As a former Allbirds employee, the pivot from shoes to AI makes more sense than you'd think

Wait...what?

When Allbirds hired me (me? little ol’ me?) in 2018, I thought I was on my way to making it¹.

Not because the company was going to rocket to the moon and would IPO and I would be a rich bitch. I mean, maybe I thought that, but that wasn’t what made me feel like I’d made it.

But before I get into why I felt like I made it, I’m just going to say this now. Both in case someone from the Allbirds legal team is reading this (whom I no longer know) and also in case someone reading this really loves a story about a fallen darling (a la WeWork²). That this essay, maybe much to your chagrin, isn’t an exposé or a peek under the cloth. I know, lame. I’m sorry!

This isn’t going to be where I tell you the writings were on the wall, that leadership walked around barefoot (again, a la WeWork), that the reason I left the company after 11 months was because of a reason other than the fact that I wanted to move back east.

The writings were not on the wall because there wasn’t anything to be written on the wall. No one walked around barefoot, although we did gather at 4pm every day to do a series of pushups³. The only reason I left the company after 11 months was that I got a job at another former D2C darling that would move me back east, my ultimate goal, because San Francisco just wasn’t the city for me (it’s not you, SF. It’s me).

When I take a step back, this essay isn’t even about the current state of Allbirds at all. But the darling hath fallen, and therefore is now relevant. I’m not going to cover the downfall or retell a story that can easily be found within the archives of Business Insider or WaPo. I’m not really going to talk about the AI pivot at all, at least not in a grand ‘what it means for the industry’ sense.

I’m not a tech reporter, and I don’t care to be. But I did spend 11 months with the brand, and those 11 months shaped me more than makes sense.

Oh, you’re still here after all of that? Okay, let’s get into it⁴.

To really tell this story, we need to go back a little further in time, to October 2017. I was visiting New York after living in the Bay Area for just over a year — at the time, we were still in San Jose. I was overwhelmed with emotion and nostalgia for my East Coast life, but I hadn’t yet thought about moving back any time soon (though crying in Central Park should’ve been a sign? I digress again…).

I brought a pair of Birkenstocks⁵ with me and a pair of Nike Frees that had far too many miles on them. I cannot remember the events leading up to this moment, except that I’d walked a lot on a particular day during this trip (like, 30,000 miles) and my feet hurt.

While walking in Soho, I spotted an Allbirds sign in the distance. I don’t know what made me walk in — I guess I’d seen them around, or had heard about them (I was living in the Bay Area, after all), and something about spotting that sign while my feet ached made me walk in to that small storefront on Prince Street.⁶

I could’ve walked half a mile in any direction and have been met with any other shoe store — the Nike store on Broadway, the Adidas store on Houston, the David Z on Broome. But I found myself walking into an Allbirds.

At that point, the brand was selling one shoe — the Wool Runner (the one you probably think of when you think Allbirds). I walked out with the quintessential gray shoe with white sole. Yeah, you know the one.

I often say living in the Bay Area specifically SJ robbed me of my style for a bit. This picture absolutely comes to mind....

The store employee assured me that, even though I was a true half-sizer, I’d find myself at home in the half size down. We carry whole sizes only, but wool stretches⁷.

And stretch it did, I guess, because I wore the fuck out of those shoes. One of the first in my Mountain View office to own a pair, with the exception of an engineer or two, I fit right in. They went with nothing and yet I wore them with almost everything.

Coming from a gal who, just a few years earlier, had a shoe collection that included canvas platform sneakers, Doc Martens, black jelly sandals, desert boots, clogs, and aforementioned Birkenstocks (to name a…few), this was, well, a departure. I’m not saying I was the personification of fashion, to be clear, but still.

Fast forward six months later and I realize how much I want to move to San Francisco proper. I also know that the commute to Mountain View on CalTrain will get old fast, and so I set out to find an apartment and a job up in the city.

I could go into detail about how I stumbled across a job as CX Manager at Allbirds, how I went through a lengthy interview process, how I questioned whether I should wear my (at this point, beat up) Allbirds to my in-person interviews, that I’d also managed to move to a tiny apartment in Hayes Valley in May and had been doing the CalTrain commute for months.

