this super frustrating experience that the brands, big brands, they said they cared about sustainability, but in reality, they were just paying lip service to the idea. So I'm sitting here and Tim comes with this, not just a concept, but like a pretty fleshed out idea with Kickstarter success. And it really resonated with me from a sustainability perspective. But it was also about an opportunity to sell shoes in a totally different way than the industry had ever done before.

• 39:30Guy Raz?

  Okay. So you see this term sheet.

• 39:34Guy Raz?

  The gears start turning in your head, Joey, where you're thinking, "Wait a minute. This actually, there's some legs to this thing. And actually, maybe I can talk to Tim about sort of using this shoe idea as a vehicle for a sustainability business."

• 39:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, and I'd read this book, Cradle to Cradle. I remember the intro chapter talked about one of the scourges of the earth on pollution and the environment being the shoe industry.

• 40:00Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 40:01Speaker 02

  The number of shoes, and I mean, there's 20 billion pairs of shoes that are made every year. And in the US alone, the average American, kid, woman, man, they buy eight pairs per year.

• 40:12Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 40:13Speaker 02

  Per person. So it's 2.5 billion, just the US. And all these things are sitting in landfills. And so what you put into the chemicals and the materials that use to produce it are, they're incredibly important, and no one's thinking about it. And so, yeah, the gears started turning a little bit. And I started thinking more. And, you know, look, timing is everything. And I asked Tim, my family, I had two really young kids at the time. And Liz and my kids were gone for the weekend. And I asked him if he wanted to fly out from London and just talk about the concept and see if he'd give it another go.

• 40:54Guy Raz?

  And maybe you guys could work together.

• 40:55Speaker 02

  We could work together. Yeah.

• 40:57Guy Raz?

  What did you think about that, when he said that?

• 41:00Speaker 01

  I jumped on the plane, and I flew out to San Francisco. And Joey and I spent the weekend together. And he picked me up at the airport. And it's-

• 41:10Guy Raz?

  This is in 2015?

• 41:12Speaker 01

  This is in early 2015. And we spent the weekend together, getting a little bit drunk and talking about our families and getting to know each other and walking in the hills of Marin and really just sort of imagining what it might be like to work together and trying to understand if that would be a good idea or not.

• 41:29Guy Raz?

  So did you resolve that weekend? To try this out, to make a go of it? By and large, yeah.

• 41:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, I landed back in London and I said to Linz, I go, I think I want to do this and I've found the person to do it with.

• 41:41Guy Raz?

  Why did you think he was the person to do it with?

• 41:43Speaker 01

  Um, I think I found a guy that on the surface was very, very different from me, but maybe underneath shared a lot of similarities in terms of attitude and approach. I'd found a maybe a kindred spirit in terms of the competitiveness, which we both shared that I that was attractive. And I think I'd found someone that could do all the parts of the business that I shouldn't be doing and that we potentially could be a great, a great partnership.

• 42:17Guy Raz?

  Can I ask you guys, and this is important because a lot of people who listen to this show are their co-founders, they're two people involved. And a big part of this show is lessons learned, right? It's a roadmap. How, can you walk me through the, I don't know if it was difficult, I don't know if it was uncomfortable or unpleasant, the conversation the two of you had to have when you decided how you were going to structure this company? Because you'd been working on this and you had this idea, but you also have this idea, which is to actually take Tim's idea, but to turn it into a totally sustainable, carbon free, carbon neutral product, which we'll get to. So you, you're both coming in with big ideas. How do you divide the company up?

• 43:03Speaker 01

  And we did that, we did that very quickly and very simply over emo.

• 43:07Speaker 02

  Well, I think, I think the important part that we both understood was that we're doing this alone, I mean, Tim had experienced it for a while, that doing it alone is really lonely. And I'd always been of the opinion that if I was going to do a business, I wanted to do it with someone because I knew my shortcomings were substantial. And then I would much rather have a piece of something big than a lot of something small.

