How I Built This with Guy Raz - Allbirds: Tim Brown & Joey Zwillinger

Episode Date: June 10, 2019

Growing up, Tim Brown discovered he was very good at two things: design and soccer. While playing professional soccer in New Zealand, he was turned off by the flashy logos on most athletic gear. He started making simple canvas shoes for his teammates, but soon discovered a better material: soft merino wool from his country's plentiful sheep. Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, his future business partner Joey Zwillinger was frustrated that most companies lacked a genuine commitment to sustainability. In 2015, Tim and Joey teamed up to create Allbirds, a company with two ambitious goals: create the world's most comfortable shoes, and do it in a way that was completely carbon-neutral. Today, just three years after launch, Allbirds is worth $1.4 billion. PLUS, for our postscript "How You Built That," how Kirby Erdely saw a problem with flying beach umbrellas and developed a new kind of tent stake—with a twist. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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made it feel less like a visit and more like we were actually living there. Plus, taking a trip is the perfect time to host your space on Airbnb. Your place with all of its personal touches and its amazing location could make someone else's vacation even better. Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at Airbnb.ca.ca. So I want to tell you that we're coming to the Twin Cities for a live event on Wednesday, July 17th. I'll be talking with Dan and Angie Bastian, co-founders of Angie's boom chickapop. How a history teacher and a psychiatric nurse started making popcorn and eventually got it into stores from coast to coast. The show is supported by American Express and our other live events have sold out fast, so to get tickets, go to nprpresents.org and hope to see you there.

And one more thing before we start the show, I want to tell you about a brand new discount for the How I Built This Summit, which is happening this October in San Francisco. We have a new deal for group tickets through June. Buy four summit tickets, get the fifth absolutely free. So bring your co-founders, your leaders, your innovators, and your dreamers, and grow together at the How I Built This Summit, supported by American Express. To take advantage of group discounts, email HIBT Summit at npr.org, and I hope to see you in San Francisco. I would find myself at dinners with friends who are kind of early 30s now at the stage of their career where things are starting to take off. and we'd go out for dinner and go around the table and I would dread when it would come to me

and people would ask what I was doing. My body would curl up into a little ball and I would sort of say wool shoes. And when we'd leave the dinner, people would pat me on the head and say, that's lovely that you're pursuing this little thing and good luck with that little fella and it was just, it was awful. From NPR, it's how I built this,

a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists and the stories behind the movements they built. I'm Guy Raz, and on today's show how an environmentalist and a professional soccer player from New Zealand teamed up to create what's been called the world's most comfortable shoe, all birds. So for every human being in New Zealand, there are six sheep. Let that sink in, a six-to-one sheep-to-human ratio.

And that's down from a peak in 1982 when there were 22 sheep for every human in New Zealand. Now, as you probably know, New Zealand's population is pretty small, a little under 5 million people. But the country produces more than 10% of all the wool we use. And what New Zealand is particularly good at is producing a type of wool that is considered to be among the best. It's called marino wool, and it comes, as you might have guessed, from a marino sheep. It's softer, lighter, and less scratchy than the type of wool you might find in, say, a thick Christmas sweater. Now, for years, Tim Brown was aware of his country's prized export, but it would take him more than a decade to realize that it was the perfect material to build light, comfortable, and breathable shoes. The kind of shoes you could slip on for a run or just wear around the house.

In 2015, Tim partnered up with Joey's Willinger to figure out if they could actually find a market for these shoes. They raised about a million dollars from investors to launch Allbirds in March of 2016, and almost instantly, Allbirds were dubbed the world's most comfortable shoe by Time magazine. Today, just three years on, their shoe company is valued at $1.4 billion. But what's also incredible is how unlikely it is that they even met in the first place. Joey grew up in Marin County in California. Tim, of course, grew up on the other side of the world. And even before he seriously got into shoes, he was playing soccer professionally. He even competed at the World Cup.

Tim was raised in Wellington, New Zealand in the 1980s and 90s. His mom was a nurse, his dad worked in nonprofits. And from a pretty early age, he found himself being drawn into the world of soccer, first as a fan and then as a player. You know, it's a really popular sport in a nation that loves its rugby. So the joke always was as this went on to become more a part of my life that certainly some of my mum's family were disappointed that it was soccer and not rugby.

But it was something that I loved to do and kept doing it. And even when I look back, you know, by the time I was 16 and 17, that was my identity. And that was what my friends were doing. And I was starting to get a sniff, you know, of something that I could do well. And something where I could carve out, you know, if not a career, certainly a pathway.

It was, gosh, if I could make the New Zealand under 20 team, you know, I could die happy. Yeah, I mean, you must have been a super talented soccer player because you've got a scholarship to come to the U.S. to go, I guess, to the University of Cincinnati to play soccer. How did you end up there? I ended up getting about six scholarship offers. And then I found in Cincinnati a design school, which was the subject that it was starting to really connect with me. And so Cincinnati was where I headed. And it was, it was probably, I feel like, the first adult decision, big decision I'd made when my, when mom and dad were like, we'll make it work.

And I remember as part of the application, they'd put their mortgage, you know, put their house as part of the credit that sort of said, you know, he's good for this. You want to do it? Go, we'll back you 100%. And so off I was on a plane to Cincinnati as an 18-year-old. Okay, so you end up in Cincinnati on the soccer team. and what was school like? Was it intense? Because you're doing soccer for 40 hours a week and school. Yeah, the design program was difficult. It was a five-year program. They wanted to break you down

and build you up over five years, literally in the first foundation year, cutting paper and not using a computer, and literally going through a very, very traditional sort of design education. And it was, It was difficult because the whole athletic department kind of had their trainings in the afternoon. And I had a studio every, just about every day from 9 to 12 and then from 2 to 5. And I can still remember sprinting across campus, changing. And I'd structured some agreement with a coach that I could kind of be a little bit, I could miss the warm up or something and then I could do the studio and I somehow made it work. But it was intense from the beginning.

When I looked back on it, there was a fair amount of pressure. but I'd found something that I was in love with. What was it about art and design that connected with you? It was the solving of problems. I'd found a place that was like a catch-all for my curiosity and was a process that I, it took me a little while, but with the help of a couple of these professors, I realized this was, the design was actually not about the output.

It was a process of problem-solving. And if you applied it, you could apply it to all sorts of different things. All right, let's pause there for a sec. And I'm going to turn to Joey for a little bit. Yep. So Joey, you grew up in the Bay Area. Yeah. And when you, I mean, you know, you grew up here and then you end up at Berkeley, which is a great school.

