Young and Profiting with Hala Taha - Joey Zwillinger, Allbirds Co-founder: How We Earned 7 Figures in Our First 30 Days With 0 Marketing Spend | E255
Episode Date: November 10, 2023It all started with a three-page vision statement for Joey Zwillinger and his company, Allbirds, which is revolutionizing the footwear industry with its eco-friendly and sustainable products. Joey and... his co-founder Tim Brown set out to emulate nature’s brilliant design skills by creating the now iconic Wool Runner, a shoe made from Merino wool, and to create a sustainable global company in the process. In this episode, the latest in a limited series sponsored by Shopify, Joey shares some of the challenges that Allbirds faced, the technology that transformed their direct-to-consumer business into a global brand, and how to align mission with profitability.  Joey Zwillinger is the CEO and Co-Founder of Allbirds, which uses wool to create sustainable footwear. He has long been passionate about making things from renewable resources, which led him to start Allbirds with New Zealander Tim Brown and begin tackling sustainability issues in the footwear industry. Working together, Tim and Joey crafted a revolutionary wool fabric made specifically for footwear, resulting in an entirely new category of shoes inspired by natural materials.  In this episode, Hala and Joey will discuss: - How competitive sports translates into business - Finding a career with meaning and impact - The importance of constraints to creativity - Aligning your mission and profitability - Learning innovation from nature - Founding a purpose-focused company - Launching Allbirds with the Shopify platform - The secrets to a million-dollar launch - Breaking through in a noisy marketplace - And other topics…  Joey Zwillinger is the CEO and Co-Founder of Allbirds, which uses wool to create sustainable footwear. Prior to co-founding Allbirds, he spent six years at biotech firm Terravia (formerly Solazyme, Inc.) leading its renewable chemical business, developing and selling high-performance algae-based chemicals into various industries such as CPG, personal care, and industrials. He has long been passionate about making things from renewable resources, which led him to start Allbirds with New Zealander Tim Brown and begin tackling sustainability issues in the footwear industry.   Resources Mentioned:  Joey’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jzwillinger/ Allbirds Website: https://www.Allbirds.com/ Allbirds Twitter: https://twitter.com/Allbirds Allbirds Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/Allbirds/ Allbirds Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/weareAllbirds Zingerman’s Deli's Mission and Guiding Principles: https://www.zingermanscommunity.com/about-us/mission-guiding-principles/ Why and How Visioning Works by Ari Weinzweig, founder of Zingerman's Deli: https://www.zingtrain.com/article/why-and-how-visioning-works/  LinkedIn Secrets Masterclass, Have Job Security For Life: Use code ‘podcast’ for 30% off at yapmedia.io/course.  Sponsored By: Shopify - Sign up for a one-dollar-per-month trial period at youngandprofiting.co/shopify Greenlight - Sign up for Greenlight today and get your first month free when you go to greenlight.com/yap MasterClass - Get 15% off right now at youngandprofiting.co/masterclass Relay - Sign up for FREE! Go to relayfi.com/profiting **Relay is a financial technology company, not an FDIC-insured bank. Banking services and FDIC insurance provided through Evolve Bank & Trust and Thread Bank; Members FDIC. The Relay Visa® Debit Card is issued by Thread Bank pursuant to a license from Visa U.S.A. Inc. and may be used everywhere Visa® debit cards are accepted.  More About Young and Profiting Download Transcripts - youngandprofiting.com Get Sponsorship Deals - youngandprofiting.com/sponsorships Leave a Review -  ratethispodcast.com/yap Watch Videos - youtube.com/c/YoungandProfiting  Follow Hala Taha LinkedIn - linkedin.com/in/htaha/ Instagram - instagram.com/yapwithhala/ TikTok - tiktok.com/@yapwithhala Twitter - twitter.com/yapwithhala  Learn more about YAP Media Agency Services - yapmedia.io/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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If you can constrain your innovation to something that is high performance and low impact,
that is exciting because you drive amazing business value and you drive amazing environmental value.
It can connect those ideas together.
You have a business model that is
both mission aligned and profitable. Joey's Dwellinger, the co-founder and CEO of All Birds,
which uses wool to create sustainable footwear. They're the ones responsible for all the famous
wool runner shoes that you see now everywhere. And All Birds is also one of the first brands from
Shopify to have an IPO. I really left college seeking just a broad based education.
I did a little bit of consulting.
My one is doing investing.
That's around the time that I really caught the bug
where I thought that the dynamism of entrepreneurship
could blend with social purpose to create something
extraordinarily meaningful that didn't have to sacrifice
on the planet, but actually made meaningful impact
on the social purpose as well as the bottom line
for the business.
Why do you think you were able to have such a great launch compared to other entrepreneurs
who start businesses every day in the field?
I think it's as simple as...
Yeah, fam, today's episode is part of a special limited branded series that we're doing with Shopify about how technology is changing the landscape of entrepreneurship and how it's
empowering founders to disrupt industries as never before and often from the comfort of
their own homes.
In this series, we're talking with trailblazing founders, learning key lessons
from their incredible founder stories, and gaining insight into how platforms like Shopify
have enabled them to compete with the heavy hitters in their industries.
Today, I'm thrilled to be joined by Joey Zwillingger, the CEO and co-founder of All Birds,
which uses wool to create sustainable footwear. They're the ones responsible for the famous wool
runner shoes that you now see everywhere.
And All Birds is also one of the first brands from Shopify to have an IPO.
Joey, welcome to Young & Profiting Podcast.
Thank you for having me, all. It's so good to be here.
Joey, thank you so much for being here. I'm looking forward to our conversation.
And there's so much I want to discuss with you related to your company, All Birds.
But first, I'd like us to get to know you a little bit better.
So you grew up in the Bay area, you were into sports like a lot of young boys and teens
are, namely soccer, and while you didn't grow up to become a pro soccer player, I'm sure
your experience with sports still taught you a lot.
So my first question to you is, what are some of the lessons that you learned from sports
that you now apply in business?
Yeah, good research.
I was a soccer player.
I played at Cal, UC Berkeley, where I went to college.