• 43:34Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 43:34Speaker 02

  And so, you know, and I think he respected what I was going to bring to the table, particularly in the future of the business. So it wasn't, it ended up being a reasonably, reasonably quick conversation. And I think neither of us have, have really looked back, or at least I certainly haven't looked back and ever regretted that.

• 43:50Guy Raz?

  So you're dividing up 100% of something worth nothing at that point, which is always a challenge because you never know what's, what's going to happen in the future. And then you both decide you are going to both be the CEO?

• 44:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, you know, we, um, look, I was having a lot of the conversations with the financial community and, you know, you go into like someone's office and they're like, okay, that's awesome, but can I talk to the CEO?

• 44:16Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 44:16Speaker 02

  And Tim is, Tim is, you know, first-

• 44:20Guy Raz?

  He's in London.

• 44:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, he's in London. He's also, he's also doing other kinds of conversations that would be, and subsequently, we knew that, like, press, like, talking to the media was going to be really important. And if Tim was going to go have a media conversation, he, like, they would also want to talk to the CEO. So we're like, yeah, let's just do co-CEOs. And we also, I think we both knew that what each other brought, uh, something really special to the table that the other one didn't, didn't bring. And now, and so the, it wasn't just a semantic title. It was really, actually, the fundamental, uh, contribution warranted that kind of split responsibility.

• 44:58Guy Raz?

  So that summer of 2015, you're pounding the pavement, Joey, trying to raise money. How much money did you think you needed to raise to get this thing off the ground?

• 45:08Speaker 02

  We, uh, you know, we did our little business plan, which was remarkably inaccurate. But we, but we had decided that we needed a million and a half dollars.

• 45:18Guy Raz?

  Okay.

• 45:19Speaker 02

  And we felt like that could get us through a huge amount of marketing, branding work in the beginning and then buy a whole bunch of inventory. And we wanted to buy a lot of inventory because we, we had this mentality of if we were going to do this, we were going to fail super fast or-

• 45:34Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 45:34Speaker 02

  -succeed really big.

• 45:36Guy Raz?

  And so the idea from the beginning was direct to consumer. You were going to have a big marketing campaign to attract people to the website and you were going to have the shoes in a warehouse and then you could just ship them out?

• 45:48Speaker 02

  Yep, basically it. And we were going to launch simultaneously in the US and New Zealand on just website.

• 45:55Guy Raz?

  And did you have a date in mind?

• 45:56Speaker 02

  We did. March 1st, 2016.

• 45:59Guy Raz?

  Wow. And you were working out of your house?

• 46:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, my mother-in-law's apartment.

• 46:03Guy Raz?

  Okay, in, in Marin?

• 46:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 46:05Guy Raz?

  Tim, you're wrapping up in London, preparing to move to California.

• 46:08Speaker 01

  Preparing to get married on June 6th, 2015.

• 46:10Guy Raz?

  And then to move to California?

• 46:12Speaker 01

  And then come to California. And I'm going through a green card of the immigration-

• 46:15Guy Raz?

  All that stuff.

• 46:16Speaker 01

  -thing. It's just a little while.

• 46:18Guy Raz?

  Okay, so you spent basically a full year raising the money from investors and perfecting the design and doing everything you need to create this comfortable and sustainable wool shoe. What was your game plan at that point? Like, what do you do at this point?

• 46:34Speaker 01

  Well, we had to build the brand. We'd had quite an instrumental conversation with a guy who's previously been on the show called Eric Ryan.

• 46:43Guy Raz?

  Sure.

• 46:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, Method. Because we'd sat down with him and we said, hey, we want to build a different type of footwear brand and we believe there's a problem to be solved and we can make shoes that are more comfortable, that are better for the environment. And so, plan, what do you think? And he said to us, fantastic. Don't pat yourself on the back, just get on with doing it. People don't buy sustainable products, they buy great products. And the only reason there's an opportunity for you to do this is because the rest of the world is far behind where they need to. But get on with doing it and don't make sustainability a part of your brand. Make the attributes of the product, of the sustainable materials, the story.

• 47:28Guy Raz?