But was that your sort of idea? You wanted to stay in this area. You wanted to... Yeah. I wanted to go to a great place that challenged me. I wanted to do engineering. And I also wanted to try and play soccer. And so those are the two guiding factors that.

ended up leading me by deduction to get to Berkeley. Were you a good soccer player? I was all right. Yeah. I played at Berkeley as well until I got injured. Wow. So you were also a great soccer player as a kid. Well, yeah, to my, go in the alley and challenge anyone that will take us in our customers.

I got you. Okay. All right. So you were, you finished Berkeley and you, what do you want to do with your life at that point? I mean, you know, 22, 23, whatever, most people don't really know. Were you thinking maybe I'll go to law school? Maybe I'll do something like that. Or did you have a sense of what you want to do?

You know, I really didn't. And then at some point I just, I latched on to this concept of business consulting, which I think was marketed to me as if you don't know what you're doing, this is a great way to get a taste for a lot of things. So I was like, okay, cool, that sounds good because I definitely don't know what I'm doing. And so I just went to a couple of those little info sessions that they have on campus and thought this company, Deloitte, sounded amazing. I ended up jumping into there and did their consulting group. You know, a lot of people that we've had on how I built this did consulting work.

They saw, you know, they had experienced sort of consulting with different industries. And that's sort of how they got their ideas. What was some of the consulting work you were doing? Probably my most transformative one was I worked for a client was a garbage, a garbage company. I was the second largest garbage company in the country. And I was, I looked at fuel, I was looking at something esoteric like fuel surcharges. Yeah. And I was negotiating all these trucking fleet contracts.

I was literally doing deals in landfills. I would go to a landfill and it would, you know, you'd walk in and the guy who was running the landfill would be like, yep, smells like money. because it would smell really bad, but that was what they thought was business success. And it was really eye-opening. It was very scrappy. And it was something I actually really loved it. And I ended up leaving consulting because that really early taste of entrepreneurial business just got me.

And being in the Bay Area, you almost can't help it. Sure. And this was in, I guess, 2005. and I latched onto this concept of environmentalism through business and using business for good and doing it for the environment. And so I decided that business school would be a good opportunity to kind of refine my interests and help really focus on getting into that sector.

So I guess you go to Penn to the Wharton School. Would you, I mean, was business school, like did you love business school? Was business school like a sandbox where you thought, you know, I'm just going to come up with some ideas and then get out of here and create it? Yes, actually. I was searching with all the engineering schools at Penn to find a clean tech oriented company that I could help take the technology out of the university and start the business. And then I also got to just come out to the West Coast where most of the clean tech style of business was happening right now, right then.

It was solar, wind, biofuels, biochemicals, and that was a big shaping experience too. All right, so you are, you graduate with an MBA, and you went and got a job with like an environmental technology company, back in the Bay Area, right? Yeah, the company was called Solazim, and Solazim was doing something really unique in the biofuel space. They were using microalgae, and doing it in a totally different way. They were growing this microalgae.

and huge fermentation vessels. And I was completely captivated by the technology. The vision was to basically be the next source of liquid fuel and chemicals for the entire world. You could make oil sort of a biofuel from algae. Yeah. You could turn it into fuel. And it was potentially incredibly high impact for the world if we could get the technology right and get the cost down to a place that was meaningful.

What was the response to your idea? The response for the company was incredible. I mean, we were, I joined in 2009, and we ended up going public in 2011. We raised over a billion dollars of money for the business. Wow. And it was, it was, it had a legitimate shot of doing something special. And, you know, towards the end of my time there, I think I learned a huge amount about what not to do. And it ended up, I think, unequivocally being a pretty big failure.

What was a failure? The entire business. It went bankrupt and then has been acquired since for some of the remnants of the technology. So the investors lost their money on that, essentially. A lot of money. And you and the other people who made a commitment to that company probably lost out as well, right? Because you probably got some equity and then... Sure.

Yeah. I mean, we had dreams of fortunes, I suppose. But yeah, what I took away from that experience was incredibly rich. And towards the end of that, I started looking around a ton of different opportunities because I had refined what I wanted to do. And I saw what I thought was a path to make a different kind of a company where the output of that business was really high impact. Okay, Joey, let's just pause for a second.

I want to turn back to you, Tim, because you eventually would graduate from the University of Cincinnati. and then you went to, I guess, to Virginia to play soccer professionally, semi-professionally for a while. But then you eventually go back and play professional soccer in New Zealand, right? Yeah. And I found myself signed on a multi-year deal to play professional sport in my hometown. And I was now a part of a New Zealand team that had set its target of qualifying for the World Cup in 2010. And I was kind of on my way. Wow. And I wasn't the quickest and I wasn't the most technical.

but I'd found a way where I could carve out a career that involved me doing a couple of things really, really well. What were they? Being fit and running around a lot, kicking people and tackling people and getting the ball off the opponents and giving it to the good players on our team. You were a defender.

I was a midfielder, but I had a kind of a sort of a defensive responsibility that was about tackling and about aggression and about running around and getting the ball. And then it was about scoring goals. Well, you're getting lots of. penalties called against you? Yeah. Were you getting kicked out of games?

Yeah. Because you don't strike me as an aggressive kind of guy. The competitiveness was something that burned in me. Whatever it took to win, that's, you know, that was within me. And it took a little while to realize that. But it was there. And I just was competitive. So you were, I mean, this is in your sort of 20s and into

or 30s, like, how did you think about structuring your life? Did you think, okay, I'll play soccer and then I'll get into like soccer management or something like that? You know, I hadn't thought about that. I was probably starting, I was singularly focused on this, on this sporting career. And, you know, I was being paid a good living, better than my friends that had gone to university and were getting consulting jobs. And it became a job for the first time.

Wow. And I got a taste of playing for my country and what that meant. You know, we had a small group of players. that realized that we had a potential shot at a World Cup. And that was the special source that drove me to kind of get through the humdrum, you know, routine and professional sport and keep driving and keep improving and keep working because there was this larger prize there in this larger sense of purpose. And the prize was getting to the World Cup in South Africa in 2010.

Yeah, for my country. But this was also the period in your life, I guess, when you sort of started to come up with the idea for what would become Albert's. One of the other cool things that happened is I got a sponsorship deal from one of the big sportswear companies that shall not be named. And that felt like a moment. And I could go into the shop and get what I wanted. Really? But I was wearing logos all the time.