And it was, I would say, absolutely pivotal
to how I act in life, how I live,
and what I think about teams in particular.
I'm an extremely competitive person in general,
and I think in business, which is more or less a game that we play here
in life. I think competition is an incredibly catalytic type of mentality to keep for both driving
teams towards a clear outcome but also just how you interact with one another in order to achieve
those shared outcomes. And I remember when I was playing at my peak level,
the thing that was most surprising to me
was that it was the most inclusive open environment
that I've ever been a part of.
And still to this day, I think,
where it is so outcome driven
and there is absolutely nothing about the personalities,
the backgrounds, the race, the socioeconomic, whatever it is,
all of that completely falls
away.
And all it is is about winning as a team and making sure that you can trust one another
and that you can rely on your partner in whatever you're doing in this case sports.
And I would say that that has translated to me to be the most pivotable use of teams
and way to interact with your colleagues in a business setting, while maintaining that drive around outcome orientation and winning together.
So your company All Birds is what you call a purpose native organization, and
we're going to get into that detail later on as we talk about All Birds. But
really my question is about your passion for wanting to improve the world and
where that really was stemmed from.
So, for my understanding, I heard you in another interview
where you cited your parents, your dad as somebody who sparked
that interest in you, all birds is this organization
that is aligning its sustainability mission
with its profit outcomes.
So, talk to us about how you first got that spark
while you want to help improve the world.
Yeah, you know, I think it's my dad played a pivotal role.
My mom also played a really important role in my life and shaping how I view the world
and how you're both a speck of dust on the planet, but also you can change everything.
One individual can change everything.
And my mom was an immigrant from South Africa.
She left her in the apartheid era. And really the values of that government
were antithetical to how she believed the world should be. So she picked up and left and left
her family behind and came to California where she ended up meeting my dad. And around
that time, my dad was a real social activist leading the professor's union at San Francisco
State to get the first African American studies department, did a lot of work
around social responsibility and uplifting a lot of disenfranchised groups from his position
as a professor at the university.
When he had me, I think what he imbued upon me was that it didn't really matter what
I chose to do in life.
He probably preferred that I wasn't in psychology as my dad and mom both were, but he needed me to do something that left an
imprint on the world in a positive way, and that understanding that the power of the
individual is extremely high. And with a bunch of hard work and creativity, you can shape
the world in very meaningful ways.
And that responsibility, if you're going to use that kind of effort and use the short time
on this planet that we have, has got to be done for a broader societal impact and one that
was positive.
We happen to be in nature quite a bit, a lot of camping.
So I think that was the early taste that I got for what kind of social consciousness really
drove me
and I thought was most important
and leading into what I did in my professional career,
that shaped how I viewed business
and how could you have both a meaningful professional career
and something that was fulfilling
but went beyond certainly making money,
which was never much of a motivator for me.
I love that story, and I love looking at entrepreneurs,
careers and backgrounds and trying to figure out
how all the stars aligned, and also from my research,
I found out that you weren't the first in your family
that had experience in the garment manufacturing industry,
so can you tell us about that?
Yeah, my parents had zero business background, and they truly did not. I didn't know what
business was at all when I left college, so I needed like some serious education when I got
to the workforce. But yeah, my mom's grandpa, he fled Russia in about 1904. There are some
pogroms, and he was in the garment business business and he happened to cut a little rip a hole in his trousers
and stuff some Russian rubles in his trousers
to if needed to bribe some policemen
on his way to the harbor.
Managed to make it out to the harbor
and found himself on a boat, didn't know where it was going
and he landed in South Africa
and fortunately didn't have to use those rubles.
His name is Rubin, so we named one of my kids,
and we now have those little coins
to celebrate that spirit from his great-grandfather.
And he ended up starting a contemporary men's
professional wear business in South Africa
and really did fantastically for a little while
before going bankrupt, but that's the way it goes in the garment business.
And my grandpa and my dad's side was also
lower east side, tenement housing,
had a business inside of his apartment
when my dad was growing up in Manhattan,
making uniforms for Pinkerton Detective Agency
and some government agencies and things like that.
So I guess it runs deep.
It was sewn into my DNA from many generations ago.
And here I am.
Yeah, that's such a cool background story.
And so you went to college and you got your MBA from Warren.
You went to UC Berkeley for engineering.
And you don't often meet engineers
that turn into CEOs.
And so I'm curious to understand
what kind of advantages you feel that you have as a CEO
who really thinks like an engineer.
I think being trained as an engineer,
there are some positives, fantastic positives,
and there's also some drawbacks.
I was taught to think about problems extraordinarily
analytically, and I save a quote in my phone.
It says, if you can't describe what you're doing as a process,
you don't know what you're doing.
And I think that speaks really concisely to how I think about running
not just a process independently, but running a business.
And yet, at the same time, I think if people don't share that sharp
analytical focus, sometimes it can feel a little too linear
and leave no room for creativity, which is quite the opposite from how I think about running
fantastic processes.
You really need to leave room and put the right gates for wonderful creativity, but you also
need to logically tackle problems.
And I've taken that in every business experience I ever have,
while also trying to compensate for the fact that
not everyone shares that kind of point of view.
So always a growth area for me to make sure that there's
clear room for creativity and clear articulation of
when that comes into the process and leaving room for
serendipity all along the way.
I love that.
And you have a good point.
Process doesn't have to stifle creativity.
Having good structure and good process
can actually enable people to feel more creative
because they have like an SOP of how something should get done.
So there's certain things that are sort of incongrued
but then there's certain areas where they can innovate
and get creative.
That's a great articulation.
I think that constraints are the most significant impact on a creative outcome.
If you aren't bound by great constraints, you're left to a wide open canvas to come up
with a great idea.
Those are typically a lot less actionable, a lot less commercial, a lot less meaningful
for whoever you're targeting consumers in our case are our clear endpoint and having the boundary and the guardrails
is incredibly important to get the best kind of creativity.
I totally agree.
Okay, so after college, you worked at GoldenSax, you did some consulting, you got into venture
capital as well.
Can you walk us through some of those highlights in your early career?
