Allbirds recently garnered a 50 Million dollar investment. This valued the company at 1 billion dollars. I have an interesting story about Allbirds and how perception hindered my understanding of why the company was capable of doing something my shoe company couldn’t.
Allbirds was originally named Three over Seven. They launched in 2014 at the same time that I decided to run a Kickstarter campaign. Which was a bad move for me and ARCH. Three over Seven boasted a professional soccer player as the owner and a catchy material, Wool and a professionally edited video. I was going the performance route with a design that looked a lot like shoes that already existed. My only claim to being different was the weight of my shoe.
Three over Seven launched based on sustainability and comfort and they funded at 100,000 in 5 days pushing my campaign off of the front page since we were in the same category. When the Kickstarters ended they had over 100K and I had 3400 dollars.
I shipped faster, and Three Over Seven had some issues, but Silicon Valley liked the idea of sustainability and bought into the company. The brand changed to Allbirds and the rest is history.