And I was a minimalist. And I remember still, my dad probably got this from my dad, but like picking logos off clothes. And so the idea that there was logos over everything that I was wearing, it was just like this weird thing. completely the antithesis of everything I stood for from a design point of view that had been ingrained to me at the University of Cincinnati. And I guess the other thing that was happening is I just had it, I had my afternoons free. I was training in the morning and I was incredibly focused on sport, but I had a lot of free time. And so I started to get curious about this particular problem, particularly in footwear. The problem of? The problem of something simple. It was

is impossible to find. And in New Zealand, it was sort of... Just like a nice slip-on or something. Like a lace-up sneaker. Right. It either had logos on it or you bought a Chuck Taylor. Right. And there wasn't too much. And Chuck Taylor's, they're great, but they're not super comfy. Yeah, it was. It was one of those ones. I just saw a problem that was my own. I didn't write a business plan. Yeah. And so in the off season of one of my soccer seasons, I want to say it was the 2008, 2009. You know, you get a month off at the end of the year where you kind of go off and you rest.

Yeah. And I found a footwear factory online, and I went and visited one. Where was it? It was in Indonesia. So you were serious? You were like, no, I'm going to go build this. You're like, I'm going to build a comfortable shoe. It wasn't about comfort at that time.

It was a design observation about a category that I thought was super complicated and overcrowded and over-loged. And you just said, I want to make a shoe that's sort of a high top, like a Chuck Taylor without logos? Yeah, I'm going to go do it. It was that simple. And I tried to do it in New Zealand and realized that that industry had long since disappeared from music. Nobody was manufacturing. It was all in Asia. It was all in China. And so I said, well, let's go, let's go see if we can do this. And I had greatly underestimated it as I'm sure Joey would attest how complicated it is actually to make a shoe. By the way, did you know how to sew? I mean, you probably learned that. You didn't learn that in design school? No. But you make patterns. You cut them out. Like you didn't have a sense of. how to. We had like 2D drawings that we made of just this form and I had photos of other examples of shoes that I thought were kind of close but that was it. And I thought you know, you could go make this and I think if you could make it you could sell it and there's potentially a business

here. And I had started to get really, really interested in this idea of entrepreneurialism and building a business and of making things. This is why you're still a soccer player? I'm still a soccer player, and I'm kind of 80% folks, I mean, on the World Cup. Yeah, I bet. That was everything. It was training. It was diet. There was not room for much else, but this was my mental escape.

This was in 2009. You would not actually really start to make a shoe for like five more years later, which we'll get to. Not really. I made shoes straight away. You made shoes straight away? And I sold them to my teammates. Okay. So you made them at this factory?

I made them at this factory, and they showed up. How many did you order? I think it was a thousand pairs the first time. You ordered a thousand pairs of these shoes, so you actually put all your cash into this thing. I put some cash into it, and my brother was helping me with some of the selling. What were they made out of?

Canvas and some leather, you know, some New Zealand leather that I was shipping over, which was another eye-opening experience where I walked into a tannery for the first time and started to understand how bad that material is. Right, all the chemicals that go into making leather, leather, right? And just understand just generally, just, you know, where these materials were coming from, and I remember the samples would come, and you'd open the box, and it would smell like just, oh. And I think that opened up the idea of exploring different materials. What were your shoes called? At that particular time, I think the name was, well, my

initials, it was like 2B. And the idea was a no logo shoe that was comfortable, made out of canvas. Yeah, there was a couple of different styles. It was a high top and a low top, and I sold them to my teammates. For like 40 bucks? No, I made them pay full. price. How much was that? I think it was a hundred and 150 bucks. And so you sold them, but you couldn't have sold a thousand pairs. We did a, we did a pop-up shop in Wellington. And, you know, I think it was the beginning of, of an interest in this category. Because I, I realized, too, in the process of selling, of selling the shoes, the design story was, was one part of it. I think it resonated with people. But it needed something more, both for me and

for the product. The product was okay, but it wasn't, it wasn't differentiated. Yeah. And, you, I think I remember I was reading a magazine one day about the wool industry in New Zealand, and we'd actually, we'd put some wool felt, experimented on some wool felt on the outside of some of the sneakers. And I was like, gosh, wouldn't it, why is wool not used in shoes? And what if we could do that? That would be hugely interesting. And so I, you know, with the help of, you know, some friends at the time put together a grant on a whim to develop a, a, a woolen textile

for making the upper of a shoe out of. You applied to the New Zealand government. It was like a wool funding board and it was To research how you could turn wool into shoes? To actually make that textile because it didn't exist and I think the backdrop and the context around

this was that New Zealand's probably famous for having lots of sheep and it's a hugely important legacy industry in New Zealand that has gone through a really really tough time and I think they were they were searching for new ideas and new categories and it was kind of right time, right place

with a random maybe obvious idea that hadn't been done before and we got lucky and so probably around the World Cup a little bit before this grant, this research lab in Christchurch, set about trying to make a fabric for us. So wait, all of this is happening at the same time that your team is

finally qualifying for the World Cup? Yes, so it was the second time New Zealand ever qualified for the World Cup. So the first time in 1982 and the second time in 2010. So that was a big deal. Did you guys get past the first round? We were undefeated. We were the only undefeated team at the World Cup.

Because? We drew three games and didn't get out of our pool. And Spain won the World Cup. But that was an enormous achievement. And this was a New Zealand team that, I mean, was ranked. I think we were the smallest nation at the World Cup. We were the lowest ranked. And we went in there.

And, I mean, even to qualify was enormous. Wow. So, okay, I want to bring, Joe, I want to bring you back into the conversation. Yeah. Because while Tim was playing in the World Cup, what were you up to? Yeah, you know, that was actually just about the time when we met. How did you meet? Well, Tim, Tim had started dating a lady named Lindsay, who he is subsequently married. American.

She's from New York. How did you meet Lindsay? We'd met each other at a wedding. I'd come back to visit one of my old teammates from Cincinnati and go. to their wedding and stopped by to see some friends in New York and sat next to Lindsay at a dinner. And Lindsay, Joey, Lindsay knew. I need Lindsay because back in maybe 2000, early part of that decade, Lindsay and Liz, my wife, were roommates and dormates in college at Dartmouth.