Yeah, I mean, as I said, not knowing what business was,
back in college, I recall it distinctly.
I would say, you know, what does your dad do?
What does your mom do?
He'd be like, oh, he's in business.
I was like, oh, cool, that's good enough for me.
That's a good enough granularity.
If someone said that to me today,
I would be like, well, like, what do you mean?
Like, what kind?
Like, what do they do?
What function?
What department do they work in?
All that good stuff.
I had no idea, business was very ethereal to me.
So I really left college seeking just a broad base education.
I did a little bit of consulting.
I wanted to do investing.
That's around the time that I really caught the bug
where I thought that the dynamism of entrepreneurship
could blend with social purpose
to create something extraordinarily meaningful
that didn't have to sacrifice on the planet,
but actually quite the contrary,
made meaningful impact on the social purpose
as well as the bottom line for the business.
And so I started looking at investing in that timeframe.
I didn't find the clean tech was the kind of jargon de jour
in that era where people were investing in
businesses that met my kind of value set and met my business ambitions as well.
The venture capital model at that time in particular was not really a great avenue
to pursue.
It just took too much capital to build these huge facilities to displace petroleum-derived
products and make them from naturally-derived products and make them from
naturally-derived products using cutting-edge technology at the time.
So I left the investing world and really sought after an operating role.
And I chose a company after a huge amount of diligence.
I went out and met dozens and dozens of companies interviewing to really understand where I didn't
have the most technical background.
So where could I make an impact on the business side having a technically oriented mindset
without having a deep understanding of the technology.
And I found a company called Solazam, which was using biotechnology to engineer microalgae
to essentially replace any derivative of petroleum and do so with
a zero carbon impact.
So all of the benefits of whatever the cut of oil is that the end product used from a performance
perspective with no environmental impact and ideally no cost impact or even cheaper.
That was the ambition of the company.
I ended up leading the chemicals group, so green chemicals displacing any petrochemical product that's surrounding all of us all the time
with an algae-based solution that left no dent on the planet. And it was interesting. I'm sure you
want to get into all birds more, but I had these experiences repetitively where I would go and
speak with brands. We'd have a conversation where I would kind of tease out the opportunity that the technology
presented for that company.
And it was like jaw dropping, everyone loved it.
And then by conversation three, it was like, well, you know, I talked to my sourcing
department and really they just want polyester cheaper.
Can you do that?
One in particular, we made a surfboard
out of microalgae that we then
derivatives into a polyurethane foam.
So this is a zero impact, rigid polyurethane
shaped into an amazing high-performance surfboard.
We had Rob Machado, a professional surfer,
ride it in competition.
And you think about these guys,
during Gals, they're sitting in the ocean, seaweed floating by,
maybe a dolphin skimming the wave.
What a better customer than that could you find me
for somebody that wants high performance
with no environmental impact.
Yet when we pitched it to the surfboard blank companies,
paying $10 more per blank,
which ends up retailing down the chain for, you know,
$700 to $1,500.10 more.
That was too much for them to stomach, and no one could figure out how to position the
products such that you could really make the impact with the end consumer there.
And so it was just this eye-opening experience for me.
It felt a little like pushing string every time I went to these meetings because I eventually
knew what the outcome would be. So fortunately, I was introduced to Tim via our wives
and Tim Brown's my co-founder at Allbirds now
and really saw an opportunity to connect my frustration
with trying to bring high volume low carbon material
to market with a wonderful consumer product
where you didn't have to compromise
on any performance attribute that the consumer wanted. I love that you didn't have to compromise on any performance
attribute that the consumer wanted.
I love that you brought this up because later on, I want to talk about the importance of
clear messaging when it comes to bringing your product to market.
So, I love that you brought that story up.
Would you say at this point, after you're working at this company that you knew that you
wanted to make sure that your career would have something to do with environmental science moving forward.
Yeah, innovation is pretty exciting.
If you can constrain your innovation to something that is high performance and low impact, so
you offer the consumer a no compromise solution for whatever that need is that they have, that
is a constraint that is exciting because you drive
amazing business value and you drive amazing environmental
value. And if you can connect those ideas together,
you have a business model that is both mission aligned and
profit aligned. So there's really no asymmetry between the
stakeholders that you're really fighting for being your
shareholders in a business and your environmental impact as one
of the other key stakeholders.
So I'd say I caught that bug early on.
The way it ended up manifesting within my career took some twists and turns.
And I learned a lot along the way, but this is the place that I always wanted to be.
And I think making that impact every single day, I couldn't think of something more exciting.
Yeah, it's very cool.
So let's move on to all birds.
So you alluded that you met your co-founder Tim Brown.
I think we should start off with maybe his origin story
or the origin story of the product beginning with him.
Yeah, very important because you got on my background,
which is running in parallel to Tim's.
Tim was actually a professional athlete.
He happened to get a design degree, which was his kind of intellectual passion when he went to college,
also in the United States, but he's actually a native New Zealander Kiwi. And he was pretty good
as soccer and ended up playing more than a decade professionally in the A-League and a couple other places, A-Leagues
in Australia.
And he ended up rising to be the vice captain of the New Zealand national soccer team, which
ended up going to the World Cup in 2010.
Obviously, both a leader as well as an incredibly good athlete and talented soccer player.
Yet he was consistently offered free gear from all the big sports
wear companies.
And there was this vacuum in space between what he wanted and what he thought all of his
comrades on the soccer team wanted and what was being offered.
And really the brands were marketing themselves via the athletes as a vehicle for marketing.
And getting paid a little extra if you wear the bright yellow shoes on the field and if everyone wears the yellow shoes you get even a bigger bonus so it's obviously focused on marketing and a big logo on the side of a shoe versus comfort versus performance versus what the athlete or the consumer needs in particular. So he started using his design background and really cobbling around with
shoes back in probably as early as 2008 was probably the first shoe he ever made. Really
small scale much more as a hobby on the sidewall his teammates are playing PlayStation. He's
making shoes ended up after his retirement after the World Cup. Now let's call 2012 now.