  So you thought comfort was the way we were going to sell this?

• 47:31Speaker 01

  Comfort was the way that was the problem to be solved and we were going to solve comfort through sustainable materials that enabled that comfort experience, but were also better for the environment.

• 47:41Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 47:42Speaker 01

  You know, in hindsight, it seems obvious.

• 47:44Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 47:45Speaker 01

  Comfort is the number one reason why people buy shoes. And comfort often is equated with ugliness. So if your dad tells you he's got a comfortable pair of shoes, you assume they don't look very good. So the idea of bringing great design and pairing it with that and achieving the comfort through materials that were also better for the environment is really kind of the north star for the business.

• 48:07Guy Raz?

  By the way, how did you get the name?

• 48:10Speaker 01

  Uh, you know, we'd, we'd been brainstorming a lot of different names and ultimately landed on, on the name Allbirds as a sort of this whimsical encapsulation of, of the type of business that we wanted to build. And when people first came to New Zealand, there was, there was nothing there but birds. It was all birds. Um, so it was a little nod to the provenance of the story and, and the idea that we should tread more lightly in the, in the way that, that we make products.

• 48:38Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 48:38Speaker 01

  And so, so we, we chose that and Joey procured the dot com and, um, and we were, we were away.

• 48:45Guy Raz?

  So you launch on March, what?

• 48:48Speaker 02

  March 1st.

• 48:49Guy Raz?

  March 1st, 2016. You hit the, hit the, the, the big red button, or it's not a big red button, but I know, but you, you launch it, the website goes live. What happened to your inventory?

• 48:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, we sold through it really fast.

• 49:00Guy Raz?

  And where were you holding that inventory?

• 49:02Speaker 02

  We had a warehouse in Connecticut at the time and we sold through within, I think a week and a half, we started having sizes that were sold out.

• 49:11Guy Raz?

  Wow. And you did all this like with Shopify as a backend?

• 49:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. The technology enabled us to do this really lean.

• 49:16Guy Raz?

  Are you still doing Shopify today?

• 49:18Speaker 02

  We are.

• 49:18Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 49:19Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, that, that's the thing, you know, we, we started direct to consumer as a concept has been around for a while.

• 49:25Guy Raz?

  Sure.

• 49:26Speaker 02

  But the technology has developed and so it, it allowed us to take advantage of things quite inexpensively from, from that infrastructure, that, that stuff.

• 49:34Guy Raz?

  I mean, that's amazing because anyone can use that technology. It's available to anyone. It's affordable, right? Sales force, technology, Shopify, all this stuff is out there.

• 49:42Speaker 01

  In some ways, the, the barriers for entry to, to launching a new business have never been lower and in, in others, it's, in other ways, it's, it's never been more competitive. Um, but certainly, you know, we were able to do that reasonably easily.

• 49:56Guy Raz?

  So you launch and you just start selling out fast. Was that incredibly exciting or did that create new kinds of stress?

• 50:07Speaker 02

  It was weird, you know? It was like neither of us would have said that we were like really successful at that point. And I think in some ways it was great, like obviously it's certainly better than not selling any shoes. So, so don't get me wrong. I mean, and we had ordered like 15,000 pairs. So that was, it was a lot. And, and we started selling through really fast. And then we, I think we both found ourselves acting strange, like this, this like, it was like letting the air out of a balloon. It was like you, you had this unbelievably stressful seven, eight months of, of, of working for this singular creative piece of this product, and then you put it out there and just see what happens.

• 50:49Speaker 02

  And it worked ostensibly, you know, people 15,000 or close to that, that bought it. And then we're sitting there like, okay, the stress is gone. Now it was like, I don't know, maybe we like had too much of a swagger. And like, I think it was funny, like the, the, the most successful times on the outside, maybe you look on the inside and it's actually where we were probably maybe at one of our worst moments as a partnership.

• 51:13Guy Raz?

  Why?

