FUELING THE FUTURE OF FOOTWEAR is a hands-on master class featuring footwear design, color & material design, and brand+marketing design.
Source: PENSOLE x Allbirds – Pensole Design Academy
Allbirds is the beginning of the end for me. Anyone who knows me understands that I don’t look at Allbirds in the same way that everyone else does. The company that captured all of the buzz for their merino wool walking shoes doesn’t even know who I am, but they did something to me that gave everyone who reads this site, this site.
In 2014 I had the misfortune of launching a Kickstarter on the same day as a company named Three Over Seven. That New Zealand company had laid the groundwork for an amazing Kickstarter and they had a handsome footballer delivering the narrative of the land of sheep and it was one of the most explosive Kickstarter campaigns in the history of the site. In 3 days Three Over Seven had raised 100,000 dollars. In doing so on the footwear side of things they pushed other footwear Kickstarter projects off of the discovery page. What does this mean? My Kickstarter for ARCH, which actually funded, only hit 3500 bucks and the place where most of Kickstarter funding takes place (in discovery on their site) was no longer available to me. Unlike Three Over Seven I didn’t have a professional athlete attached to my project or the cool concept of a wool runner that could be machine washed. I had a real performance shoe with me running in a video and I also had a proven outsole and a solid design. Three Over Seven at the time was touting itself as a performance shoe. By the time the company gained considerable investments from Venture Capitalists, it no longer had the name 3|7. It was a company selling itself as a sustainable brand. There was no mention of the shoe as a runner, which it really never was considering it was basically a Nike Roshe Run without the Swoosh and made of wool.
Boy… I sound bitter, lol. I’m not really bitter though. At the time I learned the importance of focusing on one thing. ARCH was not my primary money maker. It was a hobby. I never completely got behind my own shoe company because I was making so much money in the third party marketplace… until I wasn’t making a ton of money in the third party marketplace.
None of this matters as Allbirds is now a darling of Silicon Valley and is opening their own doors. The company has locations in Asia, Europe and across the U.S. They also have a location in their original home of New Zealand. I shuttered ARCH as a sneaker company and began discussing the various mistakes I made while making my ARCH footwear. I also began discussing the mistakes I made in utilizing Amazon. Allbirds without even knowing I existed created this site as it is today, in a way.
The brand is rather vanilla and doesn’t really have a lot of style but that has been changing with the addition of the Mizzle (pictured above). The shoe which looks a lot like the Roshe Run Mid would have a difficult time crossing over, but is a much better looking option than the Runners. Allbirds is about to change the game and they are doing so with a company/school that I stated a few years ago would change the footwear industry, PENSOLE.
PENSOLE has the ability to disrupt all of footwear. The PENSOLE model has already created a concept by default. The company WE ARE UNDERDOGS produced the shoe of the first PENSOLE champion and since that time they have taken students from PENSOLE Academy and built a limited release sneaker company that is working with sneakerhead YouTubers and garnering a solid following. That model is slightly flawed as the shoes are produced in Portugal and it’s a model that can’t quite sustain in the long term as limited runs don’t produce the amount of income to build quality footwear without a consistent stream of marketing which is expensive.
Back to Allbirds and PENSOLE. PENSOLE has student designers who are now actively creating footwear for every major brand. Those students craft some of the dopest gear created. Allbirds isn’t exactly moving across demographics so when you consider the amount of investment the company has garnered 77.5 million in funding and has a valuation of 1.4 Billion at some point the customer demographic will have to grow and that will only happen with a more adventurous design.
PENSOLE x Allbirds: is pleased to announce the launch of PENSOLE’s Master Class in Design in partnership with Allbirds. This hands-on master class features color + material design, functional apparel & accessories design, and footwear design. 12-students will be selected to partake in a 3-week ‘learn by doing’ program. Students will form teams and be introduced to a curriculum about product creation informed by sustainability. To learn more about eligibility, your design challenge, Allbirds, and our studios download the submission brief below. *YOU MUST BE A LEGAL RESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES, CANADA, OR MEXICO TO BE CONSIDERED FOR THIS PROGRAM*
DOWNLOAD THE SUBMISSION BRIEF HERE
While this is a learning collaboration that will be rooted in sustainability, it is also a moment for Allbirds to look at a demographic obsessed with the mainstream brands. An Allbirds x PENSOLE project could find itself on the pages of Hypebeast and Complex. That’s an arena that’s hard to crack, but once the door is opened there Allbirds could find itself with a collection that changes everything.
This is an exciting collab and I hope that we are updated with the results from both companies.
Sources:
Captive Environment: Airplanes Are Becoming Experiential Marketing Pods
https://craft.co/allbirds