He really started in earnest and it got the concept. You know, let's call it 2012 now. He really started in earnest.
And it got the concept, you know,
he's staring out his window in Wellington, New Zealand,
and seeing 30 million sheep in the countryside.
And saying people understand the amazing qualities
of marina wool when it comes to shirts,
or when it comes to base layers for outdoor adventure,
why has no one made a shoe out of marina wool?
And so he had this instinctual understanding that
nature was the greatest innovator and mother nature having
many millennia to do her work, do a lot better job than a
chemical engineer over the last hundred years with working
with petroleum. So that concept as a kernel, coupled with his
design background was something that drove him to get it out of his system,
so to speak, entrepreneurially.
And he ended up designing a prototype,
put the product up on Kickstarter in 2014.
And it was a phenomenal success for Kickstarter at the time,
in that category.
And I was fortunately one of the first customers
that got to feel the wool runner and listen to his message.
You can still see the video on Kickstarter today.
I was fortunate enough because my wife
and his then girlfriend, now wife,
were college roommates when they went to college at Dartmouth.
So I'd known him socially,
but nothing ever crossed my mind
that we might connect business
wise.
But he went through this experience, had some success, and then went through an unbelievable
set of travails when it came to fulfillment, customer service, manufacturing, all the
good things that are required and can break a company if you don't do it well.
And so we started talking first about just a solution
to those issues, but eventually it was about really connecting something much bigger than
a single product or a single material, but really connecting the idea that we could offer
something that was no compromised performance with no impact on the environment or much
less at least to start versus the competition and that every time we stole market share from a competitor we were doing something great for our business we're doing something great for the world and so that idea really spark something in us
made us feel like we would be proud to build a brand that stood for that and we would be proud to tell our grandkids that that's what we spent our large chunk of our life doing.
And so we decided and we met on my,
at my house in Marin,
which is just north of San Francisco,
over a weekend my kids and wife were gone
and we kind of crafted what were the key messages,
what was the key idea for this business,
how would it take shape over the next few years,
we really shook hands on it that day on my deck.
And we have not skewed very far.
When we skew far, sometimes we make mistakes, to be honest.
And that core understanding of what we were trying to accomplish is the root of what became
all birds eventually.
And we joined forces formally in 2015, did a real sprint to launch our product on the
first day of March in 2016
and came out of the shoot pretty hot.
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I love this story. You guys have such a great founder story because it is so
inspirational to other entrepreneurs because you used platforms that are
available to all of us for very little investment. For example, you started on
Kickstarter, then you ended up using Shopify for DTC. And so it's just awesome that you used things
that are readily available,
and it's just very inspiring to hear.
In my story, you hear about innovation,
you hear about Tim's design background,
you hear about the consumer a lot,
you don't hear about technology a lot.
We are a product first business
that's making amazing things
that people want because it's going to make their lives
better, make them feel happier,
bring joy to their lives.
We are technology enabled though,
but the core offering for us is about product.
So if it's not going to make our product better,
let's see if we can rent it from an expert
and make sure that it's going to be way better than we could ever recreate ourselves. So, you know, the tools that you mentioned are
amazing catalyst for a business in the solution like Kickstarter, but really an enabler for a very
long-term kind of business build when you're thinking about e-commerce as a core part of our solution
for how we come to market with customers in a product like Shopify.
So totally you get to focus on creating the best offering ever product ever rather than
focusing on how to scale an e-commerce platform, right?
So I love it.
So let's go back to this concept of a purpose native organization.
It sounds like you were super intentional when you and Tim met up and really started the
foundation for all birds. and it sounds like you were super intentional when you and Tim met up and really started the foundation
for all birds.
Walk us through that process,
how you guys started to think about your business model,
and was it like highly intentional
where you already knew you were gonna have
a purpose native organization
or did that sort of evolve?
No, that was from before day one.
Purpose native was a phrase that we kind of figured out
later on, but that was at the
core of what we wanted to do. We would never have agreed to do business together if it wasn't
with that in mind. So the way it most formatively took shape was about a month after we launched
our product. We got the founding team together. It was about 10 people at that time. And we went through a multi-day exercise
where we rode out looking back from the seat
of the summer of 2026, 10 years before,
writing about that journey.
What brought us to the place that we eventually saw
the business getting to and the brand getting to?
And we wrote that into a three-page narrative.
And we still use it very much today,
every final round candidate that's interviewing
for our company reads it, has to digest it,
and it really separates out
whether people wanna come here for the right reasons
or not.
And you can generally tell whether people get more excited
by it or less excited by it.
They might think we're hippies from San Francisco
with flowers in our ear, or they might think,
wow, this is something I can get out of bed every single day
and feel amazing about the work that I'm doing on the planet
and it aligns with their personal values.
So we not only knew it from the core,
but we wrote it down and documented it and institutionalized it.
And we've always from the beginning
believe that environmental causes is a very broad term, and documented it and institutionalized it. And we've always from the beginning believe
that environmental causes is a very broad term.
Sustainability means 10 different things,
a 10 different people.
The thing that we found the most
generationally important problem
that the world has to face is climate change.
And so we focused on carbon emissions from day one
and we constrained all of our innovations
to be lower carbon emitting and less of an impact
on greenhouse warming and constrain it
with those types of guardrails,
and then allow us to come out with component tree
that delivered much higher performance, much higher comfort
and a much better consumer experience
all within those constraints.
So the way we come to market is better products.
They're just gonna feel better
and look better on your feet than anything else in the market,
because we make shoes.
Yet, as a gift with purchase,
you get this amazing environmental impact
that you may not have even understood when you bought the product
because it's just phenomenally comfortable.
I love actionable advice on YAP.
And I think everybody tuning in is probably like, what's in this three-page document that I wrote?
How can I do one for my business?
Could you give us some insight
in terms of how we can do this exercise
for our own businesses?
Yeah, you know, this isn't our idea.
We stole it, which all good ideas generally have some inspiration.
It's from a deli and Ann Arbor called Zingermans.
They have a process for visioning.
And you see companies like Amazon are pretty famous
for writing the press release of what you want to do
at the end of the project.