Oh, wow. Yeah. And so they'd been super close friends for well over decades. So I got to meet Lindsay And when Lindsay came around and introduced us to Tim I thought he was a pretty good bloke So you guys had met But you were doing your own thing

He was playing soccer And you just thought it was a nice guy Tim you retire from football From soccer in 2012 I go to the World Cup And I have this great experience And I realized like that's the end of this This is the moment where I depart

Seen left and I I tore up a two-year contract, and at this time, the idea of going back to school and studying all the subjects that I'd avoided was interesting, and I'd always wanted to go back to London where I was born and where my father was from, and so the idea of being able to go back there and study was both a way out of sport in some ways, and the best of ways, and the opportunity to kind of step back and start this next chapter. So you decide to do a degree at London's School of Economics with this idea for a shoe in your mind? Yeah. And I had a little bit of shoe-making

knowledge. So, you know, I made a couple of shoes, literally a couple of shoes. And I showed up and did the first couple of semesters at LSC and then went off to Kellogg at Northwestern. And you were able to take the pick of classes that you wanted through the quarter that you were there, the period that you were there. So I show up at Evanston and I walk into an entrepreneurship class with a professor called Carter Cast who is a former CEO of Walmart.com and this pretty special professor there and he'd sent an email out

and he said everyone has to come in and that you've got three minutes to pitch an idea to the class and we will form teams around the best ten ideas and for the whole quarter you will go after this business idea and I came in and I pitched the idea of woolshoes and I think people thought it was a little bit of a joke

but for whatever reason it got selected. And I found myself immersed for three months in... On this idea? On this idea. Wow. And truly, you know, actually building this into a business. So this idea of wool shoes, which you'd really been toying with since 2009, now around 2012, 2013, it's starting to get some traction.

Yeah. But I wonder, I mean, we're, like, was anyone saying like, How do you turn scratchy wool into shoes? Everyone said that. But there was something about the idea that people sort of said, oh, yeah, why's that not been dumb? But how did you describe it to people? Because I'm saying to you, Tim, I don't get it.

Like, here's my wool sweater. How do I translate that into shoes? How would you describe it? Well, first of all, I realized that wool to Americans meant hot and scratchy. Yeah. So all of a sudden you actually had to talk about Marino. Okay. It's a different sheep.

It's a different sheep. And it's a finer material and it's softer. And then you also had to talk about not just the material. You actually had to talk about the benefits of the material. So why? If you're going to do this, there must be a reason. And the reason is because wool has these miraculous properties. And then people are, okay, that's interesting.

And then as much as people kind of laughed at the idea and this has been a consistent thread, I think on some level they sort of said that's interesting. and but I got to the end of that course and you know I flew back to to London after my time at Kellogg and decided I was going to launch wool shoes on Kickstarter. Okay but so to do something on Kickstarter, which you did in 2014, but to do something on Kickstarter, you need to have the prototype, you need to have a lot of things. Had you, what was it, what was it called? Was it called Albirds?

No, it was at this stage I'd renamed it again. It took another crack at naming and it was called 3 over 7 and it was going to be very, very, very simple design, the original, and it was going to be made out of wall with this new material. All right. So, but to get a Kickstarter, you still have to promise people that you're going to deliver them these shoes. I found another factory on Google.

Where was it? In Portugal this time. And I'd flown over, and it was a tiny factory. And I'd made, I think, I think it was eight pairs of samples. And I went home to New Zealand for Christmas. And I shot it. I needed to shoot a video. And I'd organized with my dad's friend.

who owned a sheep farm, not just outside of Wellington. Yeah. We have one day to do this. Okay. And my dad's friend, I remember showing up on the morning of, he went and got a bunch of sheep so they could be in the backdrop of this video. And I very nearly pulled out. I was writing this script and I just, it was one of those moments where you think this is dumb,

this is not going to work. And my brother literally dragged me along to the farm and said, just do it. What's the worst that can happen? and so we went ahead with it and shot a video and ultimately launched the Kickstarter. It went live on March of 2014. So you make the video and you say,

hey, I'm Tim and I want to tell you a little bit about marino wool and the shoes that I'm going to create. And I chase some sheep around and it's a little, it's kind of a little flood of the Concordes-esque maybe. I don't know, a little weird and funny, but tried to really hone in on sort of why this is different and why it matters. and click live on it.

And I was back in London, and I remember my phone just started going crazy. When you put it on Kickstarter? I put it on Kickstarter. I got picked up by some New Zealand media. Okay. And then it went on the Kickstarter's homepage and on their mailing list where they send out sort of interesting projects. And it went to $120,000 in four days and I had to stop it because I didn't have enough. That was the...

Yeah. And I had to stop this thing. And I was like, oh, my gosh, I can't believe this is... Because you didn't have enough. a fool. And Linz had sent this out to all her friends and, you know, hey, you know, my boyfriend's doing this project and maybe you could support him. And Joe was one of the earliest customers. And what was your, what would you have to pay? Like 100, hundred, hundred dollars or $120? Something like that. $120 is going to get you a pair of

these shoes. Yeah, first wool runners ever created. First wool runners ever created. All right. So you do the Kickstarter. You're one of the contributors. Joey, Tim, you raise more money than you need, which sounds like a great thing, but actually it wasn't, it was actually stressful. Oh, I just, it was one of those moments. Sometimes from the outside when you've had the moment of greatest success, that's the moment where you're most unsure or you're most scared, and I remember being scared. I have to go deliver on this now and execute it and this is going to be really, really hard.

When we come back in just a moment, how Tim reached out to Joey for help and how Joey went from being a customer to a partner to helping build Allbirds into a billion-dollar brand. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This from NPR. Hey, welcome back to how I built this from NPR. I'm Guy Raz. So it's 2014, and Tim Brown has launched his idea for a new kind of wool shoe on Kickstarter. And people respond right away. They raise $120,000 in just a few days, which means that Tim now needs to get to work fast to start filling orders. I had a couple of young guys kind of working for me,

and we'd found a little office space in London, and I spent probably the worst year trying to make this thing happen. Why was it the worst year? I mean, every mistake you could imagine. And I remember that the factory, the young guy had gone over to the factory, and he called me up one day, and he goes, we got a problem. The factory's made the men's and woman's shoes

exactly the same size. I go, that's bad. There's like a one and a half. It's quite a big difference. Sure. What are we going to do? We've got no choice. We're going to have to just,

we're just going to have to send these out. Joey, you are a customer of that Kickstarter campaign. Yeah. I was one of the lucky customers who ordered a men's tent and got a women's tent. And it was fine. No. No.

It was not fine. It was a pretty bad thing, too. And when I ping customer service, which was Tim Brown, he just recommended that I take out the insul and make a little more room for myself. Wow. And since he didn't have any more wool, there was no exchanges or anything like that. Can you explain something to me? When you make $120,000 off Kickstarter, which sounds amazing, that's a lot of cash, it probably did not pay for all of the orders you had to fulfill. No, the whole thing was financially was not close.

