Tim Brown on Allbirds’ whirlwind decade, meeting Obama, billion-dollar lessons

When former All White Tim Brown retired from professional football in 2012, he couldn’t possibly have envisioned what the next decade would look like. His idea for a woolen, environmentally friendly, sustainable shoe evolved into a company valued at close to US$4 billion in 2021. But the past 12 months have been fraught with challenges.

In a wide-ranging, long-form chat with the Between Two Beers podcast, Brown talked about the realities of being the co-CEO of a billion-dollar company, all the most interesting steps on his journey from a Wellington flat to worldwide footwear industry leader, partnering with Leonardo di Caprio and meeting Barack Obama, and the big losses and challenges the company faced across the last year.

Don’t judge the Allbirds footwear company until you’ve walked in the shoes of its Kiwi co-founder, former All White Tim Brown.

With a tagline calling itself “the world’s most comfortable shoe”, Allbirds was all the rage when its shares rose 90 per cent on the opening day of trading after the niche company went public in November 2021.

By contrast, in 2023 Allbirds struggled with a sobering $100 million loss.

Now Brown has done a soft-shoe shuffle, stepped down as chief executive and taking a new role as chief innovation officer. At the same time, he’s been leaning hard on life hacks learned from football as Allbirds seeks to regain profitability with new products, including the new Wool Runner 2, which features a 14 per cent lower carbon footprint than its predecessor.

In the podcast, Brown reflects on how Allbirds had hired 60 per cent of its 1000-strong company staff through the Covid pandemic, after initially being a two-man outfit, and in the process had lost a little focus.

“We bought a couple of things to market that didn’t work out as we planned,” Brown said. “And then we ran into sort of the headwinds of the sort of big shift in the economy and public markets and the expectations for early stage growth companies and... we had a really tough period, and we’re still in it.

“And it forced us to take a really hard look at the business and who we are and what we stand for and go through a period of transformation.”

Lessons from football

Brown drew a comparison to previous personal ups and downs - such as his own experience in breaking a shoulder 20 days before the start of a World Cup - where it was necessary to see the bigger picture.

“We zoom out a little bit and see this for what it is, learn from it, try and get better, and then we go again... If we’re smart, this is part of how we’re going to get better.”

As a young footballer, Brown could recall his father presenting him with newspaper clippings reporting how he hadn’t played very well and asking him what he was going to do about. As a result, he learned to deal with setbacks, using them as fuel for future endeavours.

“A lot of the experiences in sport have stood me in good stead. When, post-IPO, all the headlines that were incredibly favourable turned pretty quickly, pretty negative about Allbirds and I was like, ‘Okay, I’ve seen the script before. I’ve got some experiences here I can fall back on’.”

So now he’s rolling his sleeves up under his new job description and acknowledging it was the right time to have a single chief executive at Allbirds, rather than two - with co-founder Joey Zwillinger the right man for the job.

“No one had ever thought or imagined that I was a kind of a corporate executive, and increasingly, that was a big part of my responsibility,” Brown said.

“So in the expanded scope of what the business now was, there was an opportunity to play a role as co-founder, that was about the culture, innovation and thinking - having a little bit of distance from the coalface to look further out, and different ways to contribute.

“I’m incredibly energised and excited. We’re going to take our lumps here, and then we’re going to come back stronger and better for the experience.”

Brown’s journey from grafting box-to-box midfielder with the Wellington Phoenix to designing woollen sneakers and forming a sustainable shoe company is a compelling one.

He had studied design at university in the US with his interest in shoes fuelled by the free gear he got as a footballer. Brown found it curious that there had never been an iconic New Zealand footwear brand, considering the athletic heritage from the days of Arthur Lydiard and Peter Snell.

“I was like, oh my gosh, New Zealand has this like incredible provenance of footwear and running and there is permission here to create a brand around this. So it was over many years, just kind of piecing together these fragments of a story.”

But being knee-deep in the Phoenix and trying to get to the World Cup with the All Whites meant this project sat on the back-burner for years.

“It was very, very much a sort of a random thing. I got made fun of a lot in the locker room when I started to tell people about this.”

The joke was that Brown needed to create shoes that could cater for his wide and unwieldy feet.

However, the Phoenix dressing room also became a marketplace for inspiration, ideas and marketing, while he also sold his early prototype woollen sneakers there.

“Always charged. My theory was if I could make shoes and sell them to a locker room that got free footwear, then that was the most competitive environment that you could ever imagine for footwear commerce.”

Brown found an Indonesian factory online, visited during the A-League off-season and started making shoes. His founding perspective was essentially that shoes were over-designed and there was an opportunity for un-logoed, simple footwear, with alternative materials.

At the same time Brown was influenced by a magazine article he’d read about the decline of the wool industry.

“No one for multiple generations has grown up in New Zealand wanting to be a sheep farmer. And yet we had this miraculous fibre which was such a core part of our history.

“In really simple terms, the question was: could you make a shoe out of wool? That was really the starting point of everything. It was just history, ideas and just a willingness maybe to give it a crack.”

Former All Whites captain and Allbirds co-founder Tim Brown. Photo / Michael Craig

A master of marketing

It was also during this era that Brown first displayed his chops in marketing and promotion as the All Whites qualified for the 2010 Fifa World Cup.

It all came down to the home leg of a two-legged playoff against Bahrain and what quickly evolved as the inspired “One Shot For Glory” campaign.

In contemplating the biggest game of their lives, Brown and his fellow senior players were worried that the national body might not have the resources and wherewithal to make the best of the occasion.

“Without being too negative, there was a fairly decent track record of dysfunction at New Zealand Football in terms of realising these moments and making sure that... everything was co-ordinated.”

