Young and Profiting with Hala Taha - Joey Zwillinger, Allbirds Co-founder: How We Earned 7 Figures in Our First 30 Days With 0 Marketing Spend | Business E255

Starting point is 00:00:00 If you can constrain your innovation to something that is high performance and low impact, that is exciting because you drive amazing business value and you drive amazing environmental value. And connect those ideas together, you have a business model that is both mission aligned and profit aligned. Joey Zwillinger, the co-founder and CEO of All Birds, which uses wool to create sustainable footwear. They're the ones responsible for all the famous wool runner shoes that you see now everywhere. and Allbirds is also one of the first brands from Shopify to have an IPO. I really left college seeking just a broad-based education. I did a little bit of consulting.

Starting point is 00:00:38 I wanted to do investing. That's around the time that I really caught the bug where I thought that the dynamism of entrepreneurship could blend with social purpose to create something extraordinarily meaningful that didn't have to sacrifice on the planet, but actually made meaningful impact on the social purpose as well as the bottom line for the business. Why do you think you were able to have such a great launch compared to other entrepreneurs who start businesses every day and fail. I think it's as simple as...

Starting point is 00:01:16 Yeah, bam, today's episode is part of a special limited branded series that we're doing with Shopify about how technology is changing the landscape of entrepreneurship and how it's empowering founders to disrupt industries as never before and often from the comfort of their own homes. In this series, we're talking with trailblazing founders, learning key lessons from their incredible founder stories, and gaining insight into how platforms like Shopify have enabled them to compete with the heavy hitters in their industries. Today, I'm thrilled to be joined by Joey Zwillinger,

Starting point is 00:01:47 the CEO and co-founder of Allbirds, which uses wool to create sustainable footwear. They're the ones responsible for the famous wool runner shoes that you now see everywhere, and All Birds is also one of the first brands from Shopify to have an IPO. Joey, welcome to Young Improfiting Podcast. Thank you for having me, Holla.

Starting point is 00:02:05 It's so good to be here. Joey, thank you so much for being here. I'm looking forward to our conversation, and there's so much I want to discuss with you related to your company, Allbirds, but first, I'd like us to get to know you a little bit better. So you grew up in the Bay Area, you were into sports like a lot of young boys and teens are, namely soccer. And while you didn't grow up to become a pro soccer player,

Starting point is 00:02:25 I'm sure your experience with sports still taught you a lot. So my first question to you is, what are some of the lessons that you learned from sports that you now apply in business? Yeah, good research. I was a soccer player. I played at Cal, UC Berkeley, where I went to college. And it was, I would say, absolutely pivotal to how I act in life, how I live, and what I think about teams in particular.

Starting point is 00:02:50 I'm an extremely competitive person in general, and I think in business, which is more or less a game that we play here in life, I think competition is an incredibly catalytic type of mentality to keep for both driving teams towards a clear outcome, but also just how to be. you interact with one another in order to achieve those shared outcomes. And I remember when I was playing at my peak level, the thing that was most surprising to me was that it was the most inclusive open environment that I've ever been a part of. And still to this day, I think, where it is so outcome driven. And there is absolutely nothing about the personalities, the backgrounds, the race, the socioeconomic, whatever it is, all of that completely falls away. And all it is

Starting point is 00:03:38 is about winning as a team and making sure that you can trust one another and that you can rely on your partner in whatever you're doing in this case sports. And I would say that that has translated to me to be the most pivotal use of teams and way to interact with your colleagues in a business setting while maintaining that drive around outcome orientation and winning together. So your company, Allbirds, is what you call a purpose native organization. And we're going to get into that detail later on as we talk about Allbirds. But really my question is about your passion for wanting to improve the world and where that really was stemmed from. So from my understanding, I heard you in another interview where you cited your parents, your dad, as somebody who sparked

Starting point is 00:04:24 that interest in you. Allbirds is this organization that is aligning its sustainability mission with its profit outcomes. So talk to us about how you first got that spark, why you want to help improve the world. Yeah, you know, I think it's, my dad played a pivotal role. My mom also played a really important role in my life and shaping how I view the world and how you're both a speck of dust on the planet, but also you can change everything. One individual can change everything. And my mom was an immigrant from South Africa. She left her in the apartheid era. And really, the values of that government were antithetical to how she believed the world should be. So she picked up and left and left her family behind and came to California, where she ended up meeting my dad. And around that time,

Starting point is 00:05:06 my dad was a real social activist, leading the professor's union at San Francisco State to get the first African-American Studies Department, did a lot of work around social responsibility and uplifting a lot of disenfranchised groups from his position as a professor at the university. when he had me, I think what he imbued upon me was that it didn't really matter what I chose to do in life. He probably preferred that I wasn't in psychology, as my dad and mom both were. But he needed me to do something that left an imprint on the world in a positive way. And that understanding that the power of the individual is extremely high. And with a bunch of hard work and creativity, you can shape the world in very meaningful ways.

Starting point is 00:05:55 and that responsibility, if you're going to use that kind of effort and use the short time on this planet that we have, has got to be done for a broader societal impact and one that was positive. And we happen to be in nature quite a bit, a lot of camping. And so I think that was the early taste that I got for what kind of social consciousness really drove me and I thought was most important. And leading into what I did in my professional career, that shaped how I viewed business and how How could you have both a meaningful professional career and something that was fulfilling, but went beyond certainly making money, which was never much of a motivator for me?

Starting point is 00:06:36 I love that story. And I love looking at entrepreneurs' careers and backgrounds and trying to figure out how all the stars aligned. And also from my research, I found out that you weren't the first in your family that had experience in the garment manufacturing industry. So can you tell us about that? Yeah. My parents had zero business background, and they truly did not. I didn't know what business was at all when I left college, so I needed some serious education when I got to the workforce.

