Allbirds: The Rise and Fall of Direct to Consumer | 5

Business Wars

Wondery

History, Business, David Brown, Management

4.6 • 13.2K Ratings

🗓️ 25 April 2024

⏱️ 42 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Allbirds was once valued at $4.1 billion. The sustainable shoe brand had a fast and meteoric rise that mirrored the path of many other direct to consumer brands, but by early 2024 Allbirds' luck had changed. Find out what wrong for the company and the DTC market broadly, and how they're trying to find their footing again.

Featured Guests: Ann Gehan, Retail Reporter at The Information Elizabeth Segran, Senior Staff Writer at Fast Company

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Wundery Plus subscribers can binge new seasons of Business Wars, ad free right now.
0:06.0	Join Wundery Plus in the Wundery app or on Apple Podcasts. In the 2010s, direct toconsumer companies were sprouting up everywhere,
0:24.0	promising to remove the middleman and deliver innovative new products
0:28.0	right to your doorstep with one-click shopping.
0:30.0	By 2021, the stock market saw more than 1,000 IPOs hit the trading floor
0:36.0	with a portion of these belonging to DTC companies like Warby Parker, Poshmark,
0:41.0	Rent the Runway, and the star of today's episode, All Birds.
0:46.0	The sustainable shoe brand had a fast and meteoric rise, but it wasn't long before
0:50.9	investor demands and the punishing trend cycle started to hit the company hard.
0:56.2	When Allbirds went public in November of 2021, their iconic Woolrunner was a hit, and the company
1:02.4	was valued at nearly 4.1 billion dollars on the first day of trading.
1:07.0	But behind the scenes, this Silicon Valley darling was starting to crumble.
1:12.0	They had to contend with pressure for growth from
1:14.5	investors who'd shelled out more than 250 million dollars in venture capital
1:18.8	funding. Their stock began to slide and by March 2024 both of their co-founders had stepped down as co- CEOs
1:28.0	leaving the company at a crossroads.
1:30.8	As investors size up what's next for Alberts and the DTC movement as a whole,
1:35.0	we're lacing up our sneakers and walking through the company's past to understand
1:40.0	where they lost their footing and what it means for the future of the DTC brands we've come to love.
1:47.0	Stick around. From Wandaonary, this is the Spy Who. This month we open the file on Oleg Lellen,
2:02.4	the Spy Who saved MI5.
2:05.0	Lellen's actions changed the course of the Cold War in the 1970s,
	...

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