His fear was that while it might be one of the biggest games in New Zealand sport, it would be dutifully played under contractual arrangement on a Tuesday night at Albany with nobody knowing - at a time when Wellington was the real home of football and full of energy and buzz.

So Brown and a few other senior players proactively addressed this concern.

“At the time, we had this player’s union - the small mighty players union that had a little bit of money - and we sort of thought, let’s take some of that, and put it towards promoting this game.

“And we took that [decision] as a playing group, which I think is almost unprecedented - a group of players marketing their own game with their own funds... We’ve got New Zealand Football down and said, ‘Hey, we’ve just got to do this’.”

Brown described the outcome as “this joyful thing that just sort of happened out of nowhere”. But this was also the most Kiwi thing ever: the All Whites’ starting central midfielder organising a marketing campaign to make World Cup qualification happen.

“All of a sudden, we’re kind of in the business of building a concept around this game, and... the title became One Shot For Glory. It was the start of a really, really special period and one game of football that really changed my life.”

For Brown, it was also his first major experience of bringing an idea to life and was something that would serve him well in business activities to follow, while New Zealand’s win over Bahrain became a seminal moment in the country’s football history.

It was also personally important.

“Allbirds and all the things that went on would not have happened if we hadn’t won that game,” Brown reckoned.

He retired relatively early from his professional football career with the Phoenix. At 31, he looked to still have three seasons in the tank, but put it this way: “I didn’t want to be the last guy at the party”.

Tim Brown pictured at Northburn Station. Photo / Vaughan Brookfield

Chapter Two

Instead, Brown leveraged his experiences to be accepted into the London School of Economics and what he called “Chapter Two” of his life, living in a single-bed dormitory in London.

“It was just exhilarating. Sometimes you just have to go a little bit backwards to go forward.”

He then did an exchange from London to the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University in Illinois. Here Kellog’s “New Venture” branch of the Entrepreneurship Pathway guided students through the process of building and launching start-ups under larger-than-life Professor of Entrepreneurship, Carter Cast.

It started with all 60 in the class getting three minutes to pitch a business idea.

“Then over a series of rounds of voting, it gets whittled down to 10 teams of six with the 10 best ideas. So I get up in pitch wool shoes in a squeaky nervous voice and somehow get selected.

“All of a sudden, I have a team and I run through 10 weeks of this class with Carter, and it just changed my life.

“And it was like our thinking about this not as a product or a concept, but actually as a business which I’d never done before. And I’m getting all sorts of questions about supply chain and margin.”

But Cast remained unimpressed.

“At the end of that 10 weeks, Carter called me into his office and he goes, ‘I’ve been teaching this class for a long time, seen a lot of different ideas. And this is by far and away the worst one.

‘You don’t know shoes, you barely know business. Wool has never been used in footwear, and God it would be great if you at least grew up on a sheep farm, but that’s not even the truth either.

‘But for whatever reason, you seem really determined and are trying harder than anyone else in this class, so I suggest you go home and put this on Kickstarter or something so it can fail.

‘And then you can get on with your life because otherwise I fear you’re going to be one of those guys that just sort of wallows in this for a long time and makes yourself miserable and unhappy.’

“And I walked out the meeting going, ‘He likes me’.”

Undeterred, back in Wellington Brown shot a $400 video with the six prototypes of merino wool shoes that he had at the time and put it on Kickstarter, a US corporation that maintains a global crowdfunding platform focused on creativity.

Brown had enough wool from a research grant to make 1000 pairs of shoes, and they sold out in four days, with $120,000 of sales.

Then it was back to London, with Brown spending his life savings on a tiny apartment for the wool shoes and working with a tiny factory in Portugal.

From factory supply chain, customer service, design and sales - all things Brown had never done before - he ended up doing it all by himself.

Then came a good-looking offer from a New York investment firm that was interested in buying in.

But at this point it was Zwillinger, a San Francisco biotech engineer whose wife had been roommates with Brown’s soon-to-be wife, who talked him out of cashing in.

“He said, ‘Hey, don’t leave this now. This is a big idea. And while you’re making more shoes, there’s something else going on here. The world’s about to change, we’re going to need to remake all the products and services that we use every day and nature’s making a comeback.’

“I had a vision for the product, like the design and the creative piece of it, he [Zwillinger] had a vision for the purpose.”

They partnered up and Zwillinger hit the pavement in New York with a sack of shoes and made it happen.

In 2016, Time magazine called Allbirds shoes the most comfortable in the world and they took off, selling a million pairs in the first 14 months.

There were many unplanned random bonuses as Allbirds took shape, including Hollywood star Leonardo DiCaprio getting involved, through his brother-in-law having worked on a solar panel business with Zwillinger.

”And next thing I know, Joey and I are kind of meeting with him. And he just is so into what we’re doing and became a partner in that time, which was amazing.

”And it just felt like there was so many of those moments that you could never have planned for that. That all of a sudden, it just started to build momentum.”

Former US president Barrack Obama also entered the frame.

”I remember Mum calling me and Jacinda Ardern had met the Australian Prime Minister for the first time and gifted him a pair of Allbirds and stuff like that just started to happen.

”You just pinch yourself. And there was an opportunity to speak as part of the Obama Foundation. So I went to Kuala Lumpur for one of his leadership conferences, spoke to him and Michelle, were there, got the opportunity to meet him, my Dad came over, and it was just like, wow, this is too good. So there’s just some really, really special special moments that kind of came about, after a lot of a lot of hard work.”

In 2020, GQ magazine even ran a feature on Obama wearing Allbirds shoes.

“I can’t tell you how many people that we sat in rooms with who knew about shoes and knew about brands, and they said you can’t launch with one shoe. You can’t do it this way. It’s not going to work.

“But we had the courage to kind of shut it all out.”