Starting point is 00:07:06 But yeah, my mom's grandpa, he fled Russia in about 1904. There was some pogroms, and he was in the garment business, and he happened to cut a little rip a hole in his trousers and stuffed some Russian rubles in his trousers. to, if needed, to bribe some policemen on his way to the harbor, managed to make it out to the harbor and found himself on a boat, didn't know where it was going, and he landed in South Africa and fortunately didn't have to use those rubles. His name is Rubin, so we named one of my kids, and we now have those little coins to celebrate that spirit from his great-grandfather.

Starting point is 00:07:46 And he ended up starting a contemporary men's professional wear business in South Africa and really did fantastically for a little while before going bankrupt, but, you know, that's the way it goes in the garment business. And my grandpa on my dad's side was also Lower East Side tenement housing, had a business inside of his apartment when my dad was growing up in Manhattan, making uniforms for Pinkerton Detective Agency and some government agencies and things like that. So I guess it runs deep. It was sewn into my DNA from many generations ago, and here I am. Yeah, that's such a cool background story. And so you went to college and you got your MBA from Wharton.

Starting point is 00:08:26 You went to UC Berkeley for engineering. And you don't often meet engineers that turn into CEOs. And so I'm curious to understand what kind of advantages you feel that you have as a CEO who really thinks like an engineer. I think being trained as an engineer, there are some positives, fantastic positives, and there's also some drawbacks. I was taught to think about problems extraordinarily analytically. and I save a quote in my phone. It says, if you can't describe what you're doing as a process, you don't know what you're doing. And I think that speaks really concisely to how I think about running not just a process independently, but running a business.

Starting point is 00:09:09 And yet at the same time, I think if people don't share that sharp analytical focus, sometimes it can feel a little too linear and leave no room for creativity, which is quite the opposite from how I think about running fantastic processes. You really need to leave room and put the right gates for wonderful creativity, but you also need to logically tackle problems. And I've taken that in every business experience I ever have while also trying to compensate for the fact that not everyone shares that kind of point of view. So always a growth area for me to make sure that there's clear room for creativity and clear articulation of when that comes into the process and leaving room for serendipity all along the way. I love that. And you have a good point.

Starting point is 00:09:55 Process doesn't have to stifle creativity. Having good structure and good process can actually enable people to feel more creative because they have like an SOP of how something should get done. So there's certain things that are sort of in concrete, but then there's certain areas where they can innovate and get creative. That's a great articulation. I think that constraints are the most significant impact on a creation. creative outcome. If you weren't bound by great constraints, you're left to a wide open canvas to

Starting point is 00:10:27 come up with a great idea. Those are typically a lot less actionable, a lot less commercial, a lot less meaningful for whoever you're targeting consumers in our case are our clear endpoint. And having the boundary and the guardrails is incredibly important to get the best kind of creativity. I totally agree. Okay, so after college, you worked at Golden Sacks, you did some consulting, you've gotten to venture capital as well. Can you walk us through some of those highlights in your early career? Yeah, I mean, as I said, not knowing what business was, back in college, I recall it distinctly. I would say, you know, what does your dad do? What does your mom do? He'd be like, oh, he's in business. I was like, oh, cool, that's good enough for me. That's a good

Starting point is 00:11:07 enough granular. If someone said that to be today, I would be like, well, like, what do you mean? Like, what kind? Like, what do they do? What function? What department are they working? All that good stuff. I had no idea. Business was very ethereal to me. So I really left college seeking just a broad-based education. I did a little bit of consulting. I wanted to do investing. That's around the time that I really caught the bug where I thought that the dynamism of entrepreneurship could blend with social purpose to create something extraordinarily meaningful that didn't have to sacrifice on the planet, but actually quite the contrary, made meaningful impact on the social purpose as well as the bottom line for the business. And so I started looking at investing in that time frame.

Starting point is 00:11:48 I didn't find the clean tech was the kind of jargon de jour in that era where people were investing in businesses that met my kind of value set and met my business ambitions as well. The venture capital model at that time in particular was not really a great avenue to pursue. It just took too much capital to build these huge facilities to displace petroleum-derived products and make them from naturally derived products using cutting-edge technology at the time. So I left the investing world and really sought after an operating role. And I chose a company after a huge amount of diligence. I went out and met dozens and dozens of companies interviewing to really understand

Starting point is 00:12:36 where I didn't have the most technical background. So where could I make an impact on the business side, having a technically oriented mindset without having a deep understanding of the technology? And I found a company called Solazim, which was using biotechnology to engineer microalgae to essentially replace any derivative of petroleum and do so with a zero-carbon impact.

Starting point is 00:12:59 So all of the benefits of whatever the cut of oil is that the end product used from a performance perspective with no environmental impact and ideally no cost impact or even cheaper. That was the ambition of the company. I ended up leading the chemicals group, so green chemicals, displacing any petrochemical product

Starting point is 00:13:19 that's surrounding all of us all the time with an algae-based solution that left no dent on the planet. And it was interesting. I'm sure you want to get into all birds more, but I had these experiences repetitively where I would go and speak with brands. We'd have a conversation where I would kind of tease out

Starting point is 00:13:38 the opportunity that the technology presented for that company. And it was like jaw-dropping. Everyone loved it. And then by conversation three, it was like, well, you know, I talked to my sourcing department

Starting point is 00:13:50 and really they just want polyester cheaper. Can you do that? One in particular, we made a surfboard out of microalgae that we then derivatized into a polyurethane foam. So this is a zero. Zero impact, rigid polyurethane shaped into an amazing high-performance surfboard.

