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Imagine for a second that you’re a soccer player.
And yes I mean soccer, because in this particular case you’re living in Wellington, New Zealand.
It’s 2012, and you’ve spent the last five years playing professionally for the Wellington
Phoenix.
You’re ready to retire and find something new, but instead of continuing on in the realm
of sports, you launch a kickstarter for a shoe idea you’ve been kicking around: wool
sneakers.
You manage to raise $119,000 in just five days and go to found one of the fastest growing
shoe companies in March of 2016.
This atypical path to creating one of the most popular shoes on the market is that of
Allbird’s co-founder Tim Brown.
Alongside his co-CEO Joey Zwillinger, Brown has managed to transform the simple idea of
a casual wool sneaker into a company that’s valued at 1.4 billion dollars.
So, what is the reason for Allbird’s tremendous success?
What I really want to know is whether Allbirds are popular solely because they are comfy,
or whether they’re growing rapidly in part because of their environmental practices.
Sheep.
That’s where all this starts.
Sheep’s wool is the cornerstone of the Allbirds supply chain, and is the epitome of Allbird’s
successful innovations with sustainable material.
In a way, Allbirds’s approach to building their shoes is what drives their success.
When creating their brand Brown and Zwillinger identified the unnecessary traditions of a
stagnant shoe industry, and not only changed their approach to crafting a shoe, but did
so in a way that stands by an environmental ethic.
They essentially had the courage to imagine a shoe that could be both chic and sustainable.
And their use of high-quality materials is a perfect example of this.
Allbird’s flagship shoe, the wool runner, uses merino wool for the upper, recycled plastic
bottles for the laces, and castor bean oil for the soles.
The common saying goes that there are more sheep in New Zealand than people, and Allbirds
relies on that massive population of fluffy animals to create their shoes.
The company only sources their wool from a collection of sheep farmers certified by ZQ,
a New Zealand based company that holds its farmers to strict environmental and ethical
standards by routinely auditing farms with third party certifier AssureQuality.
Ultimately, ZQ supplies Allbirds with sustainable, ethical, and traceable wool for their shoes.
And yes, traceable means ZQ has a map of over 400 farms on their website so you can see
exactly where each fiber is coming from.
In addition to wool, Allbirds is trying to shake up the sneaker industry by creating
a shoe made out of TENCEL lyocell, which is essentially eucalyptus tree pulp spun into
fibers.
Not only is this fiber biodegradable, but the chemicals used for creating the actual
Tencel can be recovered time and time again.
According to the Austrian based Lenzing Group, which produces the Allbirds tree fiber, they
are able to recover and recycle 99% of the chemical solvents used during the Tencel creation
process.
Lenzing has perfected its eco-minded process to such a degree that they are now Forest
Stewardship Council certified and even won the European Award for the Environment from
the European Commission in 2002.
According to the Allbirds website, the eucalyptus fiber is sourced from fast-growing tree farms
based in South Africa that minimize the use of fertilizer and rely on rainfall, which
means that 95% less water and half the carbon emissions are needed when compared to a material
like cotton.
That being said, some have pushed back against Eucalyptus tree plantations in South Africa
as invasive species that might harm or crowd out native plants.
But on the whole, the Allbird tree shoes are one of the most eco-conscious on the market
due to their high resource efficiency and comparably low environmental impact.
Despite all of their efforts in procuring the most renewable resources for their shoe,
Allbirds does still have a carbon footprint.
Granted, the emissions associated with producing an Allbirds shoe is relatively small at 10
kg of carbon (according to a self-conducted life-cycle assessment) When compared to the
50kg required for a shoe made by Everlane, a company that prides itself on its environmental
ethics, Allbirds production practices seem pretty lo -carbon.
Recently, Allbirds has announced that they are going carbon neutral in 2019 by purchasing
carbon offsets, which they admit is a temporary patch and claim that they are committed to
decarbonizing their supply chain by inventing new carbon-free processes.
They use their sugarcane based SweetFoam sandal as an example of this, explaining that every
tonne of material they use pulls 2.5 tonnes of CO2 out of the air due to sugarcane’s
carbon capture properties.
So, Allbirds is clearly trying to work many angles to reduce their environmental impact.
But are people buying their products because of their sustainable practices or just the
comfortable design of the shoe?
After looking behind the scenes of Allbirds, I think that question misses the point.
The meteoric rise of the Allbirds is the product innovative thinking, especially when it comes
to sustainability.
Co-founder Tim Brown continues to emphasize that the three pillars of their company are
deeply connected.
Claiming on their website that “comfort, good design, and sustainability don’t have
to be mutually exclusive.”
And I think it’s this both/and mentality that’s driving the Allbirds hype.
Allbirds shows us that a path towards more sustainable products requires imagination,
flexibility, and creativity in order to truly push the boundaries of what a sustainable
shoe can be.
Because often, sustainability and environmentalism deal in the business of less or giving up
comfort, but Allbirds shows that that doesn’t have to be the case.
A sustainably sourced shoe can also be a very comfortable shoe.
That might seem like a simple statement, but that’s a remarkably creative approach to
stagnant shoe market.
This, then, might be the key to their success and popularity: dreaming up and actually creating
an environmental ethic that’s central to making a shoe which Time magazine deemed the
most comfortable in the world.
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Charlie here.
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