• 51:14Speaker 02

  I think we just started, you know, we started, um, maybe I was probably getting over my skis and talking about things in design. And maybe Tim was doing some things in, in the area of the business that I was stronger at that, that, um, that maybe he shouldn't have. And, and we, we were, we were like, hey, this worked, like step off. I remember we had, we had a, we had a beer, it must've been like at the end of March, so like our first 30, 31 days of sales. And we, we done a million dollars in sales in the first month. I mean, it was, it was crazy. And no way, we didn't, we, I think we, we blew through our first year business plan

• 51:59Speaker 02

  projection in like, I don't know, weeks after that, like a really short amount of time. So we were beyond any doubt that it was, it was working. And we're having this beer and we're like both eyes watering up and be like, why, why are you, you know, I don't like how this is going.

• 52:18Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 52:19Speaker 02

  And it was one of those moments where we then kind of fell back on the promise we'd made probably to our wives about not ruining their relationship and the fact that if we were going to make something successful, it was going to take two of us and we got to work on this and this is more important than whether we sell out the next color, whatever.

• 52:40Guy Raz?

  Yeah, because from the outside, as you say, you would have thought, oh, man, this is because you're crushing it, great job, but this is really when the tension begins.

• 52:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was a dark, it was a dark moment and it's funny, it has, you know, we've, we've had a couple of them through the journey and they've usually, they've usually linked up from the outside when we've had, we've had.

• 52:57Guy Raz?

  Most success.

• 52:58Speaker 01

  Most success, when everyone would sort of be high fiving and popping.

• 53:01Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 53:01Speaker 01

  You know, we had a moment and it was, I don't think we'd yet found a kind of a mechanism to kind of get, to get stuff out. I think we'd just been working, you know, side by side, heads down.

• 53:14Guy Raz?

  Sure.

• 53:15Speaker 01

  And, you know, it's the joke about sort of the idea that this is a marriage, it sort of, there's an intimacy to it.

• 53:21Guy Raz?

  Hmm.

• 53:21Speaker 01

  That is, you know, that is pretty deep and I don't think we'd acknowledged that and we hadn't found, found ways to sort of like purge the system and reset the machine. And, you know, there was a bunch of stuff that had been building up over time that kind of came out in a, in a little bit of an avalanche of, of kind of emotion and tiredness and, and I, you know, I think it was, we realized that we needed to manage this more effectively, that our relationship would be as important as the strategy.

• 53:52Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 53:53Speaker 01

  As, as important as, as many of the things we were doing that, and that needed to be worked on like any, like any healthy one.

• 53:59Speaker 02

  It's also, I mean, there's a directness in our relationship that if we didn't have that, like, you can't just, you can't just talk about superficial business tasks that are going wrong or right. Like, you know, we're like.

• 54:15Speaker 02

  Dude, this is not good. Like, it's gotta be a different direction for us to work this out with. And it's, and just getting to the heart of issue, not letting it calcify. It's, you know, give it no time, nip it in the bud and move on and have super low ego about it. And I think our personalities and our respect for one another is what kind of lends itself to allowing that strategy to work and it might not be for everyone.

• 54:42Guy Raz?

  So was it a, just a self-generating thing? Once you launched, my suspicion is, it was just off to the races. Like, you were getting more attention and you're getting celebrities wearing it and Gayle King telling Oprah, "You gotta try these on." And today Barack Obama wears them. I mean, is that what happened? Would it, did it just continue to kind of snowball on its own? And obviously, you did media stuff, but, or was there ever a moment where it just sort of slowed down and you thought, "Okay, I don't know"?

• 55:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, I don't think there's like a single moment, but there was, there was moments. You know, in August, the front page of the New York Times, you get on the, the front page of the business section.

• 55:23Guy Raz?

  All about how everyone's wearing all versions.

• 55:25Speaker 02

  The big picture with, with someone wearing a pair of shoes. And that catalyzes a bunch of attention. And then, you know, you get a moment like, like you mentioned, Gayle King. So a lot in the media. And I think, we just gave it time, too. You know, we didn't sell, we sold one style, the wool runner, for 14 months. We didn't, we didn't do anything else except sell the wool runner. And, and I think that, it's hard to create any doubt about what you stand for when you have just one product. I think that helped, too. And, and just being methodical and intentional about that and not taking advice from people who said, "Churn it out faster, drop more colors, drop more styles," you know?