Starting point is 00:14:08 We had Rob Machado, a professional surfer, ride it in competition. And you think about these guys and gals, they're sitting in the ocean, seaweed floating by, maybe a dolphin skimming the wave. What a better customer than that could you find me for somebody that wants high performance with no environmental impact. Yet when we pitched it to the surfboard blank companies, paying $10 more per blank, which ends up retailing down the chain for $700 to $1,500, $10 more. That was too much for them to stomach,

Starting point is 00:14:40 and no one could figure out how to position the product such that you could really make the impact with the end consumer there. And so it was just this eye-opening experience for me. It felt a little like pushing string every time I went to these meetings because I eventually knew what the outcome would be. So fortunately, I was introduced to Tim via our wives and Tim Browns, my co-founder at Allbirds now and really saw an opportunity to connect my frustration with trying to bring high volume, low-carbon material to market with a wonderful consumer product where you didn't have to

Starting point is 00:15:15 compromise on any performance attribute that the consumer wanted. I love that you brought this up because later on I want to talk about the importance of clear messaging when it comes to bringing your product to market. So I love that you brought that story up. Would you say at this point, after you're working at this company, that you knew that you wanted to make sure that your career would have something to do with environmental science moving forward? Yeah. Innovation is pretty exciting. And if you can constrain your innovation to something that is high performance and low impact, so you offer the consumer a no

Starting point is 00:15:50 compromise solution for whatever that need is that they have, that is a constraint that is exciting because you drive amazing business value and you drive amazing environmental value. And if you can connect those ideas together, you have a business model that is both mission aligned and profit aligned. So there's really no asymmetry between the stakeholders that you're really fighting for being your shareholders in a business and your environmental impact as one of the other key stakeholders. So I'd say I caught that bug early on the way it ended up manifesting within my career. It took some twists and turns, and I learned a lot along the way. But this is the place that I always wanted to be. And I think making that impact every single day, I couldn't think of

Starting point is 00:16:34 something more exciting. Yeah, it's very cool. So let's move on to Albert. So you alluded that you met your co-founder, Tim Brown. I think we should start off with maybe his origin story or the origin story of the product beginning with him. Yeah, very important because you got it on my background, which is running in parallel of it to Tim's. Tim was actually a professional athlete. He happened to get a design degree, which was his kind of intellectual passion when he went to college, also in the United States. But he's actually a native New Zealander, Kiwi, and he was pretty good at soccer and ended up playing more than a decade professionally in the A-League and a couple other places, A-Leaks in Australia. And he ended up rising to be the vice captain of the New Zealand

Starting point is 00:17:22 national soccer team, which ended up going to the World Cup in 2010, obviously both a leader as well as an incredibly good athlete and talented soccer player. Yet he was consistently offered free gear from all the big sportswear companies, and there was this vacuum in space between what he wanted and what he thought all of his comrades on the soccer team wanted and what was being offered. And really, the brands were marketing themselves via the athletes as a vehicle for marketing and getting paid a little extra if you wear the bright yellow shoes.

Starting point is 00:17:58 on the field. And if everyone wears the yellow shoes, you get even a bigger bonus. So it's obviously focused on marketing and a big logo on the side of a shoe versus comfort versus performance, versus what the athlete or the consumer needs in particular. So he started using his design background and really cobbling around with shoes back in probably as early as 2008 was probably the first shoe he ever made. Really small scale, much more as a hobby on the side while his teammates are playing PlayStation, he's making shoes, ended up after his retirement, after the World Cup, let's call it 2012 now. He really started in earnest and got the concept, you know, he's staring out his window in Wellington, New Zealand, and seeing 30 million sheep in the countryside

Starting point is 00:18:43 and saying people understand the amazing qualities of marino wool when it comes to shirts or when it comes to base layers for outdoor adventure. Why has no one made a shoe out of marino wool? So he had this instinctual understanding that nature was the greatest innovator. And Mother Nature, having many millennia to do her work, do a lot better job than a chemical engineer over the last hundred years with working with petroleum. So that concept as a colonel, coupled with his design background, was something that drove him to get it out of his system, so to speak, entrepreneurially. And he ended up designing a prototype, put the product up on Kickstarter in 2000.

Starting point is 00:19:26 And it was a phenomenal success for Kickstarter at the time in that category. And I was fortunately one of the first customers that got to feel the wool runner and listen to his message. You can still see the video on Kickstarter today. I was fortunate enough because my wife and his then-girlfriend, now wife, were college roommates when they went to college at Dartmouth. So I'd known him socially, but nothing ever crossed my mind that we might connect business-wise. But he went through this experience, had some success, and then went through an unbelievable set of travails when it came to fulfillment, customer service, manufacturing, all the good things that are required and can break a company if you don't do it well.

Starting point is 00:20:13 And so we started talking first about just a solution to those issues, but eventually it was about really connecting something much bigger than a single product or a single material, but really connecting the idea that we could offer something that was no compromise, performance with no impact on the environment, or much less, at least, to start, versus the competition. And that every time we stole market share from a competitor, we were doing something great for our business. We were doing something great for the world. And so that idea really sparked something in us that made us feel like we would be proud to build a brand, that stood for that, and we would be proud to tell our grandkids that that's what we spent

Starting point is 00:20:53 a large chunk of our life doing. And so we decided, and we met at my house in Marin, which is just north of San Francisco. Over a weekend, my kids and wife were gone, and we kind of crafted what were the key messages, what was the key idea for this business, how would it take shape over the next few years? We really shook hands on it that day on my deck. And we have not skewed very far. And when we skew far, sometimes we make mistakes, to be honest. And that core understanding of what we were trying to accomplish is the root of what became Allbirds eventually. And we joined forces formally in 2015, did a real sprint to launch our product on the first day of March in 2016 and came out of the shoot pretty hot. At Yap, we have a super unique company culture. We're all about