And so I was tapping into my savings that were rapidly dwindling at the time and living in London. And then right at the end of that, we'd sort of the factory in Portugal decided to go bankrupt right at the end of this shortly after we just delivered it. So the idea that we were going to kind of try and make more and build this business and go forward to the next phase of things. I had to do a mercy dash to Portugal to go rescue the 10 metres of. wall and from the factory. Okay, when you finished fulfilling those orders, were you like, okay, now I've got to create a business or were you like? Well, I mean, I was, or were you like, I'm done with this? I just kind of somewhere in between. And I, that, that year had was, was awful. And it was, I would find myself at dinners with, with, with Linz and her friends who were kind of

early 30s now at the stage of their career where things are starting to take off and, and, uh, we'd go out for dinner and it would go around the table. And I would, I would, I would, I'd, just, I would dread when it would come to me and people would ask what I was doing. And I would, Lins would make fun because my body would curl up into a little ball and I would sort of say wool shoes. And when we'd leave the dinner, people would pat me on the head and say, that's, it's lovely that you're pursuing this little thing. And good luck with that little fella. And it was just, it was, it was awful. And it became clear too that doing this by yourself was really hard. And that I was good at some aspects of it. And there was a bunch of things that I

was not good at. Joey, you, you know, you're doing your, you know, your friend of favor and you want to support them. But I have to imagine that at least initially, you're not thinking, this is what I want to do. I want to leave my job and go do this. Right? Yeah, I mean, if you'd ask me at the time, I would have laughed at you. You would, I mean, you would just thought, I'm just going to support this guy's shoe. No chance. I mean, yeah, not just supporting. I mean, I did think it was, it was really cool. And I mean, looking back at that video, as I once in a while do when we're showing new employees now of Allbirds, you know, a lot of the things that Tim intuitive.

saw and talked about in that video are exactly the same things that we talk about today. And I think, you know, Tim is, Tim is just one of those unbelievable, intuitive marketers that just connects with people and understands what is missing in the market. And that was clear from, I think, day one. So, Tim, I read that after the Kickstarter ended and you fulfilled those orders and you're kind of exhausted and you have this nightmare, nightmarish year. and you're trying to think, what am I going to do with this thing? You were contacted by an investor who said, hey, there's something here.

Would you let me buy into this thing? I found myself on a plane to New York speaking with someone from within the footwear world who had seen the traction and the product. And liked it? Liked it. And I went to New York and spent a lot of time with them, and we went through every aspect of it, and they put a deal in front of me. And that must have been pretty gratifying.

I mean, I have to assume you were getting a little bit nervous about your financial situation. So they're putting a dollar figure in front of you. Must have been quite nice. I was starting to think, what do I do next? And I've been through this really difficult year, and I was like, why am I, what am I doing? We're making wool shoes. Why does this even, why am I doing this? And so there's a lot of those questions kind of going through, through my mind. But we get this investment offer. I knew enough to understand the deal. But it was complicated. It was complicated. And how much time did you have before you had to give them an answer? You know, just a couple weeks.

Yeah, there's things on the table. And Lynn's, she goes, you need to speak with Joey about this. He comes from this world. He's a customer of the project, and he, you know, he'd be an interesting person to sort of put this in front of. And so I did. And everyone had given me their kind of 10 minutes on this. Were most people saying, take it. Everyone was like, oh, it's good and it's bad, and you don't really have anything else.

So do you want to shop this around or what you really want? Can you give me a rough sense of what they're offering you? it was some upfront capital that would convert to equity depending on how the business performed and involved kind of moving to New York and they were going to take a big chunk of it, a large, large chunk of it. Majority. Yeah, a majority of it. So you'd be left with like 20, 15%.

Something like that. And so Joey took a look at this thing for me and he jumps on the phone and he hasn't just looked at this thing. I had really, really good friends, close friends that had looked at it, that kind of looked at it. Yeah. He'd gone through, he'd rid it. Wow. What did you think when you saw it, Joey? I thought, you know, I didn't think that there was any ill intent from the guys who sent the deal, but it was, it was vultuous in the way I read it.

And I thought that it was taking advantage of a great idea and trying to sink their talents into this business. and what Tim would have been left with was not great. So I think I told him at that time, I was like, look, I wouldn't take the deal and I wouldn't run the business this way. But what was his alternative? I said at that time, and look, this is a moment in my life, too, that I'd been at Solzine for six years. Yeah.

And I had a very consistent experience. And, I mean, I kind of look back and laugh a little bit now. Like algae oil kind of sounds like the, like, 2000s version of snake oil salesman. But I was going to big multinationals and chemical companies, big brands. And there was like a couple of these just seminal moments where I would have an idea. I would go talk to the right people you'd want to talk to if you had an amazing new material that happened to be really sustainable for the planet. I pitched it in, had multiple meetings. And everyone at first is like, I'm super.

This is amazing. It's an exciting idea. We love the sustainability mission. And then you'd be like, okay, well, let's do it. this. Yeah. And then it turns to like this really inane sourcing conversation where they're like, just do what we do now and do it cheaper. Like we don't really, we don't really care about the sustainability part is not the words they use, but that's the sentiment that's conveyed. And so I just realized through this super frustrating experience that the brands, big brands, they said they

cared about sustainability, but in reality they were just paying lip service to the idea. So I'm sitting here And Tim comes with this, not just a concept, but like a pretty fleshed out idea with a Kickstarter success. And it really resonated with me from a sustainability perspective. But it was also about an opportunity to sell shoes in a totally different way than the industry had ever done before. Okay. So you see this term sheet. The gears start turning in your head, Joey, where you're thinking, wait a minute, this actually, there's some legs to this thing. And actually, maybe I can talk to Tim about sort of using this shoe idea as a vehicle for a sustainability business. Yeah, and I'd read this book, Cradle to Cradle.

I remember the intro chapter talked about one of the scourges of the earth on pollution and the environment being the shoe industry. Wow. The number of shoes and, I mean, there's 20 billion pairs of shoes that are made every year. And in the U.S. alone, the average American, kid, woman, man, they buy eight pairs per year per person. So it's $2.5 billion, just the U.S. And all these things are sitting in landfills. And so what you put into the chemicals and the materials that used to produce it are, they're incredibly important and no one's thinking about it. And so, yeah, the gears started turning a little bit. And I started thinking more. And, you know, look, timing is everything. And I asked him, my family, I had two really young kids at the time. And Liz and my kids were gone for the weekend. And I asked him if he wanted to fly out from London and just talk about the concept and see if he'd give it another go.

And maybe you guys could work together. We could work together. Yeah. What did you think about that when he said that? I jumped on the plane and I flew out to San Francisco. and Joey and I spent the weekend together and he picked me up at the airport. And it's... This is in 2015.

This is in early 2015. And we spent the weekend together, getting a little bit drunk and talking about our families and getting to know each other and walking in the hills of Marin and really just sort of imagining what it might be like to work together and try to understand if that would be a good idea or not. So did you resolve that weekend to try this out, to make a go of it? By and large, yeah. Yeah.

