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Hello, I'm Sam Fenwick, and this is Business Daily Meets from the BBC World Service.

Today's guest is Tim Brown, a former New Zealand footballer who went on to co-found

Allbirds, the billion-dollar brand known for its woolen shoes. We hear how he

made the leap from sport to sustainable style. In the background had been this entrepreneurial idea around

shoes, I took an entrepreneurship class with a professical Carter cast in Chicago. It changed my life.

The setbacks he faced along the way. He told me that he'd been teaching this class for a long, long time,

and he'd seen lots of ideas, and this was by far and away the worst one.

To launching a billion-dollar business making woolen shoes.

In four days, we sold $125,000 worth of wool shoes,

and it was the start of this whole journey.

That's Tim Brown, the founder of Allbirds, here on Business Daily from the BBC.

My father was English. My mum was a Kiwi. We'd grown up in New Zealand, but I was born in

England, and my father and my grandfather had lived in London, worked on Fleet Street. Growing up in Carrowery, Wellington, Tim had two

big dreams, to become a footballer and to design shoes. His football coaches doubted his chances,

but he was determined to prove them wrong. And that determination paid off when at the age of just 17,

he earned us scholarships to the University of Cincinnati,

marking the start of his football career.

I can still remember it.

There'd be a big game of rugby and we'd be playing football, soccer in the corner,

and if our ball kind of went in the rugby game, someone would pick it up and kind of kick it over the fence and we'd apologize and go get it. That was the kind of the hierarchy of where rugby sat, equally, you know, cricket. I loved all sports, but soccer was the one that really connected for me. And I just caught the bug. And I've had it really ever since and I was lucky enough and I think

this happens sometimes to play with some really tremendous players when I was young far far

...