Starting point is 00:21:46 obsessive excellence. We even call ourselves scrappy hustlers. And I'm really picky when it comes to my employees. My team is growing every day. We're 60 people all over the world. And when it comes to hiring, I no longer feel overwhelmed by finding that perfect candidate, even though I'm so picky, because when it comes to hiring, Indeed is all you need. Stop struggling to get your job post noticed. Indeed, sponsor jobs help you stand out and hire fast by boosting your post to the top relevant candidates. Sponsored jobs on Indeed get 45% more applications than non-sponsored ones, according to Indeed data worldwide. I'm so glad I found Indeed when I did because hiring is so much easier now. In fact, in the minute we've been talking, 23 hires were made on Indeed

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Starting point is 00:23:45 after hours, ensuring your business stays responsive, even when you finally logged off. It makes doing business so much easier. Make this the year where no opportunity and no customer slips away. Try Quo for free plus get 20% off your first six months when you go to Quo.com slash profiting. That's QUO.com slash profiting. Quo. No missed calls, no missed customers. I love this story. You guys have such a great founder story because it is so inspirational to other entrepreneurs because you used platforms that are available to all of us for very little investment. For example, you started on Kickstarter, then you ended up using Shopify for DTC. And so it's just awesome that you used things that are readily available and it's just very

Starting point is 00:24:32 inspiring to hear. In my story, you hear about innovation. You hear about Tim's design background. You hear about the consumer a lot. You don't hear about technology a lot. We are a product first business that's making amazing things that people want because it's going to make their lives better, make them feel happier, bring joy to their lives. We are technology enabled, though, but the core offering for us is about product. So if it's not going to make our product better, let's see if we can rent it from an expert and make sure that it's going to be way better than we could ever recreate ourselves. So, you know, the tools that you mentioned are amazing catalyst for a business in the solution like Kickstarter, but really an enabler for a very long-term kind of

Starting point is 00:25:19 business build when you're thinking about e-commerce as a core part of our solution for how we come to market with customers in a product like Shopify. Totally. You get to focus on creating the best offering ever, product ever, rather than focusing on how to scale an e-commerce platform, right? So I love it. So let's go back to this concept of a purpose native organization. It sounds like you were super intentional when you and Tim met up and really started the

Starting point is 00:25:47 foundation for all birds. walk us through that process, how you guys started to think about your business model. And was it like highly intentional where you already knew you were going to have a purpose native organization or did that sort of evolve? No, that was from before day one. Purpose native was a phrase that we kind of figured out later on. But that was at the core of what we wanted to do. We would never have agreed to do business together if it wasn't with that in mind.

Starting point is 00:26:14 So the way it most formatively took shape, was about a month after we launched our product. We got the founding team together. It was about 10 people at that time. And we went through a multi-day exercise where we wrote out, looking back from the seat of the summer of 2026, 10 years before, writing about that journey.

Starting point is 00:26:39 What brought us to the place that we eventually saw the business getting to and the brand getting to? And we wrote that into a three-page narrative. And we still use it very much today. Every final round candidate that's interviewing for our company reads it, has to digest it. And it really separates out whether people want to come here for the right reasons or not. And you can generally tell whether people get more excited by it or less excited by it.

Starting point is 00:27:04 They might think we're hippies from San Francisco with flowers in our ear. Or they might think, wow, this is something I can get out of bed every single day and feel amazing about the work that I'm doing on the planet. And it aligns with their personal values. So we not only knew it from the core, but we wrote it down and documented it and institutionalized it. And we've always from the beginning believed that environmental causes is a very broad term. Sustainability means 10 different things, the 10 different people. The thing that we found the most generationally important problem that the world has to face is climate change.

Starting point is 00:27:41 And so we focused on carbon emissions from day one, and we constrained all of our innovations to be lower carbon emitting and less of an impact on greenhouse warming and constrain it with those types of guardrails and then allow us to come out with componentry that delivered much higher performance, much higher comfort, and a much better consumer experience all within those constraints. So the way we come to market is better products. They're just going to feel better and look better on your feet than anything else in the market because we make shoes. Yet as a gift with purchase, you get this amazing environmental impact that you may not have even understood when you bought the product because it's just phenomenally comfortable. I love actionable advice on Yap. And I think everybody tuning in is

Starting point is 00:28:26 probably like, what's in this three page document that he wrote? How can I do one for my business? So could you give us some insight in terms of how we can do this exercise for our own businesses? Yeah, you know, this isn't our idea. We stole it, which all good ideas generally have some inspiration. It's from a Delhi in Ann Arbor called Zingermans. They have a process for visioning. And you've seen companies like Amazon are pretty famous for writing the press release of what you want to do at the end of the project. It's in a similar vein as that. But you really seat yourself well forward in the future. It doesn't need to be 10 years, but that was sort of the initial time frame. We wanted to architect with the original business plan and how we were going to come to market.

Starting point is 00:29:08 and we asked everyone to write down, you do that exercise. They weren't allowed to lift their pen off the paper, physical pen, physical paper, no typewriter, no computer, and not lift their pen off the paper for 20 minutes. And everyone went around and read to the group what they wrote about. And then we, as the leaders of the company, unearthed the gems from each of those and kind of steered it in the direction that we felt was most high impact and also the best articulation of what we were trying to achieve. And we ended up getting down to that final prose and that three-page narrative.

Starting point is 00:29:42 And if we don't have it published already, I'm going to take the opportunity from this podcast and see if we can get it on our website. Oh, my God. I would love that. I would love to read that. And in the outro, I'll find more information about what was it called Zillinger? What was it called again? Zingerman's Deli.