• 56:06Guy Raz?

  Yeah. You guys have, you guys are a B Corp, which for people who don't know what that is essentially means you're committed to certain sustainability practices and the way you sort of treat your employees and compensation, et cetera. This is a big thing. You know, you talk about the materials that are used for the shoes. I know, Joey, you were very influenced by sustainability. Let's talk about this for a moment. I mean, you're still, you got to get the wool from New Zealand. It's got to be spun into this material, then made into shoes at a factory that is probably, you know, using electricity, and then put on ships and then sent all over the world.

• 56:48Guy Raz?

  Is it possible to make a carbon neutral shoe? Is that possible with all those things I've just described?

• 56:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, it is. We're not there yet. And I think when we started this business, we had a really clear idea. We wanted to be, we wanted to be like a tree. We wanted to suck carbon out and spit out oxygen. We want to be that good. And we knew we were, we were quite a ways from that, that ambition. But the problem with climate change is that businesses pollute and, and society pays for that.

• 57:22Guy Raz?

  Yep.

• 57:23Speaker 02

  The companies don't pay for it, and that's the problem. And so we've, we believe that we should pay for it. And so we have committed to be carbon neutral.

• 57:32Guy Raz?

  How do you do that?

• 57:33Speaker 02

  So we try to minimize the carbon impact across all those dimensions that you said, from transportation to the electric grid that the factory is, and we're in Korea because it's a much cleaner grid than other places in the world.

• 57:44Guy Raz?

  Sure.

• 57:45Speaker 02

  But we still, we still have emissions in the way that we make the shoe and transport it, ship it to customers for e-commerce. And so we pay for, pay for offsets for the remainder of that.

• 57:55Guy Raz?

  I want to try to bridge the gap between the idealism and the practicality. So where the sort of the rubber meets the proverbial road.

• 58:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 58:03Guy Raz?

  Despite your idealism, despite your commitment to creating this thing that could be carbon neutral, there are people who are going to want a return on their money. And they don't really care about that, even if they say they do. Even if they say they do, at the end of the day, they're going to want a return on that. So what happens? How do you, how do you protect this thing that you built and keep doing it? I mean, because at some point, a big shoe company, Nike or Adidas, might say, hey, we want to buy you for $40 billion. And, and that may happen.

• 58:40Speaker 02

  Well, you know, we don't believe that there needs to be the tension between financial success and success for other purpose-driven aspects of our business, namely, the environment for us. And I think that's true for a lot of businesses. You know, we have, we have a lot of debates inside the company because there's always a balance. Like, if something costs 20 times as much, yet it's way more sustainable, you know, maybe you can't do that.

• 59:06Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 59:07Speaker 02

  Take that, take that choice. But on the margin, you can absolutely do it. When it's a little more expensive, it's much better for, and it follows our North Star of making a lower-carbon footprint shoe or product, we'll do it. And so, we just don't, we don't see that tension. And I think that the other aspect is, we built this into the charter of the company. So, our charter says, we have a fiduciary responsibility to our shareholders, and we have a equal responsibility to the environment. And so, if Tim or I are no longer in the business, and some other, some other person takes over, they still have a responsibility to do what our charter says, unless they get 2/3 of our shareholders to, to vote and say that they don't care about the environment. And so, we, we've kind of embedded this in the fabric of the company.

• 59:52Speaker 02

  And so, people have to know, when they sign on for a financing, this is part of the deal.

• 59:57Guy Raz?

  I want to shift. You mentioned, Tim, that there was a time where you were dipping into your savings, it was stressing you out, back in 2014. Do both of you feel like you can breathe a sigh of relief now that you're financially, you're on stable ground because your company is valued at $1.6 billion? Or do you still have stress about financial matters?

