Tim Brown: Allbirds co-founder on mission-driven design and entrepreneurship

0:00I've yet to meet a designer in my entire life that isn't incredibly aware of the importance of putting out products that have less environmental impact. And yet we need to agree and agree quite quickly what a framework is for making that type of contribution to society. I think it represents an enormous opportunity for the design profession to be the guardians and champions of this. But it can't just be platitudes and labels. It has to be anchored and connected to the science and truly meaningful impact. Otherwise we're talking and we're not really doing.

0:30Sometimes your career takes an unexpected turn, and that pivot can lead to something bigger than you imagined. Tim Brown, co-founder of Allbirds, has been there. After a stint as a professional soccer player, Tim found himself on a different path, one that led to creating a simple wool sneaker that would grow into a movement for sustainable fashion. We spoke with Tim about how he and his co-founder used design thinking to tackle everything from material innovation to business strategy, the importance of being transparent about both successes and failures, and what it really takes to start a mission-driven company.

1:03Tim also shares how his athletic background shaped his approach to leadership and why having constraints can actually fuel your creativity. This is Design Better, where we explore creativity at the intersection of design and technology. I'm Eli Woolery. And I'm Aaron Walter. If you're hearing this, you're not currently on our premium subscriber feed. Design Better Premium subscribers enjoy weekly episodes. You get four episodes per month rather than just two. All are ad-free, and you get invited to our monthly AMAs with the smartest folks in design and tech. You'll hear a preview of this episode, but if you'd like to hear the full conversation, please consider becoming a premium subscriber at designbetterpodcast.com slash subscribe.

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2:18We'll return to the conversation after this quick break.

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3:28And now, back to the show.

3:35Tim Brown, welcome to Design Better Podcast. Hi, fellas. Thanks for having me. It's a real pleasure. We're very excited to have you. Tim, you and I spent some time together this year because you were teaching basically the same class I teach, but a slightly different version of it. And I think we'll get into that in the course of the conversation. But let's rewind a bit for folks that don't know you. You're the co-founder of Allbirds. But before that, you were a professional football player. And we were talking a little bit about that kind of offline before we hit the record button. So yeah, tell us about that because you started your education and career in design.

4:06Then you made this jump into being an athlete and then came back into design and entrepreneurship. So maybe we can kind of get the tour of that narrative arc there. I always appreciate the use of the word athlete. In an American context, it just makes you sound a little bit better than maybe you were. But I certainly love sport. Grew up in New Zealand and actually had an auntie, an American auntie, who encouraged me to pursue that sport in America on a soccer scholarship. I'd grown up in New Zealand, in Wellington, the capital, the land of lots of sheep. And fallen in love pretty early with design and creativity.

4:36I actually started off studying architecture at university, but realized I didn't quite have the patience to sort of pursue that and had just begun to pivot into graphic design and then was able to take up the scholarship in America and combine this real interest in sport and what was this emerging love and clarity that this was what I really wanted to be when I grew up in design. And I took up a scholarship at the University of Cincinnati in the early 2000s, and that was really the beginning of my professional story. Before we hit record, you were talking a little bit about how your time in football and being an athlete, that there were a lot of lessons that transferred over as an entrepreneur, someone who's designing new products, working with teams, building new products.

5:21What did you learn from that experience, being an athlete and pursuing that at a high level? Well, when I retired from sport and went on to take an entrepreneurial path and found a business, I found myself leaning on the lessons of sport a lot. As my co-founder liked to point out, I had to do that because I didn't have any other experience. But the truth was, there's a lot of significant things to be learned. I think there's some obvious ones around teams and building teams. I think as a general rule, we tend to over-index on our focus on leadership and a little less on the design of teams and how within any high-performing team, there tends to be a bunch of anchors to them coming together really well.