Starting point is 00:29:58 Zingerman's Deli. I'm going to find out information about that and then explain it further in the outro for everybody else. So in your first month, you ended up making a million dollars in sales through your, I guess, your Shopify website, D2C. Talk to us about that. Why do you think you were able to have such a great launch compared to other entrepreneurs who start businesses every day and fail? You know, if I look back at that time, I'd say that the most pivotal aspect of our success was focus. At that time, Tim and I would always share this kind of quip that we would have to say, no to 99 things for every one thing we said yes to. And you have so much advice coming in,

Starting point is 00:30:40 particularly like before your business is truly anything. You haven't even launched a product. And how do you filter that out? So incredibly fine filter with extreme focus. And we knew that we were a product and marketing company. Everything needed to come out, feeling amazing for the consumer. So we poured an enormous amount of the money that we had collected to help start the company into product. And then the only other dollars that we spent was to build the personality of the brand and amplify the message that we wanted to send to consumers that we were making the most comfortable shoe in the world. And fortunately, a lot of people shared that view when they tried the shoes and wrote significantly about it. So we didn't spend any dollars on marketing

Starting point is 00:31:20 for many, many months, paid marketing. I should say, we did the PR thing and a whole bunch of other tools to amplify our messaging. But really, it was just about a singular focus on amazing product and amplifying the message that we wanted to deliver, the promise that we wanted to deliver on that product. And fortunately, because we did those two things well, the promise was met by amazing product. And we delivered on the customer expectations that we set. And so, lo and behold, people liked the message. We had some good amplification from the media. And yeah, we sold a million bucks worth of shoes in the first month, which was dramatically more than we ever anticipated. We were chasing into demand for at least a year,

Starting point is 00:32:04 always behind what the signal from the consumer was and having some caution. I remember the first million dollar purchase order like it was yesterday that we made to the factory. And it's very fortunate to have both really good timing to have tools at our disposal like Shopify, channels to amplify the message really nicely, to reach the consumer, and a great partner and Tim so that we could have one plus one equal three to really start things off in the right direction. And earlier, you were talking about when you were working at another company and you wanted to create these like LG surfboards, right? And they didn't want to do it because they didn't want to spend $10 more and have to charge the customer more down the line.

Starting point is 00:32:46 And you said that messaging would fix that. So talk to us about how you were able to put out a clear message that allowed you to price your products at a point that was profitable for you and also good for the world. I think there's an underlying tension that business people but also consumers feel, which is that if something is sustainable, that it's probably worse. Maybe it's less durable. Maybe it doesn't look as good. Maybe something else has been sacrificed on the way. maybe it's too expensive. And we always believe that that tension was a paradigm that needed to be broken.

Starting point is 00:33:22 And so we wanted to offer an amazing product for an amazing price and do that without any compromise on the tangible aspects of the product itself. As I said, the gift with purchase is that it's amazingly beneficial for the world, but that's just a gift with purchase. What you get for the price is a price value of your product that is fantastic and stands on its own two feet, so to speak, without needing some kind of like a price premium or anything like that. That's never been in the language that we use internally to how to think about innovation and how to think about building great products. People love great products, and it love

Starting point is 00:33:58 sustainable ones. I think over time, we do believe people will understand that truly great products are also sustainable, but that's not the leading message. This is a gift with purchase from us, and we give you everything that you could possibly want, and you've come to expect from an amazing pair of shoes, and we deliver that because we rely on the best innovator in the world, which is nature. These are some really important lessons, especially for any entrepreneur that's trying to get into this space. So you mentioned that one of the key reasons why you were successful and you had your, you know,

Starting point is 00:34:33 million dollar launch essentially in your first month was focus. So talk to me about how you made sure you guys. guys stayed focused during this time. Yeah, that is a subjective art. I think this maybe goes back to my training as an engineer. You know, it's what is the outcome you're seeking and does this help the outcome? Is the activity that you're doing today or this week or this month? Is that going to help you drive towards the outcome that you think is going to be the

Starting point is 00:35:02 barometer of success for whatever you're trying to achieve? So we picked the three key outcomes we wanted to do. was it going to help this or was it going to hurt this? And more is not more. More is often much less. And so that was the mantra. And it was often just Tim and me and then eventually a handful of people around a room debating these things and just saying, why are we wasting time doing this? Don't do that. This is what we're coming to market with. We need a exceptionally clear message if we're going to break through an enormously noisy consumer marketplace, enormously noisy and competitive. If we're going to break through and have any kind of success, we need to be clear, we need to be singular, and we need to back that up with everything we can from a messaging perspective to meet those expectations that are going to be set very high.

Starting point is 00:35:51 And so you better deliver if you're going to be successful because, you know, you can market your way to a first sale, but the second sale, it's got to be love for the product. It's got to be love for whatever that service or product is that you're offering. So it's got to be good. It's got to be good. You got to set high expectations, but then you got to deliver. So many gems in this, a sharp offering, sharp messaging, and focus. Don't get distracted on those two main goals. So let's talk about you starting as a direct-to-consumer company. Why did you decide that you were going to start off DTC? I like how you frame that because we believe that we are a brand.