It's in a similar vein as that.
But you really seat yourself well-farred in the future.
It doesn't need to be 10 years,
but that was sort of the initial time frame.
We wanted to architect with the original business plan
and how we were going to come to market.
And we asked everyone to write down, you do that exercise, they weren't allowed to lift
their pen off the paper, physical pen, physical paper, no typewriter, no computer, and not
lift their pen off the paper for 20 minutes.
And everyone around and read to the group what they wrote about.
And then we, as the leaders of the company unearthed the gems from each of those and kind
of steered it in the direction that we felt was most high impact and also the best articulation
of what we were trying to achieve.
And we ended up getting down to that final pros and that three page narrative.
And if we don't have it published already, I'm going to take the opportunity from this podcast and see if we can get it on our website.
Oh my God, I would love that. I would love to read that. And in the outro, I'll find
more information about what was it called, Zillinger? What was it called again?
Zingerman's Deli. Zingerman's Deli. I'm going to find out information about that and
then explain it further in the outro for everybody else. So in your first month, you ended
up making a million dollars in sales through your, I
guess, your Shopify website, D2C.
Talk to us about that.
Why do you think you were able to have such a great launch compared to other entrepreneurs
who start businesses every day and fail?
You know, if I look back at that time, I'd say that the most pivotal aspect of our success
was focus.
At that time, Tim and I would always share this kind of quip that we would have to say no
to 99 things for every one thing we said yes to.
And you have so much advice coming in, particularly like before your business is truly anything.
You haven't even launched a product.
And how do you filter that out?
So incredibly fine filter with extreme focus.
And we knew that we were a product
and marketing company.
Everything needed to come out,
feeling amazing for the consumer.
So we poured an enormous amount of the money
that we had collected to help start the company into product.
And then the only other dollars that we spent
was to build the personality of the brand and amplify the message that we wanted to send to
consumers that we were making the most comfortable shoe in the world.
Unfortunately, a lot of people shared that view when they tried this use and
wrote significantly about it. So we didn't spend any dollars on marketing for many
many months paid marketing. I should say we did the PR thing and a whole
bunch of other tools to amplify our messaging.
But really, it was just about a singular focus on amazing product and amplifying the message
that we wanted to deliver, the promise that we wanted to deliver on that product.
And fortunately, because we did those two things well, the promise was met by amazing product.
And we delivered on the customer expectations
that we set. And so low and behold, people liked the message. We had some good amplification
from the media. And yeah, we sold a million bucks worth of shoes in the first month, which
was dramatically more than we ever anticipated. We were chasing into demand for at least
a year, always behind what the signal from the consumer was and
having some caution.
I remember the first million dollar purchase order like it was yesterday that we made to
the factory.
And it's very fortunate to have both really good timing to have tools that are disposal
like Shopify channels to amplify the message really nicely, to reach the consumer and a
great partner and Tim,
so that we could have one plus one equal three to really start things off in the right direction.
And earlier, you were talking about when you were working at another company,
and you wanted to create these like LG surfboards, right? And they didn't want to do it,
because they didn't want to spend $10 more, and have to charge the customer more down the line.
You said that messaging would fix that, positioning would fix that.
Talked us about how you were able to put out a clear message that allowed you to price
your products at a point that was profitable for you and also good for the world.
I think there's an underlying tension that business people but also consumers feel, which is
that if something is sustainable
that is probably worse, maybe it's less durable, maybe it doesn't look as good, maybe something
else has been sacrificed on the way.
Maybe it's too expensive.
And we always believe that that tension was a paradigm that needed to be broken.
And so we wanted to offer an amazing product for an amazing price and do that without any compromise on the tangible aspects of the product itself.
As I said, the gift with purchase is that it's amazingly beneficial for the world, but that's just a gift with purchase.
What you get for the price is a price value of your product that is fantastic and stands on its own two feet, so to speak, without needing some kind of like a price premium
or anything like that. That's never been in the language that we use internally to how to
think about innovation and how to think about building great products. People love great products,
and they don't love sustainable ones. I think over time, we do believe people will understand
that truly great products are also sustainable, but that's not the leading message.
This is a gift with purchase from us, and we give you everything that you could possibly
want and you've come to expect from an amazing pair of shoes, and we deliver that because
we rely on the best innovator in the world, which is nature.
These are some really important lessons, especially for any entrepreneur that's trying to get
into this space.
So you mentioned that one of the key reasons why you were successful and you had your million-dollar launch
essentially in your first month was focus. So talk to me about how you made sure you guys stayed focused during this time. Yeah, that is a subjective art. I think this maybe goes back to my training as an engineer.
It's, what is the outcome you're seeking
and does this help the outcome?
Is the activity that you're doing today
or this week or this month?
Is that gonna help you drive towards the outcome
that you think is gonna be the barometer of success
for whatever you're trying to achieve?
So we picked the three key outcomes we wanted to do.
Was it going to help this or was it going to hurt this?
And more is not more.
More is often much less.
And so that was the mantra.
And it was often just tim in me and then eventually a handful of people around a room
debating these things and just saying,
why are we wasting time doing this? Don't do that.
This is what we're coming to market with.
We need a exceptionally clear message
if we're gonna break through an enormously noisy
consumer marketplace, enormously noisy and competitive.
If we're gonna break through and have any kind of success,
we need to be clear, we need to be singular,
and we need to back that up with everything we can
from a messaging perspective
to meet those expectations that are going to be set very high. And so you better deliver if you're
going to be successful because you know, you can market your way to a first sale, but the second sale,
it's got to be love for the product. It's got to be love for whatever that service or product is
that you're offering. So it's got to be good. It's got to be good. You got to set high expectations, but then you got to deliver.
So many gems in this. A sharp offering, sharp messaging, and focus. Don't get distracted on those two main goals. So let's talk about you starting as a direct to consumer company. Why did you decide that
you were going to start off DTC? I like AE frame that because we believe that we are a brand.
We are not a sales channel.
So direct to consumer was never something that we believe that would describe the company
or the brand, frankly.