I landed back in London and I said, Lindsay, I go, I think I want to do this and I've found the person to do it with. Why did you think he was the person to do it with? I think I found a guy that on the surface was very, very different from me, but maybe underneath shared a lot of similarities in terms of attitude and approach. I'd found maybe a kindred spirit in terms of the competitive. which we both shared that I that was attractive and I think I'd found someone that could do all the parts of the business that I shouldn't be doing and and that we potentially could be a great a great partnership. Can I ask you guys, this is important because a lot of people who listen to this show are

their co-founders or two people involved and a big part of this show is lessons learned, right? It's a roadmap. Can you walk me through the I don't know if it was difficult. I don't know if it was uncomfortable or unpleasant. The conversation the two of you had to have when you decided how you were going to structure this company

because you'd been working on this and you have this idea, but you also have this idea, which is to actually take Tim's idea, but to turn it into a totally sustainable carbon-free, carbon-neutral product, which we'll get to. So you're both coming in with big ideas. How do you divide the company up? And we did that, we did that very quickly and very simply over email.

Well, I think, I think the important part that we both understood was that, uh, doing this alone, I mean, Tim had experienced it for a while, that doing it alone is really lonely. And I'd always been of the opinion that if I was going to do a business, I wanted to do it with someone, because I, I knew my shortcomings were, uh, substantial. And then I would much rather have a piece of something big than, a lot of something small. Yeah. And so, you know, and I think he respected what I was going to bring to the table,

particularly in the future of the business. So it wasn't, it ended up being a reasonably, reasonably quick conversation. And I think neither of us have really looked back, at least I certainly haven't looked back and ever regretted that. So you're dividing up 100% of something worth nothing at that point, which is always a challenge because you never know what's going to happen in the future. and then you both decide you are going to both be the CEO. Yeah.

You know, we, look, I was having a lot of the conversations with the financial community. And, you know, you go into like someone's office and they're like, okay, that's awesome, but can I talk to the CEO? Right. And Tim is, you know, first. He's in London. Yeah, he's in London. He's also doing other kinds of conversations that would be. And subsequently, we knew that, like, press, like, press, like,

talking to the media was going to be really important. And if Tim was going to go have a media conversation, they would also want to talk to the CEO. So we're like, yeah, let's just go-C-Eos. And we also, I think we both knew what each other brought, something really special to the table that the other one didn't bring. And so it wasn't just a semantic title. It was really actually the fundamental contribution warranted

that kind of split responsibility. So that summer of 2015, you're pounding the pavement, Joey, trying to raise money. How much money did you think you needed to raise to get this thing off the ground? We, you know, we did our little business plan, which was remarkably inaccurate. But we had decided that we needed a million and a half dollars. Okay. And we felt like that could get us through a huge amount of marketing, branding work in the beginning, and then buy a whole bunch of inventory.

And we wanted to buy a lot of inventory because we had this mentality of if we were going to do this, we were going to fail super fast or succeed really big. And so the idea from the beginning was direct to consumer. You were going to have a big marketing campaign to attract people to the website. And you were going to have the shoes in a warehouse and then you could just ship them out. Yep. Basically it. And we were going to launch simultaneously in the U.S. and New Zealand on just website. And did you have a date in mind?

We did. March 1st, 2016. Wow. And you were working out of your house? Yeah, my mother-in-law's apartment. Okay, in Marin. Yeah. Tim, you're wrapping up in London preparing to move to California. Preparing to get married on June 6, 2015. And then to move to California. And then come to California. And I'm going through a green card, the immigration thing. All that stuff. Just a little while. Okay. So you spend basically a full year raising the money from investors and perfecting the design and doing everything you need to create this comfortable. and sustainable wool shoe. What was your game plan at that point? Like, what do you do at this point?

Well, we had to build the brand. We'd had quite an instrumental conversation with a guy who's previously been on the show called Eric Ryan from... Sure, method. Yeah. Because we'd sat down with them when we said, hey, we want to build a different type of footwear brand

and we believe there's a problem to be solved and we can make shoes that are more comfortable that are better for the environment. and it's our plan, what do you think? And he said to us, fantastic, don't pat yourself on the back, just get on with doing it. People don't buy sustainable products, they buy great products. And the only reason there's an opportunity for you to do this is because the rest of the world is far behind where they need to. But get on with doing it and don't make sustainability a part of your brand.

make the attributes of the product of the sustainable materials the story. So you thought comfort was the way we were going to sell this? Comfort was the problem to be solved, and we were going to solve comfort through sustainable materials that enabled that comfort experience, but were also better for the environment. Yeah. You know, in hindsight, it seems obvious. Comfort is the number one reason why people buy shoes, and comfort often is equated with ugliness.

So if your dad tells you he's got a comfortable pair of shoes, you assume they don't look very good. So the idea of bringing great design and pairing it with that and achieving the comfort through materials that were also better for the environment is really kind of the north star for the business. By the way, how did you get the name? You know, we'd been brainstorming a lot of different names and ultimately landed on the name Allbirds as a sort of this whimsical encapsulation of the type of business

that we wanted to build. And when people first came to New Zealand, there was nothing there but birds. It was all birds. So it was a little nod to the provenance of the story and the idea that we should tread more lightly in the way that we make products. Yeah.

And so we chose that and Joey procured the dot com and we were away. So you launch on March, what? March 1st. March 1st, 2016. You hit the big red button or it's not a big red button, I don't know, but you launch it. The website goes live.

What happened to your inventory? Yeah, we sold through it really fast. And where were you holding that inventory? We had a warehouse in Connecticut at the time. And we sold through within, I think, a week and a half, we started having sizes that were sold out. Wow. And you did all this with Shopify as a back end?

Yeah, yeah. The technology enabled us to do this really lame. Are you still doing Shopify today? We are. Wow. Yeah, I mean, this is the thing. We started, direct-to-consumer as a concept has been around for a while. Sure.

But the technology has developed. And so it allowed us to take advantage of things quite inexpensively from that infrastructure, that stuff. I mean, that's amazing because anyone can use that technology. It's available to anyone. It's affordable, right? Salesforce technology, Shopify, all this stuff is out there. In some ways, the barriers for entry to launching a new business have never been lower. And in others, in other ways, it's never been more competitive.

But certainly, you know, we were able to do that reasonably easily. So you launch and you just start selling out fast. Was that incredibly exciting or did that create new kinds of stress? It was weird, you know? It was like neither of us would have said that we were like really successful at that point. And I think in some ways it was great. Like obviously it's certainly better than not selling any shoes. is so don't get me wrong. I mean, and we had ordered like 15,000 pairs. So that was, it was a lot. And, and, and we started

selling through really fast. And then we, I think we both found ourselves acting strange. Like, this, this, like, it was like letting the air out of a balloon. It was like, you'd had this unbelievably stressful seven, eight months of, of, of, of working for this singular, creative piece of this product. And then you put it out there and just see what happens. And it worked. Ostensis. You know, people 15,000 are close to that bought it. And then we're sitting there like, okay, the stress is gone. Now it was like, I don't know, maybe we like had too much of a swagger. And like I think it was funny.