Starting point is 00:36:28 We are not a sales channel. So direct-to-consumer was never something that we believed that would describe the company or the brand, frankly. We are a brand first that makes amazing product that sets expectations really high, just like the consumer deserves and delivers on them. But what we wanted to do to start was to reach consumers,

Starting point is 00:36:49 both in New Zealand and the United States. We started with two websites built on Shopify's platform, launched at the exact same time. And we believe that creating a feedback loop that had no noise around it from Omni-Channel sales, or places that we couldn't get data from. We needed to understand who was buying the product, why they were buying the product,

Starting point is 00:37:13 and then feed that right back into the product lifecycle management to make sure we made agile and correct improvements to our products to keep building the foundation of the brand in a way that most significantly resonated with those consumers who fell in love with the company and fell in love with what we were offering. So our vision was always start with DTC, first digital,

Starting point is 00:37:36 then add our vertical retail operation, and then eventually expand into wholesale marketplaces, whether it's drop ship or something more traditional wholesale model. And as we would do that, we would reach a broader set of consumers that wouldn't initially want to engage with a company that makes shoes on a digital platform or if they didn't live around a store where we were. There's a lot of people who still like that physical try on, don't like to deal with returns through e-commerce for shoes, one of the fits a really important consideration. That was the thesis, and we took the first four years to be exclusively DTC. We built the fleet of stores, and then we expected to start expanding into wholesale at that point when the world got a pretty

Starting point is 00:38:20 big challenge in early 2020 with a bug that floated around. And so that threw back our timeline on entering the wholesale marketplace, but now we're just at the start of that journey, which is pretty exciting because we're able to reach a number of new consumers that we eventually think are going to be able to come back and engage with us directly. And when it comes to your direct consumer business, how did you decide on Shopify? Did you evaluate other platforms? What made you decide that Shopify was the platform for you? We did evaluate a number of other solutions.

Starting point is 00:38:51 And remember, this is 2015, so Shopify was a different company than it is today. But we saw the vision that Shopify had. And going back to the idea of what is your core offering as a company, how do you, focus on that almost exclusively. And our core offering is product. And so we wanted to have an unbelievably seamless shopping experience for the consumer. But we didn't want to have to hire a ton of engineers in order to create that experience. We didn't want to have a technology operations team to monitor performance of a website or worry about the interfaces with our warehouses or eventually our product catalog to make sure we had accurate pricing across our broad assortment,

Starting point is 00:39:40 across a number of markets. So we wanted to find a solution that would take all of the burden off of us from building that seamless shopping experience while being able to deliver that for the consumer, finding a group of people who were dedicated to that solution as their core offering and seamless checkout, seamless shopping experience, amazing emails to track. your progress as you get in order when you shop via e-commerce. And we found we were pretty early in the Shopify plus ecosystem. And I think we quickly became one of the fastest groups to reach various thresholds of number of orders done through the platform. But because that was the best solution

Starting point is 00:40:25 on offer, and we felt like had the biggest scale that could take us from nascent organization all the way to something that was very large scale. It was pretty clear early on Shopify was the best solution, and we've been proven really right about that. And I will say, as I mentioned earlier, you know, when you're in the early business building phase of your company, you get so much advice. And people have these narratives in their head like, oh, like, you know,

Starting point is 00:40:51 Shopify will never scale. Like, you guys are going to have to get off that. And you have to be really data-oriented when it comes to this. Like, look at the requirements that you have as a business. look at your future roadmap, engage with the vendor, whatever that technology solution is. In the case of e-commerce, we work with Shopify's team incredibly closely to align our product roadmaps and understand where they're pushing further than us, where we're pushing further than them, and make sure that we time things appropriately so that we can scale the infrastructure

Starting point is 00:41:19 or the business to support our ambitions on the consumer side. And Shopify's been an incredible partner. And just to be clear, I'm not paid by Shopify, although Toby, if you're listening, I'm happy to text you some wire instructions. But it is something like I think anyone starting a consumer products business would be absolutely crazy to use a different platform at this point. And I know tons of huge companies are migrating over to the solution because they've really proven that they can scale to the biggest size.

Starting point is 00:41:52 Hello, young improfitors. Running my own business has been one of the most rewarding things I've ever done. But I won't lie to you. In those early days of setting it up, I feel like I was jumping on a cliff with no parachute. I'm not really good at that kind of stuff. I'm really good at marketing, sales, growing a business, offers. But I had so many questions and zero idea where to find the answers when it came to starting an official business.

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Starting point is 00:43:14 Happy New Year, Yap, gang. I just love the unique energy of the new year. It's all about fresh starts. And fresh starts not only feel possible, but also feel encouraged. And if you've been thinking about starting a business, this is your sign. There's no better time than right now. 2026 can be the year that you build something that is truly yours, the year where you take control over your career. And it starts with Shopify. I've built plenty of my own businesses on Shopify, including my LinkedIn Secrets Masterclass. So it's a two-day workshop. People buy their tickets on Shopify.

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Starting point is 00:46:12 how there's so many companies of all sizes using Shopify. So I have a social media business, a podcast network, and one of my businesses is I sell courses and I sell them on Shopify. For all these entrepreneurs, because I think a lot of my listeners, I've been talking about Shopify for a long time. So I'm sure a lot of people are on Shopify. Talk to them about how,

Starting point is 00:46:30 over the last decade that you've been able to scale using that platform? What are the ways that you've scaled on Shopify? From day one, we had a seamless shopping experience for e-commerce. If you were in the U.S. or New Zealand, you had localized currency, you had the opportunity to click a button and something would show up at your door in three days and you'd be just breathtakingly wowed by how easy it is. I've had people tell me that after a couple glasses of wine, they would find two days later, all birds' shoes showed up at their doorstep and then I shipped, I did it again

Starting point is 00:47:05 because it's that easy. Like, you almost forget it. It's so seamless. So that was true from day one, but I talked about the vision for distribution for the company. We wanted to be a global brand. We started in two countries from day one.

Starting point is 00:47:20 We also wanted to be omni-channel. So we wanted to make sure that the infrastructure to support an ambition like that was robust enough to allow us to do that. So what does Shopify allowed us to do? First, there's amazing interfaces to systems that are vital to our ability to create an amazing customer experience. I would say we have something we refer to as a product information management system where every one of our product in our catalog can spit out into multiple different nodes of Shopify for different countries.