We are a brand first that makes amazing product that sets expectations really high just like
the consumer deserves and delivers on them.
But what we wanted to do to start was to reach consumers both in New Zealand and the United
States that we started with two websites, built on Shopify's platform, launched at the
exact same time.
And we believe that creating a feedback loop that had no noise around it from omnichannel
sales or places that we couldn't get data
from, we needed to understand who was buying the product,
why they were buying the product,
and then feed that right back into the product lifecycle
management to make sure we made agile and correct
improvements to our products,
to keep building the foundation of the brand
in a way that most significantly resonated with those
consumers who fell in love with the company and fell in love with what we were offering. So,
our vision was always start with DTC, first digital, then add our vertical retail operation,
and then eventually expand into wholesale marketplaces, whether it's dropship or something
more traditional wholesale model. And as we would do that, we would reach a broader set of consumers that wouldn't initially
want to engage with a company that makes shoes on a digital platform, or if they didn't
live around a store where we were.
There's a lot of people who still like that physical trion, don't like to deal with returns,
through e-commerce for shoes when it fits a really important consideration. That was the thesis and we took the first four years to be exclusively DTC.
We built the Fleta stores and then we expected to start expanding into wholesale at that point
when the world got a pretty big challenge in early 2020 with a bug that floated around.
So that threw back our timeline on entering
the wholesale marketplace.
But now we're just at the start of that journey,
which is pretty exciting,
because we're able to reach a number of new consumers
that we eventually think are going to be able to come back
and engage with us directly.
And when it comes to your direct consumer business,
how did you decide on Shopify?
Did you evaluate other platforms?
What made you decide that Shopify was a platform for you?
We did evaluate a number of other solutions.
And remember, this is 2015,
so Shopify was a different company than it is today,
but we saw the vision that Shopify had
and going back to the idea of what is your core offering
as a company?
How do you focus on that almost exclusively?
And our core offering is product.
And so we wanted to have an unbelievably seamless
shopping experience for the consumer.
But we didn't want to have to hire a ton of engineers
in order to create that experience.
We didn't want to have a technology operations team
to monitor performance
of a website or worry about the interfaces with our warehouses or eventually our product catalog
to make sure we had accurate pricing across our broad assortment across a number of markets. So
we wanted to find a solution that would take all of the burden off of us from building that that seamless shopping experience while being able to deliver that for the consumer.
Finding a group of people who were dedicated to that solution as their core offering and seamless check out seamless shopping experience amazing emails to track your progress as you get in order when you shop by e-commerce.
And we found we were pretty early in the Shopify plus ecosystem.
And I think we quickly became one of the fastest groups to reach various thresholds of number
of orders done through the platform.
But because that was the best solution on offer, and we felt like had the biggest
scale that could take us from nascent organization all the way to something that was very large scale,
it was pretty clear early on Shopify was the best solution, and we've been proven really
right about that.
And I will say, as I mentioned earlier, you know, when you're in the early business building
phase of your company, you get so much advice.
People have these narratives in their head like,
like Shopify will never scale.
You guys are going to have to get off that.
You have to be really data-oriented when it comes to this.
Look at the requirements that you have as a business.
Look at your future roadmap,
engage with the vendor,
whatever that technology solution is.
In the case of e-commerce,
we work with Shopify's team incredibly closely
to align our product roadmaps and understand
where they're pushing further than us,
where we're pushing further than them,
and make sure that we time things appropriately
so that we can scale the infrastructure of the business
to support our ambitions on the consumer side.
And Shopify's been an incredible partner.
And just to be clear,
I'm not paid by Shopify, although Toby, if you're listening, I'm happy to text you some
wire instructions. But it is something like, I think anyone starting a consumer product's business
would be absolutely crazy to use a different platform at this point. And I know tons of huge
companies are are migrating over to the solution because they've really proven that they can
scale to the biggest size.
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And it's so cool to see how there's so many companies of all sizes
Using Shopify so I have a social media business of network, and one of my businesses is I sell courses,
and I sell them on Shopify for all these entrepreneurs, because I think a lot of my listeners,
I've been talking about Shopify for a long time. So I'm sure a lot of people are on Shopify,
talk to them about how over the last decade that you've been able to scale using that platform.
What are the ways that you've scaled on Shopify?
From day one, we had a seamless shopping experience for e-commerce. If you were in the US or New Zealand,
you had localized currency, you had the opportunity to click a button and something would show up at
your door in three days and you'd be just breathtaking takingly wowed by how easy it is.
I've had people tell me that after a couple glasses of wine, they would find two days later.
All birds, shoes showed up at the doorstep and that shit, I did it again because it's
that easy.
You almost forget it.
It's so seamless.
So that was true from day one, but I talked about the vision for distribution for the
company.
We wanted to be a global brand.
We started in two countries from day one.
We also wanted to be Omni Channel.
So we wanted to make sure that the infrastructure to support an ambition like that was robust
enough to allow us to do that.
So what does Shopify allow us to do?
First, there's amazing interfaces to systems that are vital to our ability to create
an amazing customer experience. I would say we have something we refer to as a product information
management system where every one of our product in our catalog can spit out into multiple different
nodes of Shopify for different countries. It'll have the right pricing and everything will be entered perfectly.
It'll launch at the same time.
We have a content management system where we can send out translated text
and translated copy into various markets.
We have interfaces with our warehouses so that we have really seamless order interchange.
And we are sure of where every single product is across the
cycle. We've integrated our radio frequency ID tags that are on every single product. We have 99.9%
accuracy, which are both our auditors, our planners, and our finance people absolutely love.
And so we can understand where everything is all the time. So that kind of back end support
is incredibly important.
It's also the front-end.
The front-end, I've talked about the digital experience, but Shopify is also supported
where we had, at times, far ahead of where Shopify was thinking for our point of sale
and retail experiences.
We launched our stores before Shopify really had any kind of semblance of a point of sale
solution.
They've updated that many times and have consistently invested in that, which really supports
us with a fleet of 50 plus stores now.
We need one pool of inventory understanding where everything is.