Like the most successful times on the outside, maybe you look on the inside. And it's actually where we were probably maybe at one of our worst moments as a partnership. Why? I think we just started, you know, we started maybe I was probably getting over my skis and talking about things in design. And maybe Tim was doing some things in the area of the business that I was stronger at that, that, um, that maybe he shouldn't have. And, and we, we were, we were like, hey, this worked, like, step off. Hmm. I remember we had, we had, uh, we had a, a beer. It must been like at the end of March, so like our first 30, 31 days of sales. Um, and we, we'd,

we'd done a million dollars in sales in the first month. I mean, it was, it was crazy. And no way, we didn't, we, I think we, we blew through our first year business plan projection and like, I know, weeks after that, like a really short amount of time. Wow. So we were beyond any doubt that it was, it was working, and we're having this beer. And we're like both eyes watering up and being like, why, why are you, you know, I don't like how this is going. Wow. And it was one of those moments where we then kind of fell back on the promise we'd made probably to our wives about not ruining their relationship and the fact that if we were going to make something successful, it was going to take two of us and we got to work on this. And this is more important than whether we sell out the next color or whatever. Yeah, because from the outside, as you say, you would have thought, oh man, this is because of crushing it, great job. But this is really when the tension begins.

Yeah, it was a dark moment. It's funny. It has, you know, we've, we've, we've had a couple of them through the journey, and they've usually, they've usually linked up from the outside when we've had the most success. When everyone would sort of be high-fiving and popping, you know, we had a moment. And it was, I don't think we'd yet found a kind of a mechanism to kind of get, to get stuff out. I think we'd just been working, you know, side by side, heads down. And, you know, it's the joke about sort of the idea that this.

this is a marriage, there's an intimacy to it that is, you know, that is pretty deep. And I don't think we'd acknowledge that. And we hadn't found ways to sort of like purge the system and reset the machine. And, you know, there was a bunch of stuff that'd been building up over time that kind of came out in a little bit of an avalanche of kind of emotion and tiredness. And, you know, I think it was, we realized that we needed to manage this more effectively that our relationship. would be as important as the strategy. Yeah. As important as many of the things we were doing that and that needed to be worked on like any, like any healthy one. It's also, I mean, there's a directness in our relationship that if we didn't have that, like, you can't just, you can't just talk about superficial business tasks that are going wrong or right.

Like, you know, we're like, dude, this is not good. like this gotta be a different direction for us to work this out with. And just getting to the heart of issue, not letting it calcify. It's, you know, give it no time, nip it in the bud and move on and have super low ego about it. And I think our personalities and our respect for one another is what kind of lends itself to allowing that strategy to work and it might not be for everyone. So was it just a self-generating thing once you launched? My suspicion is it was just off to the races. Like you were getting more attention and you're getting celebrities wearing it and Gail King telling Oprah, you got to try these on and today Barack Obama wears them.

I mean, is that what happened? Did it just continue to kind of snowball on its own? And obviously you did media stuff. Or was there for a moment where just sort of slowed down you thought, okay, I don't know. Yeah, I don't think there's like a single moment, but there was moments. You know, in August, the front page of the New York Times, you get on the front page of the business section. All about how everyone's wearing an Auburz's. The big picture with someone wearing a pair of shoes, and that catalyzes a bunch of attention.

And then, you get a moment like you mentioned, Gail King. It's a lot in the media. And I think we just gave it time, too. You know, we sold one style, the Woolrunner, for 14 months. We didn't do anything else Except for the Woolrunner And I think that It's hard to create any doubt about what you stand for

When you have just one product I think that helped too And just being methodical and intentional about that And not taking advice from people who said Churn it out faster Drop more colors, drop more styles You know? Yeah

You guys have You guys are a B-Corp Which for people don't know That essentially means your committed to certain sustainability practices and the way you sort of treat your employees and compensation, et cetera. This is a big thing. You know, you talk about the materials that are used for the shoes. I know, Joey, you were very influenced by, you know, sustainability. Let's talk about this for a moment. I mean, you're still, you got to get the wool from New Zealand. It's got to

be spun into this material, then made into shoes at a factory that is probably, you know, using electricity and then put on ships and then sent all over the world. Is it possible to make a carbon neutral shoe? Is that possible? With all those things I've just described? Yeah, it is. We're not there yet. And I think when we started this business, we had a really clear idea. We wanted to be, we wanted to be like a tree. We wanted to suck carbon out and spit out oxygen. We want to be that good. And we knew we were, we were, we were quite a ways from that ambition. But the problem of climate change is that businesses pollute and society pays for that.

The companies don't pay for it. And that's the problem. And so we believe that we should pay for it. And so we have committed to be carbon neutral. How do you do that? So we try to minimize the carbon impact across all those dimensions that you said from transportation to the electric grid that the factory is. And we're in Korea because it's a much cleaner grid than other places in the world.

Sure. But we still have emissions in the way that we make the shoe and transport it, ship it to customers for e-commerce. And so we pay for offsets for the remainder of that. I want to try to bridge the gap between the idealism and the practicality, so where the sort of the rubber meets the proverbial road. Yeah. Despite your idealism, despite your commitment to creating this thing that could be carbon neutral.

there are people who are going to want to return on their money. And they don't really care about that even if they say they do. Even if they say they do at the end of the day, they're going to want to return on that. So what happens? How do you protect this thing that you built and keep doing it? I mean, because at some point a big shoe company, Nike or Adidas might say, hey, we want to buy you for $40 billion. And that may happen.

Well, you know, we don't believe that there needs to be the tension between financial success and success for other purpose-driven aspects of our business, namely the environment for us. And I think that's true for a lot of businesses. You know, we have a lot of debates inside the company because there's always a balance. Like if something costs 20 times as much, yet it's way more sustainable, you know, maybe you can't do that. Yeah. Take that choice. But on the margin, you can absolutely do it.

When it's a little more expensive, it's much better for, and it follows our North Star of making a lower carbon footprint shoe or product, we'll do it. And so we just don't, we don't see that tension. And I think that the other aspect is we built this into the charter of the company. So our charter says we have a fiduciary responsibility to our shareholders, and we have an equal responsibility to the environment. And so if Tim or I are no longer in the business and some other person takes over, they still have a responsibility to do what our charter says unless they get two-thirds of our shareholders to vote and say that they don't care about the environment. And so we've kind of embedded this in the fabric of the company. And so people have to know when they sign on for a financing, this is part of the deal. I want to shift.