But what’s important to know is that in August of 2018 I was walking into the doors of 730 Montgomery Pl⁸ for the first time (an address still saved with a select few online retailers).

And yeah, I’d felt like I’d made it. I was making not one cent more than I had in my last job — I negotiated as far as I could, and that led me to taking neither a pay cut nor a pay raise and breaking criminally even. I was granted stock options, but nothing that even in the event of a ‘to the moon’ IPO would make me a multimillionaire (though, it could’ve been a down payment).

My commute on Muni was fine on paper but painful in reality. I didn’t really ever feel like I had ‘extra’ money but found ways to spend it anyway. So how, after all of that, had I made it?

Because I fell for the darling. And darling she was.

When I think back to what made me purchase Allbirds in the first place, it wasn’t the look. I don’t think I thought they necessarily looked good, though I didn’t necessarily think they looked bad, either. What brought me into the store in the first place was the fact that they were familiar enough that I had some trust in them, but new enough to be interesting. The promise of comfort, too.

But what kept my interest wasn’t the shoes. It was the intentionality of the store design, the copy, and the illustrations. Everything had a purpose, and that purpose was wrapped in whimsy and delight.

The feelings of purpose and intentionality I felt as a consumer were solidified and strengthened when I became an employee. The chairs at the stores were designed to optimize the try-on experience, from their height to the fact that they could fit a shoe box underneath⁹. The whimsy was intentional, and made it easy to not question why a shoe made from wool would be named after birds?

Throughout my 11 months, I learned the commitment to sustainability was not just a message the brand used as a marketing tactic but also was deeply engrained in how the company operated. I have fond memories of team lunches, of making waffles for my team (and then leaving my waffle iron there for months on end), the email we got from a colleague asking us to not feed his dog (no matter how much said dog begged).

Most of the photos I have of my time there are with or of other people (or of their dogs) and that doesn't feel right to share without permission (even/especially the dogs!), so here are a few pics of my time there. Featuring some food, some of my face, and a very small selection of the twenty-something pairs of shoes I accumulated in my time there.

The feelings I had as a 27-year-old manager, to people close in age to me (and older) were something I had to wrestle with, but ultimately gave me more confidence than I realized at the time.

I remember our ski trip to Tahoe, eating crumpets when we launched in the UK, and all of the small corners of the office I used to work from.

When we ran out of coffee, whoever found the empty pot would just make it. If you forgot to recycle or compost or left the toilet seat up in the bathroom, know that you’d hear about it on Slack (often, from me).

And overall, I remember the people. The inside jokes that formed naturally, the stapler-in-jello level antics (yes, a stapler in jello did in fact happen). The true experts I got to work alongside daily. I’ll never say anyone, especially leadership, at any company is infallible, but by and large, we wanted to do good, and the love for the product, the materials, the customer, the innovation, and the potential ran deep.

In May of 2019, I took another trip to New York. My desire to return to my hometown slapped me in the face, and I started to casually apply for jobs in New York. One of those casual applications became an incredibly fast interview and offer, and I felt this was the nudge from the universe I needed.

It wasn’t a decision I made lightly, and leaving was hard. I had been there for less than a year, I loved the work, I loved the team, and I loved the potential. I loved the brand and everything it stood for. I was a part of it, and leaving would mean I would become a blip in the company’s history.

And after 11 months, that should be expected, and they should be more of a blip on my history too. But for some reason, the time I spent there has stuck with me in such a vivid way. It marks a real shift in my career, made me understand what I want from a workplace culture, and set a bar for my workplace experiences from here on out.

Before I left, one of my co-workers sent me a message informing me that I was in fact leaving behind a legacy. That in my short 11 months at the company, I held the record for the most Slack messages sent per day (when averaged against the number of days worked at the company).

I hope that in the almost 7 years since I’ve left, someone else has beaten that record.

