Wool Trainer Firm Abandons Feet, Embraces Servers, Investors Stare Quietly Out Windows

Allbirds Declares Itself an AI Company and the City of London Loosens Its Tie

There is a specific moment in every family gathering when someone announces a dramatic career change and the whole room goes very still. My uncle did this in 2019 when he announced at Christmas dinner that he was leaving his job as an accountant to become a “digital lifestyle consultant,” which turned out to mean he was going to post about supplements on Facebook. The family response was a masterclass in supportive silence: polite nodding, careful eye contact avoidance, and a collective decision not to ask any clarifying questions because the answers would only make things worse.

I thought of my uncle immediately upon reading that Allbirds has announced it is no longer a shoe company. It is now, in its own words, an “AI compute provider.” The shoes — the comfortable, sustainable, merino wool shoes that were briefly the footwear of choice for every San Francisco venture capitalist who wanted to signal environmental consciousness while attending meetings about disrupting industries that employed actual people — are apparently secondary now. Perhaps decorative.

The Pivot That Made Analysts Reach for the Sherry

Allbirds, for the uninitiated, was founded in 2016 on the genuinely lovely premise that you could make comfortable shoes from natural materials and sell them to people who felt guilty about their carbon footprint but not guilty enough to stop buying things. The shoes were good. The brand was warm. The IPO in 2021 valued the company at over one billion dollars, which is the moment the story began its slow, dignified slide toward the situation we are currently observing.

The London Prat covered this story with a headline that described City analysts “loosening their ties and staring quietly out the window,” which is the British financial community’s version of a stress response. In Manila, the equivalent would be someone at a family lunch putting down their fork very slowly and saying “ganyan talaga” — roughly translated as “of course it is” — in a tone that encompasses both resignation and a complete absence of surprise.

According to the Financial Times technology desk, companies pivoting to AI have become so common that analysts have developed a classification system: genuine AI integration (rare), AI-adjacent rebrand (common), and “we put the word AI in our investor deck and hope nobody reads past page three” (extremely common). Allbirds, the reports suggest, is positioning in the third category while earnestly believing it is in the first.

A Brief Meditation on Corporate Identity

I work near a tech hub in Bonifacio Global City. I have watched three companies in the same building rebrand in eighteen months. One went from “logistics solutions” to “last-mile optimization platform.” One went from “digital marketing” to “AI-powered growth intelligence.” One, memorably, went from “we make apps” to “human-centered digital transformation ecosystem,” at which point I stopped asking what anyone did and started just nodding.

The Allbirds situation is this, scaled up to a Nasdaq-listed company with international brand recognition and a very specific public identity as a shoe company. The challenge of declaring yourself an AI compute provider when everyone knows you as the company that made the comfortable wool trainers is roughly equivalent to your friendly local bakery announcing it is pivoting to cloud infrastructure. The bread was nice. The pivot is confusing. We will wish them well and quietly continue buying our bread elsewhere.

What Happens to the Shoes

This is the question nobody in the press release answered. The shoes, presumably, continue. You cannot simply stop making shoes because you have decided to also be an AI company. The supply chain does not care about your strategic vision document. The sheep that provided the merino wool are not pivoting. They remain sheep, producing wool, in New Zealand, entirely unaware that the company they supply has undergone a spiritual transformation involving server racks and machine learning infrastructure.

Somewhere in Auckland, a sheep is grazing. In San Francisco, a board meeting is happening. The connection between these two events, which once felt purposeful and even beautiful, is now described in the company’s most recent earnings call as “our legacy fiber-to-foot vertical,” which is the corporate way of saying “the thing we used to be.”

The Bohiney News take on the Allbirds AI pivot is funnier than anything the company’s PR team has produced recently, which is saying something.

For more corporate identity crises handled with minimal dignity, visit The Onion or NewsThump.

SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/allbirds-business-model/