Starting point is 00:47:55 It'll have the right pricing and everything will be entered perfectly. to launch at the same time. We have a content management system where we can send out translated text and translated copy into various markets. We have interfaces with our warehouses so that we have really seamless order interchange, and we are sure of where every single product is across the cycle. We've integrated our radio frequency ID tags that are on every single products. We have 99.9% accuracy, which are both our auditors, our planners, and our finance people absolutely love. And so we can understand where everything is all the time. So that kind of back end support is incredibly important. It's also the front end. So the front end,

Starting point is 00:48:39 I've talked about the digital experience, but Shopify is also supported where we had at times far ahead of where Shopify was thinking for our point of sale and retail experiences. And so we launched our stores before Shopify really had any kind of semblance of a point of sale solution. they've updated that many times and have consistently invested in that, which really supports us. With a fleet of 50 plus stores now, we need one pool of inventory, understanding where everything is. That enables us tied to some of the other technology investments we've made to do things like ship from store, which is incredibly supportive for profit on the back end for what we're needed to do to reach customers as quickly and efficiently as possible. So these are just a small smattering of examples, and I would just say zooming back,

Starting point is 00:49:26 you know, the idea that Shopify has thousands of engineers focused solely on this problem allows us to not even think about it. And sure, we have to do alignment with our roadmap and we have an amazingly talented group of engineers, but they are an order of magnitude smaller than what we would have had to have done if we started to try to build things and really not rent software from the best providers in the world. Yeah. And I just want to call out something that you said that I think is really important is that Shopify is not just an e-commerce platform. They are the leading e-commerce platform where 10% of all e-commerce business is happening on Shopify. But as you grow and scale and your business channels change or go-to-market channels change and you want to be retail like

Starting point is 00:50:13 you were mentioning, you can also utilize Shopify and everything is all in one place. Whereas if it was different platforms, it'd be really clunky to manage and make sure that everything's super cohesive. Yeah, that's right. And we've been pretty pretty. privilege to have a partnership with Shopify where we have, you know, access to the key people who matter in Shopify to make sure that when they look us in the eyes and say they're investing in this for the long haul, that we're like, okay, we're on board. Yeah. And thank you for paving the way for many of us entrepreneurs going in your footsteps later on and able to use those Shopify features. Okay, so let's talk about why you decided to go IPO. So you guys pretty recently went IPO. What was

Starting point is 00:50:55 the decision-making process around that, and how do you feel that IPO enabled you to sort of future-proof your business? If you've been listening for a few minutes here, you can understand that we never really started with a small idea. It always was about a vision that we would be proud to tell our grandkids about. And every time we sell a pair of shoes, it's better for our business, and it's better for the world. So with that alignment, with that kind of purpose-native construct that we've created for the business, it's really important to get big. We've made a lot of investments in growth along the way. Some work, some don't. And we always wanted to have the fuel in the tank or the battery charged in the EV, I suppose would be a better analogy here. We wanted to make sure

Starting point is 00:51:41 that we had the power in order to achieve those ambitions. And getting on a global scale, being an independent company was something that was important to us until we felt like we'd really reached a scale where we had started to scratch at achieving our mission. And we're nowhere close to that yet. You know, that said, neither Tim nor I are ideological about the best way to achieve the mission. It might be independent. It might not be. We've never been wed to a single point of view on that. But until someone presents us with a path that looks better than building this on our own, the core offering of what we do and doing it in the way that we need. know is the right way to do things from a consumer products perspective. We wanted to make sure we

Starting point is 00:52:24 had a ton of ability to do that and capital is really important. And so that moment was an opportunity to refill the gas in the tank and allow us to keep investing in the long-term picture that we believe we could. And talk to us about some of the innovations that your company has made and the ways that you've delivered on your purpose when it comes to sustainability and things like that. Where do I start? I mean, almost every component in our shoe has some real innovation to it that is designed to deliver unbelievable, tangible luxury for people. And that tangible luxury manifests itself in the most comfortable footwear that you've ever experienced. And I often tell people, you know, try our shoes for three days and then go back to whatever else you were wearing. And the absence

Starting point is 00:53:14 of comfort that you will feel and the exhaustion that your body will signal to you at the end of a day when you put back on your old pair of shoes that aren't all birds is the best signal of the kind of comfort that we deliver. And so how do we do that? The very first innovation that we had was with marino wool. We designed a textile that was bespoke for footwear that had the stood up to the durability challenges that is quite high for a pair of shoes, but yet delivered all of the magical benefits of this miracle fiber that regulates temperature, you know, keeps you cool when it's hot, hot when it's cold, and is silky soft and just delivers unbelievable comfort. So, you know, that was step number one. The sole of our shoe took us probably three full years to bring the market.

Starting point is 00:54:00 We call it sweet foam. And we were able to utilize some of the R&D from my background, work with a company down in Brazil, which happens to be kind of the Saudi Arabia equivalent of sugar cane that it is for oil. And about 50% of the world's production of sugar cane is made in Brazil. And we were able to work with a partner to derivatize a waste stream of sugar game production to create one of the most comfortable, great-feeling rides for the soul of a shoe. And so now we have this carbon-negative material born from a waste stream of sugar cane that delivers unbelievable cushion and comfort underfoot. That is across our entire lineup of shoes. We've come with great innovations. We're speaking now as we enter into the colder months of the year,

Starting point is 00:54:48 and we have amazing warmer fabrics with a membrane that can stop rain from getting the shoe, keep you waterproof while you're walking around, and grit for the bottom. I mean, I go on and on and on and these are all consumer-oriented tangible luxury benefits that are then gift with purchase. We happen to do it with the constraints that it had to be better for the earth. It's such a great story. It's such great products. I've never tried Albirds. So I am like, you've sold me. I'm ready to try some allbirds. And I know you have a new product coming out. Can you talk to us about that? Yeah. Send us your size and address and we'll be sure you're one of the first to try it on. Seven years ago, a little over seven years ago, seven and a half years ago, we launched