You mentioned, Tim, that there was a time where you were dipping into your savings. it was stressing you out back in 2014. Do both of you feel like you can breathe a sigh of relief now that you're financially, you're on stable ground because your company is valued at a billion point six, or do you still have stress about financial matters? You know, it's never been about, neither of us really need much money to be happy and live. So it's never really been about like the big valuation of the company or anything. I think we have enough anxiety between us just to push forward that,

regardless of it while we're still in there, we're still cranking and pushing. We pay ourselves more now than we used to pay ourselves when we started the company. So we're certainly in a better situation financially in our little less financial stress. But yeah, the anxiety still is palpable. You're always sitting there thinking of the 10 things

that you could be doing better. And anyone who started a business will know that feeling. oftentimes people are asking, gosh, it must be work long hours. And you're like, well, that's not, that's the wrong question. It's like when you start something, this thing embeds six inches in your brain and you don't shut it off. And it's a voice that's there 24-7 all the time. And you're constantly thinking about it. And, you know, I retired from sport and that had its pressurized moments and getting out in front of lots of people at times and playing sport.

but this is in some ways greater, more sustained pressure, and it's a very, very difficult thing to do. And, you know, we're certainly, we've had some good progress, but we've got a long, long way to go to achieve what we want to. How much do you think this, all that has happened to you is because of luck or because of your skill and hard work? You know, along the way, whether it be meeting Joey or all the different characters along the way

that popped up seemingly at the right time. You can't call that anything other than luck. But there was a lot of different off-ramps along this journey where if you were logical and rational, you would have stopped. And for whatever reason, we've kept going. And when it just seemed like it was impossible, we've managed to find a different solution

and keep on going a little bit. And you need that. and you know but if if we've had any luck if I've had any luck personally I mean I think we've been given an enormous leg up with our families and with our mom and dad and now with our wives and you know that was a that was a loving household that valued education that encouraged us to go and take risks and do what we wanted to do and not everyone has that and it's been enormously important part of the journey because I think we've lent on them right now I have at key moments very very heavily to keep on going

Yeah, I think they're inextricably linked. I've always thought of luck as some random event happening to you. But that happens, and then what are you going to do with it? And I think we've had the good fortune together to have great timing across a whole host of things. Like we could start a business and put up a website in seven months and reach 10,000 people in a week. but we also, you know, we seized and capitalized on that opportunity, and we worked super hard and made some good decisions along the way to turn that luck into something that was really positive. So I just think you can't really separate those ideas of that construct.

And fortunately, we've done a, we've had a good bit of both. That's Joey's Willinger and Tim Brown, founders of all birds. The company recently rolled out a new material for the souls of their shoes. It's called Sweet Foam, and it's made. from the leftover parts of sugar cane, which would otherwise be thrown away. And it's part of their ongoing effort to make Albirds a carbon neutral shoe. And instead of keeping the recipe a secret, they've actually open-sourced it so that anyone who wants to make souls out of sugar can do it. Hey, thanks for sticking around because it's time now for how you built that. And our story today comes

to us from Kirby or Daly from White Salmon, Washington. And Kirby and his family spent a lot of time at the beach, which means they have all observed one of the great wonders of marine life. You hear about it all the time. You hear about the beach umbrellas that fly through the air and, you know, land on somebody's car. Those things blow down the beach like crazy. And those things blow around because they're not always, well, anchored, right? And a big gust of wind, a metal stake can just fly off the ground. And Kirby just wasn't satisfied with the stuff that was on the market. Lots of inexpensive tent stakes that you pound in with a hammer or a rock.

But there was no really good toolless solution that would hold in all weather conditions and that would work in sand, it would work in clay. And because Kirby is a professional woodworker, he started to tinker around with ideas for a better ground anchor. And he was inspired by one thing in particular. You've probably seen it, and it looks like a gigantic wine cork opener. And in case you haven't seen this, giant wine cork opener, think pets, because people

use this corkscrew thing as kind of an anchor to help keep their dogs tethered outside. And because the screw threads have quite a bit more surface area that increases the surface area between the soil and the ground anchor. And Kirby thought, a big screw like that could be great for

anchoring all kinds of things. Shade or rain structures, you know, a big tarp over an outdoor kitchen when you're camping. Artists at art festivals, their booths with all of their art. Anyway, Kirby started experimenting with prototypes and looking for a company to make the screw.

And while he's doing all this, he has this huge earth-shattering epiphany. The internet is amazing. Kirby was able to locate the perfect recycled plastic to make the screws. And then Kirby did a Kickstarter campaign about three years ago. He raised $45,000 and boom, his product was launched.

The crazy thing that kept happening over and over again is we would get a phone call or an email that says, I'm going camping on Friday. I have to have these for the weekend. And so I don't know how we went from this product that never existed to something that people have to have for the weekend and they're upset if they're not going to be able to get it. Okay, great story so far, right?

But then one morning, about a year ago, Kirby gets an email. You know, an angry email. And it said, I ordered your screws from this promotion you did on Facebook. and I haven't gotten anything yet. And I thought, I don't even know what this is. We're not running a promotion on Facebook. And you probably know where this is headed. Scammers were starting to get into Kirby's business.

They were copying his photos and design and advertising cheap knockoffs and way undercutting his prices. So as soon as we would report one of these for trademark violations is how we would take them down, one would disappear and then two more would pop up. So Kirby actually did something kind of. of unusual. He sent his own product for free to anyone who had made the mistake of buying a cheap knockoff. Meanwhile, some of his loyal customers kept reporting the knockoff sites and leaving

comments warning new customers about the scam. We created this kind of international police force, probably of 50 or 60 people, that would email us every day and say, here's another one, and the whole thing just started dying down. The scammers eventually went away, and Kirby has now spent about a year running his company full-time with his wife. Oh, and the same year his company launched 2015, his daughter, Ila, was born. For a long time, my wife and I referred to them as twins, and they both had their frustrations, and we're really proud how both of them are growing up. That's Kirby or Daily.

His product is called Orange Screw. It's colored bright orange. And last year, he says, it made just under $1 million. To hear more about the company or to hear previous episodes, head to our podcast page, How I Built This.npr.org. And of course, if you want to tell us your story, go to build.npr.org. And thanks so much for listening to the show this week. You can subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and why you're there, please do give us a review. You can also write to us at hibt at npr.org. And if you want to send a tweet, it's at How I Built This.

Our show is produced this week by Rachel Faulkner with music, composed. by Ramtin Arablui. Thanks also to Julia Carney, San Azmesh Kempur, Neva Grant, and Jeff Rogers. David Jop is our intern. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Build This.