That enables us tied to some of the other technology investments we've made to do things
like ship from store, which is incredibly supportive for profit on the back end for what we're needed to do to reach customers as quickly and efficiently as possible.
So these are just a small smattering of examples, and I would just say zooming back, you know, the idea that Shopify has thousands of engineers focused solely on this problem allows us to not even think about it. And sure, we have to do alignment with our roadmap and we have an amazingly talented
group of engineers, but they are an order of magnitude smaller than what we would have
had to have done if we started to try to build things and really not rent software from
the best providers in the world.
Yeah.
And I just want to call out something that you said that I think is really important, is
that Shopify is not just an e-commerce platform.
They are the leading e-commerce platform where 10% of all e-commerce businesses happening
on Shopify.
But as you grow in scale and your business channels change or go to market channels change,
and you want to be retail like you were mentioning, you can also utilize Shopify and everything
is all in one place,
whereas if it was different platforms would be really clunky
to manage and make sure that everything's super cohesive.
Yeah, that's right.
And we've been privileged to have a partnership
with Shopify where we have access to the key people
who matter and Shopify to make sure that when they look us
in the eyes and say they're investing in this for the long haul that we're like, okay, we're on board.
Yeah.
And thank you for paving the way for many of us entrepreneurs going in your footsteps
later on and able to use those Shopify features.
Okay.
So let's talk about why you decided to go IPO.
So you guys pretty recently went IPO.
What was the decision making process around
that? And how do you feel that IPO enabled you to sort of future proof your business?
If you've been listening for a few minutes here, you can understand that we never really
started with a small idea. It always was about a vision that we would be proud to tell
our grandkids about. And every time we sell a pair of shoes, it's better for our business
and it's better for the world.
So with that alignment,
with that kind of purpose-native construct
that we've created for the business,
it's really important to get big.
We've made a lot of investments in growth along the way,
some work, some don't.
And we always wanted to have the fuel in the tank or the battery charge and the EV, I suppose,
would be a better analogy here. We wanted to make sure that we had the power in order to
achieve those ambitions and getting on a global scale being an independent company
was something that was important to us until we felt like we'd really reached a scale where
we had started to scratch at achieving our mission.
And we're nowhere close to that yet.
You know, that said, neither Tim nor I are ideological about the best way to achieve the
mission.
It might be independent.
It might not be.
We've never been wed to a single point of you on that.
But until someone presents us with a path that looks better than building this on our own,
the core offering of what we do,
and doing it in the way that we know is the right way to do things from a consumer products
perspective. We wanted to make sure we had a ton of ability to do that, and capital is really
important. And so that moment was an opportunity to refill the gas in the tank and allow us to keep investing in the long-term picture
that we believe we could.
And talk to us about some of the innovations that your company has made and the ways that
you've delivered on your purpose when it comes to sustainability and things like that.
Where do I start?
I mean, almost every component in our shoe has some real innovation to it that is designed to deliver
unbelievable
tangible luxury for people and that tangible luxury manifests itself in the most comfortable
footwear that you've ever experienced and I often tell people, you know,
try our shoes for three days and then go back to whatever else you were wearing and the absence of comfort that you will feel and the
and then go back to whatever else you were wearing and the absence of comfort that you will feel
and the exhaustion that your body will signal to you
at the end of a day when you put back on your old pair of shoes
that aren't all birds,
is the best signal of the kind of comfort that we deliver.
And so how do we do that?
The very first innovation that we had was with marina wool.
We designed a textile that was bespoke for footwear
that had the stood up to the durability challenges that is quite high for
a pair of shoes.
But yet delivered, all of the magical benefits of this miracle fiber that regulates temperature,
you know, keeps you cool when it's hot, hot when it's cold and is silky soft and just
delivers unbelievable comfort.
So you know, that was step number one.
The sole of our shoe took us probably three
full years to bring the market. We call it sweet foam. And we were able to utilize some of the
R&D from my background, work with a company down in Brazil, which happens to be kind of the
Saudi Arabia equivalent of sugar cane that it is for for oil. And about 50% of the world's production of sugar cane
is made in Brazil.
And we were able to work with a partner
to derivative a waste stream of sugar cane production
to create one of the most comfortable,
great feeling rides for the soul of a shoe.
And so now we have this carbon negative material
born from a waste stream of sugar cane
that delivers unbelievable cushion and comfort underfoot.
That is across our entire lineup of shoes.
We've come with great innovations.
We're speaking now as we enter into the colder months of the year and we have amazing
warmer fabrics with a membrane that can stop rain from getting the shoe, keep you waterproof
while you're walking around.
And grit for the bottom.
I mean, I go on and on and on.
And these are all consumer-oriented tangible luxury benefits that are then gift with
purchase.
We happen to do it with the constraints that it had to be better for the earth.
It's such a great story.
It's such great products.
I've never tried all birds.
So I am like, you've sold
me. I'm ready to try some all birds. And I know you have a new product coming out. Can you
talk just about that? Yeah. Send us your size and address. And we'll be sure you're one of
the first to try it on. Seven years ago, a little over seven years ago, seven and a half years ago,
we launched the wool runner. That was the first product we ever came out with, March 1, 2016.
And this is a moment where we're going back to that iconic silhouette.
And we made more than a dozen very significant changes to the shoe.
It is a modernized aesthetic, incredible elevation of comfort and durability.
And a vast improvement on, incredible elevation of comfort and durability and a vast improvement
on a whole number of other dimensions that are important in the footwear construction and
also of course for the planet.
So we've made incredible strides.
We're kind of going back to the core here and you're going to see both some exciting content
as well as an amazing, amazing new product that I think is gonna really excite the world again.
Awesome, and I can't wait to study your launch,
see how you position everything, your messaging,
because you seem super smart
in terms of how to position your product.
So it was such a great conversation, Joey.
I end my show with two questions that I ask all my guests,
and then at the end of the year,
we do something really fun with it.
So the first question is, what is one piece of actionable advice that you can give my young
and profitors today to make them more profitable tomorrow? I think it's as simple as do more with less.