• 1:00:17Speaker 02

  You know, it's, it's never been about, neither of us really need much money to be happy and live. So, it's never really been about, like... The big valuation of the company or anything. I think we have enough anxiety between us just to push forward that regardless of it, while we're still in there, we're still, we're still cranking and pushing. We, we, we pay ourselves more now than we used to pay ourselves when we started the company. So we're certainly, we're certainly in a better situation financially and our, our little less financial stress. But, but yeah, the, the anxiety still is palpable.

• 1:00:53Speaker 01

  You're always sitting there thinking of the 10 things that you could be doing better. And then anyone who's started a business will know that, that feeling. Oftentimes people will ask you, gosh, it must be work long hours. And you're like, well, it's not, that's the wrong question. It's, it's like when you start something, this thing embeds six inches in your brain and you, you don't shut it off and it's a voice that's there 24/7 all the time. And you're constantly thinking about it. And I, you know, I retired from sport and I, that, that had its pressurized moments and getting out in front of, of lots of people at times and, and playing sport. And, uh, but this is in some ways greater, more sustained pressure and it's, it's a very, very difficult thing to do. And, you know, we're certainly, we've, we've had some, some good progress, but we've got

• 1:01:37Speaker 01

  a long, long way to go to achieve what we, we want to.

• 1:01:40Speaker 02

  How much do you think this, all that has happened to you is because of luck or because of your skill and, and hard work?

• 1:01:47Speaker 01

  You know, um, along the way, whether it be meeting Joey or all the, the different characters along the way that, that popped up seemingly at the right time, you can't call that anything other than, than luck. But there was, there was a lot of different offer ramps along this journey where if you were logical and rational, you would have stopped. And for whatever reason, uh, we've, you know, we've kept going and when it's, just seemed like it was impossible, we've, we've managed to find a different solution and, and keep on going a little bit. And you need that. And, and, you know, but if, if we've had any luck. If I've had any luck personally, I mean, I think we've been given an enormous leg up

• 1:02:30Speaker 01

  with our families and with our mom and dad and now with our wives. And, you know, that was a, that was a loving household that valued education, that encouraged us to go and take risks and do what we wanted to do. And not everyone has that. And it's been enormously important part of the journey because I think we've leaned on them. I know I have at key moments very, very heavily to keep on going.

• 1:02:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think they're, they're inextricably linked. I've always thought of luck as some random event happening to you. But that happens and then what are you going to do with it? And I think we've, we've had the good fortune together to, to have great timing across a whole host of things. Like, we could start a business and put up a website in seven months and reach 10,000 people in, in a week. But we also, you know, we seized and capitalized on that opportunity and we worked super hard and made some good decisions along the way to turn that luck into something that was really positive. So I just think you can't, can't really separate those, those ideas or that construct. And fortunately, we've,

• 1:03:35Speaker 02

  we've done a, we've had a good bit of both.

• 1:03:42Guy Raz?

  That's Joey Willinger and Tim Brown, founders of Albers. The company recently rolled out a new material for the soles of their shoes. It's called Sweet Foam and it's made from the leftover parts of sugarcane, which would otherwise be thrown away. And it's part of their ongoing effort to make Albers a carbon neutral shoe. And instead of keeping the recipe a secret, they've actually open sourced it so that anyone who wants to make soles out of sugar can do it.

• 1:04:20Guy Raz?

  Hey, thanks for sticking around because it's time now for How You Built That. And our story today comes to us from Kirby Erdely from White Salmon, Washington. And Kirby and his family spend a lot of time at the beach, which means they have all observed one of the great Wonders of marine life.

• 1:04:37Speaker 03

  You hear about it all the time. You hear about the beach umbrellas that fly through the air and land on somebody's car. Those things blow down the beach like crazy.

• 1:04:48Guy Raz?

  And those things blow around because they're not always well anchored, right? In a big gust of wind, a metal stake can just fly off the ground. And Kirby just wasn't satisfied with the stuff that was on the market.