6:01I mean, a clear vision, clear set of values and behaviors, a set of standards and the way that they're going to operate. but also a fairly broad understanding that leadership is not singular. It's going to come from a lot of different aspects of a group and I think sport teaches you that. And maybe that's a little bit more obvious. I mean, I think what I probably took most significantly from my sporting career and applied it to the process of building a business really from nothing, from an idea into what ultimately became and is a public company employing hundreds of people, I think was the sense that sport teaches you value the compounding impact of getting a little bit better every day, that you show up, you want to get good at something and you don't see that improvement and you keep chipping away at it.

6:46And generally you do that because you're having a good time and you're doing it with people that you admire and maybe coaches or supporters that believe you and encourage you to keep going. And then somewhere along the way that compounds and you develop some skill and then even mastery along the way. And certainly even as you get into teams and you go into compete, You'll often lose a game in the short run, but ultimately the best teams through the course of a season will win more often than they lose. And so I think it teaches you this idea of patience and of developing a craft. And I think particularly in this moment in time where we want outcomes quickly, sport teaches you to walk the path.

7:24One thing that I feel like sport has a lot to teach us that we often don't look at or consider in companies is the chemistry within teams. In fact, some of the greatest teams across lots of different sports, they don't necessarily have the superstars. They have a collection of really good players who are dedicated. And often, though, when we're trying to build teams, we want to hire top talent. In fact, that's the phrase that's often used. I want to find the rock star, the top talent to bring in. And sometimes that can throw off the chemistry. How do you think about chemistry in teams when you're building a team?

8:00Well, I think it's a really interesting choice of words. in chemistry. I would argue that a word like culture has never been more overused in the context of business and never been more misunderstood. And I think people understand that it's important. But chemistry is a sort of a click deeper derivative in my mind, and it's about relational connection between a group of people. And for it to work, it necessitates a bunch of things, clearly there needs to be a shared set of values, a set of standards. But it also, I think, makes the strong case that the best teams have a fairly disparate composition of different approaches to performance.

8:40And I think you learn from sports that you need a star player, someone who wants the spotlight, who's going to stand up in big moments, who possibly might act in some cases more for themselves than they do for the team. And this works both ways because sometimes that's perceived to be bad, whereas often the great teams have those types of players and yet the foundation of them are the people that believe in the team, what I might call teamers that are there because they derive extraordinary satisfaction when the team does really, really well. And so I think you learn through sports that you need a combination of these things and too many of one thing or the other is bad, but then they somehow need to interact and work together.

9:21and there is no perfect way to do that. But I think the starting point is to understand that those differences are important. And then, as I sort of talked about earlier, I've never been in a team where there's been a singular point of leadership. You know, a CEO that makes it all work, who sets a vision and everyone follows and it's all okay. You usually have a star player who's often not the leader, but maybe is the most talented. You have the person that really is laser focused on the dynamics of the team, might not be the most talented, performer, but is critical to the day-to-day sort of binding the group together.

9:55And then, of course, you have a coach who is neither performing nor technically on the team, but is instrumental to guiding an organization. So the chemistry and interrelated connectivity between those pieces is really important. I don't think that we think enough about it and some of the soft side of how you bind talent together to make it work really, really well and perform at a high level. So sticking on the chemistry topic for a minute and starting with the early part of your company where the team, I'm assuming, was just you and your co-founder, how did you go about finding a co-founder and landing on this idea?

10:30And we talked a little bit offline about Aaron and I, how we started working together at a company and that gave us a chance to sort of prototype the relationship. But how did you kind of figure out that this is the right person to jump in with and the idea and the vision and all that? Like all of these things, there's a tremendous amount of serendipity and it's only with the benefit of time that I realized how much talent I stumbled upon so early to make this work. And I mean, just to give some context, Land of Lots of Sheep, at the time a sponsored athlete from one of the big large sportswear companies that shall not be named.