And just have incredible focus and understand the metrics that you're trying to achieve and focus
and clarity with what you're doing and what you're trying to achieve and focus and clarity with
what you're doing and what you're trying to send the message to whomever your customer
is, whether it's another enterprise or a consumer, be super clear and be super focused on your
activity to reach that exact singularity that you're looking to convey to the customer.
And what is your secret to profiting in life?
And this can go beyond the topic of today's episode,
it can go beyond your own business, personal career, finance.
What is your secret to profiting in life?
I think the model I guess I aspire to,
which I'm not going to subscribe that I achieve it,
is if you think about the most important things in my life, family, health,
personal health, and what I do in business, if I can match those circles up, think about
them as little circles, as tightly as like the concentric circles in a tree, I have the
greatest harmony in my life.
And I'd be remiss if I went through talking about the all-bird story for as long as we have here
without noting how important that interaction between my wife and I have been for the success
and the creativity that is at the heart of what the company does not to take anything away from
my partner Tim. But from my contributions, I would have been a fraction
of the effectiveness if I didn't have that tight harmony between my personal life and my family
with what I did professionally. And that kind of harmony has been very helpful for me.
Joey, thank you so much for your time here on Young and Profiting Podcast. So much advice for
entrepreneurs. You've got an incredible story, incredible company, all birds.
Where can everybody learn more about you, your company, all birds, and everything that
you do?
The best places by buying a pair of shoes to do that at allbirds.com or one of our phenomenal,
immersive, wonderful retail stores that's probably very close to wherever you're listening.
Awesome.
Well, thank you so much for your time today.
It was a pleasure.
Thanks, Halla.
Young and Profiters, I got so much out of this interview with Joey's Wellinger.
It's so wonderful to see how something meaningful, like a passion for sustainability, could lead
into building a huge, successful, impactful company like Allbirds, which is literally revolutionizing its industry.
And for Joey, his mission was all about vision, focus, and execution.
And of course, having the right tools to execute.
When it comes to vision, Joey mentioned this restaurant in Arbor, Michigan called Zinger Minz-Delhi.
It's been in business for more than 40 years and its famous freds bread and sandwiches which Oprah once rated as an 11 on a scale of 1 to 5. Zinger Mins is
also famous for its visioning. They write out a vivid description of what success looks like and
feels like for everything from a five-year business plan to a dinner special for that evening.
I'll put a link in the show notes so you can read more about it. It's super interesting.
for that evening. I'll put a link in the show notes so you can read more about it. It's super interesting. Another thing that was pivotal to all-bird success was focus. With so many
things coming at them, Joey had to continually remind himself that they were a product and marketing
company first. That means they had to say no to a lot of things, and that means that they couldn't
have built their own e-commerce platform. It meant that everything needed to come back to
delivering on their promise to their customers, that they were making the most comfortable shoe in the world.
But of course, it's not enough to have a clear vision and a keen focus. You need the technology
to execute on that vision. And from day one, thanks to Shopify, all birds had a seamless shopping
experience for their e-commerce. As a small company, they could go direct to consumer with very little investment and time. And even as they grew and scaled to the
huge global brand that they are today, it didn't have to hire a ton of engineers in order
to retain that seamless experience. Shopify scaled with them, even as they expanded to brick-and-mortar
retail shops. Well, that's all for this episode, and I'd like to thank Joey for coming on by
and Shopify
for sponsoring this special series about how technology is changing the landscape of
entrepreneurship.
And if you want to get your pair of the newly released wool runner two shoes, you can
get them at allbirds.com.
Thanks for listening to this episode of Young and Profiting Podcast.
If you listen, learned, and profited from this conversation with the visionary Joey's
willinger, please share this episode with your friends and family and drop us a five-star
review on Apple Podcast.
If you prefer to watch your podcast as videos, you can always find us on YouTube.
Just look up young and profiting and all of our episodes are uploaded there as video podcasts.
You can also find me on Instagram at Yapathala or LinkedIn if you search my name, it's
Hala Taha.
I also want to shout out my amazing production team, my executive producer Jason, Amelia,
our assistant producer for Khan and Hashan for helping us with guest outreach, Greta
and Sean for supporting research, CritiGrema, Ashtotch and Ambika for supporting us with
AdApps for Macho and the entire network.
You guys are awesome.
Thank you so much.
I love my team at Yap Media, that was only just
a small sliver of them, we've got over 50 people who work at Yap Media, so shout out to everybody
who works at this company, I love you guys so much, appreciate all your hard work.
This is your host, Palataha, aka the podcast princess, signing off.
Hey there, Yap fam.
I want to tell you about PipeDrive.
PipeDrive is a CRM platform that is made by salespeople for salespeople. And I got to say that PipeDrive is a realM platform that is made by salespeople, for salespeople.
And I gotta say that PipeDrive is a real unicorn
in the CRM world.
They've got 100,000 clients under their belt,
a team of over 1,000 employees, offices,
in eight different countries.
It's no wonder that they've bagged
six industry leading awards this year alone.
PipeDrive is awesome, and it's nothing like any other CRM
that I've been exposed to in the past.
Their interactive dashboard helps us spot winning patterns in our sales process,
which then lets us optimize our workflow and marketing campaigns.
So for example, pipe drive keeps tabs on your performance like a coach.
It crunches numbers and calculates your average conversion rates,
and then it tells you exactly how many new leads and activities your team meets to generate
to then hit your goals and targets.
It basically works backwards and ensures that you don't fail.
It also sends my team automatic alerts and reminders to keep deals on track.
It also automates a lot of our admin tasks. It keeps all our communications for deals in one place so we don't step on each other's toes and mess up any deals.
And if you're a larger team, PyP pipe drives got your back with their power plan. If it's right between their professional and enterprise plans, offering more flexibility,
seamless team collaboration and premium CRM features, including project management and
phone support.
So why wait, join pipe drive and smash your sales goals today. Go to Young & Profiting.co
slash pipe drive to try pipe drive for free for 14 days. And then if you like it, you can
get 20% off for one year.
Again, that's youngandprofiting.co.sash pipedrive for a free 14-day trial.
And if you like it, you can then get 20% off pipedrive for one year.