• 1:05:00Speaker 03

  Lots of inexpensive tent stakes that you pound in with a hammer or a rock. But there was no really good, tool-less solution that would hold in all-weather conditions and that would work in sand, it would work in clay.

• 1:05:13Guy Raz?

  And because Kirby is a professional woodworker, he started to tinker around with ideas for a better ground anchor. And he was inspired by one thing in particular.

• 1:05:23Speaker 03

  You've probably seen it, and it looks like a gigantic wine cork opener.

• 1:05:28Guy Raz?

  And in case you haven't seen this giant wine cork opener, think pets. Because people use this corkscrew thing as kind of an anchor to help keep their dogs tethered outside.

• 1:05:38Speaker 03

  And because the screw threads have quite a bit more surface area, it increases the surface area between the soil and the ground anchor.

• 1:05:46Guy Raz?

  And Kirby thought a big screw like that could be great for anchoring all kinds of things.

• 1:05:51Speaker 03

  Shade or rain structures, a big tarp over an outdoor kitchen when you're camping, artists at art festivals, their booths with all of their art.

• 1:06:01Guy Raz?

  Anyway, Kirby started experimenting with prototypes and looking for a company to make the screw. And while he's doing all this, he has this huge, earth-shattering epiphany.

• 1:06:11Speaker 03

  The internet is amazing.

• 1:06:13Guy Raz?

  Kirby was able to locate the perfect recycled plastic to make the screws. And then Kirby did a Kickstarter campaign about three years ago. He raised $45,000 and boom, his product was launched.

• 1:06:26Speaker 03

  The crazy thing that kept happening over and over again is we would get a phone call or an email that says, "I'm going camping on Friday. I have to have these for the weekend." And so I don't know how we went from this product that never existed to something that people have to have for the weekend and they're upset if they're not going to be able to get it.

• 1:06:45Guy Raz?

  OK, great story so far, right? But then, one morning, about a year ago, Kirby gets an email.

• 1:06:52Speaker 03

  You know, an angry email. And it said, "I ordered your screws from this promotion you did on Facebook and I haven't gotten anything yet." And I thought, I don't even know what this is. We were not running a promotion on Facebook.

• 1:07:05Guy Raz?

  And you probably know where this is headed. Scammers were starting to get into Kirby's business. They were copying his photos and design and advertising cheap knockoffs and way undercutting his prices.

• 1:07:17Speaker 03

  So as soon as we would report one of these for trademark violations is how we would take them down, one would disappear and then two more would pop up.

• 1:07:26Guy Raz?

  So Kirby actually did something kind of unusual. He sent his own product for free to anyone who had made the mistake of buying a cheap knockoff. Meanwhile, some of his loyal customers kept reporting the knockoff sites and leaving comments warning new customers about the scam.

• 1:07:43Speaker 03

  We created this kind of international police force, probably of 50 or 60 people, that would email us every day and say, "Here's another one." And the whole thing just started dying down.

• 1:07:56Guy Raz?

  The scammers eventually went away, and Kirby has now spent about a year running his company full-time with his wife. Oh, and the same year his company launched, 2015, his daughter, Ilah, was born.

• 1:08:07Speaker 03

  For a long time, my wife and I referred to them as twins. And they both had their frustrations and were really proud how both of them are growing up.

• 1:08:18Guy Raz?

  That's Kirby Urdaley. His product is called Orange Screw. It's colored bright orange. And last year, he says, it made just under $1 million. To hear more about the company or to hear previous episodes, head to our podcast page, howibuiltthis.npr.org. And of course, if you want to tell us your story, go to build.npr.org. And thanks so much for listening to the show this week. You can subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, and while you're there, please do give us a review. You can also write to us at [email protected]. And if you want to send a tweet, it's at howibuiltthis. Our show was produced this week by Rachel Faulkner, with music composed by Ramtin Arablouei. Thanks also to Julia Carney, Sanaz Meshkhanpour, Neva Grant, and Jeff Rogers.

• 1:09:02Guy Raz?

  David Jaap is our intern. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This.