Starting point is 00:55:33 the Wool Runner. That was the first product we ever came out with, March 1st, 2016. And this is a moment where we're going back to that iconic silhouette and we made, you know, more than a dozen, very significant changes to the shoe. It is a modernized, aesthetic, incredible elevation of comfort and durability and a vast improvement on a whole number of other dimensions that are important in the footwear construction and also, of course, for the planet. So we've made incredible strides. We're kind of going back to the core here. And you're going to see both some exciting content, as well as an amazing, amazing new product that I think is going to really excite the world again. Awesome. And I can't wait to study your launch, see how you position everything, your messaging,

Starting point is 00:56:22 because you seem super smart in terms of how to position your product. So it was such a great conversation, Joey. I end my show with two questions that I ask all my guests. And then at the end of the year, we do something really fun with it. So the first question is, what is one piece of actionable advice that you can give my young improfitors today to make them more profitable tomorrow? I think it's as simple as do more with less and just have incredible focus and understand the metrics that you're trying to achieve and focus and clarity with what you're doing

Starting point is 00:56:58 and what you're trying to send the message to whomever your customer is, whether it's another enterprise or a consumer, be super clear and be super focused on your activity to reach that exact singularity that you're looking to convey to the customer. And what is your secret to profiting in life? And this can go beyond the topic of today's episode. It can go beyond your own, you know, business, personal career, finance, what is your secret to profiting in life? I think the model I guess I aspire to, which I'm not going to subscribe that I achieve it, is if you think about the most important things in my life, family, health, personal health, and what I do in business, if I can match those circles up, if you think about them as little

Starting point is 00:57:46 circles, as tightly as like the concentric circles in a tree, I have the greatest harmony in my life. And I'd be remiss if I went through talking about the All-Bird story for as long as we have here without noting how important that interaction between my wife and I have been for the success and the creativity that is at the heart of what the company does, not to take anything away from my partner, Tim, but from my contributions, I would have been a fraction of the effectiveness if I didn't have that tight harmony between my personal life and my family with what I did professionally. And that kind of harmony has been very helpful for me. Joey, thank you so much for your time here in Young and Profiting Podcasts. So much advice for entrepreneurs. You've got an incredible story,

Starting point is 00:58:37 incredible company, Allbirds. Where can everybody learn more about you, your company, Allbirds, and everything that you do? The best place is by buying a pair of shoes to do that at Allbirds.com, or one of our phenomenal, immersive, wonderful retail stores that's probably very close to wherever you're listening. Awesome. Well, thank you so much for your time today. It was a pleasure. Thanks, Paula.

Starting point is 00:59:03 Young Improfitors, I got so much out of this interview with Joey's Wellinger. It's so wonderful to see how something meaningful, like a passion for sustainability, could lead into building a huge, successful, impactful company like Albert's, which is literally revolutionizing its industry. And for Joey, his mission was all about vision, focus, and execution.

Starting point is 00:59:25 And of course, having the right tools to execute. When it comes to vision, Joey mentioned this restaurant in Ann Arbor, Michigan, called Zingermans Deli. It's been in business for more than 40 years, and it's famous for its bread and sandwiches, which Oprah once rated as an 11 on a scale of 1 to 5. Zingermans is also famous for its visioning. They write out a vivid description of what success looks like and feels like for everything from a five-year business plan to a dinner special for that evening.

Starting point is 00:59:52 I'll put a link in the show notes so you can read more about it. It's super interesting. Another thing that was pivotal to all bird's success was focus. With so many things coming at them, Joey had to continually remind himself that they were a product and marketing company first. That means they had to say no to a lot of things, and that means that they couldn't have built their own e-commerce platform. It meant that everything needed to come back to delivering on their promise to their customers,

Starting point is 01:00:17 that they were making the most comfortable shoe in the world. But of course, it's not enough to have a clear vision and a keen focus. You need the technology to execute on that vision. And from day one, thanks to Shopify, all birds had a seamless shopping experience for their e-commerce. As a small company, they could go direct a consumer with very little investment and time. And even as they grew and scaled to the huge global brand that they are today,

Starting point is 01:00:42 they didn't have to hire a ton of engineers in order to retain that seamless experience. Shopify scaled with them, even as they expanded to brick and mortar retail shops. Well, that's all for this episode, and I'd like to thank Joey for coming on by and Shopify for sponsoring this special series about how technology is changing the landscape of entrepreneurship. And if you want to get your pair of the newly released Woolrunner Two Shoes, you can get them at allbirds.com. Thanks for listening to this episode of Young Improfiting Podcast. If you listen, learned, and profited from this conversation with the visionary Joey Zwillinger,

Starting point is 01:01:16 please share this episode with your friends and family and drop us a five-star review on Apple Podcast. If you prefer to watch your podcast as videos, you can always find us on YouTube. Just look up Young and Profiting and all of our episodes are uploaded there as video podcasts. You can also find me on Instagram at Yap with Hala or LinkedIn if you search my name. It's Hala Taha. I also want to shout out my amazing production team, my executive producer Jason, Amelia, our assistant producer, for Khan and Hasham for helping us with guest outreach, Greta and Sean for supporting research, Critty Grima, Ashatosh, and Ambika for supporting us with ad apps for my show and the

Starting point is 01:01:52 entire network. You guys are awesome. Thank you so much. I love my team at YAP Media. And that was only just a small sliver of them. We've got over 50 people who work at YAP Media. So shout out to everybody who works at this company. I love you guys so much. Appreciate all your hard work. This is your host, Halitaha, aka the podcast Princess, signing off.

Young and Profiting with Hala Taha - Joey Zwillinger, Allbirds Co-founder: How We Earned 7 Figures in Our First 30 Days With 0 Marketing Spend | Business E255

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