Once I left, I was cheering on the company from the wings. Each new store opening, product launched, headline about a big partnership and eventually, an IPO, all had me wondering what life would be like if I had stuck around. Those moments did also have me beaming with pride. Even while writing this essay, I’ve had to fight the urge to say ‘we’ many times.

I never regretted leaving, because I knew I wanted to come back to New York (and coming back to New York is what set the rest of my career in motion), but there was a lingering feeling of what if, that I was watching a parallel path unfold in real time.

At some point, the company IPOed, and the headlines went from giving the brand positive accolades to worrying about shareholder value and whatnot.

To be honest, I didn’t follow this much. I didn’t want to remember the brand for its “fallen” status, and that wasn’t part of my story. I don’t even know if I can really articulate what happened — and this essay isn’t really about what happened¹⁰.

But what the headlines and media did tell me is that the brand never recovered, the company was acquired, and now they’ve announced a pivot to AI. It’s okay if you need to do a double take, I did too.

When I first read the headline, I thought it was satire. I looked around for confirmation, and even when I saw ‘CNBC’ plastered in the address bar, I thought oh wow, they have a humor section now?

I can’t tell you what this means. I’m not a tech reporter or a market predictor, nor do I ever want to be (God, no).

But the pivot from Silicon Valley’s favorite shoe to AI might be the exact move we could expect from a shoe company turned apparel company turned back to a shoe company in 2026.

It makes no sense, and therefore, it’s perfect.

Do I understand the logistics of this move? No. From warehouse to data warehouse? From serving the feet of the tech bro to serving their AI GPU needs? I feel like I am reaching.

Do I understand the motivation? Kind of. Do I think this will become an HBS case study or Hulu documentary? Maybe.

Time will tell what the future of Allbirds New Bird AI¹¹ will look like. The CNBCs and Business Insiders of the world will keep us posted on that, but not me.

After being there less than a year, I don’t have that authority, nor do I want it. I was a small blip on the company’s history, and the success or current state of the company has nothing to do with me — without me, I don’t see the company having any different of an outcome. And yet, here I am.

My story ended when I got on a plane to New York in 2019. What happened after was news. Sometimes exciting, sometimes sad, and now, apparently, AI news. News that shaped the company more than my 11 months there ever could. But that news will never shape me more than that time did. And for that, I guess I am grateful.

1. While in hindsight I want to say that this was the first time I’d felt that way in my career, but as I reflect I also think I felt that way when I made Genius at Apple Retail when I got my first tech job, when that first job tacked on Manager to my title and gave me an extra $5,000 a year.

2. This footnote is for my mother who I am guessing does not know about the rise and fall of WeWork, and in case anyone else finds themself in the same boat, here’s a fairly good summary thanks to the New Yorker (though, you can and should just watch the Apple TV series ‘WeCrashed’, staring Jared Leto and Anne Hathaway in performances I’ll never forget.

3. Not sharing trade secrets! ‘40 at 4’, as it was known as, was written about here.

4. I really want to put a paywall here. I’m not going to, but can we acknowledge that this is a really good hook?

If you agree, feel free to buy me an iced coffee.🧋

5. It was unseasonably warm for October, similar to how it’s unseasonably warm for April now.

6. Their first location in Soho, at 68 Prince St. When Allbirds moved to its final Soho location at 73 Spring St, 68 Prince became a NOBULL store and is now a Vivaia. A storefront destined to sell shoes, I guess.

7. Once I started working for the company, I would later learn that, at least back then, the men’s and women’s shoes were cut for the same cast, meaning a Men’s 8 perfectly translated to a Women’s 9.5. And from then on, that was my size. Again, not sharing trade secrets. This is something my team would tell customers!

8. Stunning! https://www.officelovin.com/2018/10/a-look-inside-allbirds-new-san-francisco-hq/

9. https://www.bostonmagazine.com/health/2019/03/21/allbirds-shoes-newbury-street-boston/

10. Though if you are looking for a good summary, I highly recommend Gad Allon’s “Why Did Allbirds Fail”.

11. I hate to be the one to say this, but that name kind of slaps???