Allbirds' first non-shoe product: socks made of plants, wool and recycled bottles

Direct-to-consumer sustainable footwear brand from New Zealand founders, valued around US$1 billion.

That the wool-sustainability formula behind one shoe could extend into other materials-first products, starting with socks of plants, merino wool and recycled bottles.

Started via a Kickstarter campaign; a further US$50 million raised in 2018.

New Zealand professional footballer Tim Brown saw an opportunity in wool, 'this miracle fibre that had been either overlooked' — or, he jokes, 'just a really bad idea'. A Kickstarter launch and a shaky start later, biotech engineer Joey Zwillinger joined and the pair launched in San Francisco.

The company sold just one type of shoe in its first year and took 'more than six years of wrong turns and failures' to build. Socks were the logical second product: around half of Allbirds customers wore their shoes with socks. 'It turns out making socks is enormously complicated if you let it be so,' said Zwillinger, who framed the launch as the first of many materials-driven products, from eucalyptus-fibre tree shoes to sugar-foam soles.

The second product extended the founding thesis — better materials — rather than slapping the brand on a commodity.

Existing customer behaviour (half wearing socks) de-risked the choice of category.

The DTC and social-media playbook that built the shoe brand transferred to the launch at no extra acquisition model.

Category expansion is a materials story, not a logo story: socks were the defensible second product because half the customer base already wore them with the first.

As of 14 August 2019, the socks had just launched as the first of a planned family of products; the company had raised a further US$50 million the year before and sold over a million pairs of shoes.