11:01The initial insight was really that shoes were over-designed and over-complicated and there was an opportunity for minimalism and that they tended to be made out of plastic and not very nice materials and there was an opportunity to use natural materials and in a first instance wall and to innovate in a category that had got fairly lazy as it related to making products out of materials derived from nature. And, you know, that sounds like I came up with that overnight. It was multiple years of testing and I was playing football at the time, dreaming of going to a World Cup in New Zealand. But I visited my first footwear factory and started to kind of really begin what was a curiosity project.

11:35And along the way, I trained as a graphic designer at that point. I graduated from the University of Cincinnati. I'd had this incredible design education mentored by some wonderful folks that I hope we can talk about. But it was in graphic design. And yet now I was thinking about a broad product that we're going to wear on the body and a complicated one of that to engineer and make. And so I found a New Zealand industrial designer called Jamie McClellan. He was the very first person I met. And he's a friend to this day, maybe much like you guys, just a creative partner that was in love with the pursuit of design solutions and that were meaningful and big bold ideas.

12:15And we've worked together fairly collaboratively to help build the business that was all birds from the beginning. And it's another interesting sort of segue into a broader topic, I think. There's never been easier to call yourself a designer. And we've lost sight of the fact that there's still, like anything else, an extraordinary hierarchy of talent. And there are very good designers, just like there are very good soccer players. and there's a distribution of talent like there is in other professions. And I found a world-class designer in Jamie from the beginning. He was extraordinary. He continues to be extraordinary.

12:45And not only did he have extraordinary talent, but he also gave a damn. He's one of the hardest working people that I've ever met. And the combination of those things with a vision a little bit from my perspective about what the opportunity was in the category was really the start of this. Beyond the product design, there's also the brand design component of building a company and building a new product like this. That's one thing that, especially early on, it seemed like your brand, I mean, it was everywhere. You couldn't go anywhere or listen to any podcast where you didn't hear about Allbirds.

13:18Was there a marketing strategy behind that? What's the backstory of how you built your brand? We didn't sit down and write a business plan. I certainly didn't come from a footwear background. As we've talked about, I was bike sport. I met Jamie who, aside from doing his sort of undergraduate thesis on shoes, was a furniture designer, an industrial designer largely focused on furniture. I met my co-founder, Joey. Our wives were roommates in college. He was an engineer who'd come out of a biotech startup and was an early customer of a Kickstarter campaign that I used as a platform to launch the first wool shoes that I ever made.

13:53And so there was not a lot of experience. There wasn't a lot of strategy. but I think there was some big vision for a couple of really important things. I think in my case I had a really clear sense of the product and this opportunity for simplicity in a category that had become convoluted and complicated and there was an opportunity to take things away and we came to discover comfort was the number one reason why people buy shoes but it's often equated with ugliness and there was this extraordinary opportunity on the back of natural materials to create a more comfortable product. And when you combine that with a more thoughtful approach to design, you had a really interesting sort of opportunity.

14:30And we launched with a singular shoe, which is sort of the opposite of how the footwear category behaves and did some interesting things there. And then my co-founder, Joey, again, no footwear experience, no design experience, no brand experience, had a perspective around sustainability in the environment. He was very much of the belief that we were going to need to rethink all the products and services that we use through the lens of our environmental impact. And that's a little bit more of an obvious thought now, a little less clear circa 2014, 2015. But he believed that the fashion industry was going to be the sharp point of this transformation and that there was a growing consumer movement, particularly around young people wanting to know the provenance of the things that they wear and buy.

15:09And the fashion has shared a fairly poor track record of paying lip service to this topic. And we're increasingly making things largely out of plastic derived from barrels of oil. So it was a combination of those things laid the groundwork, I think, for a fairly big idea. And then there was a maniacal focus, and this is often the bit that people forget, over seven or eight years of prototyping hundreds and hundreds of pairs of a singular shoe, the Woolrunner, which was our iconic launch product, before we launched the business on the 1st of March 2016. So creativity comes together with, I think, in this case, sort of science and purpose.

15:45and it was the bedrock for, I think, what became a compelling story. And then we did a lot of things to sharpen the brand and shape it and Allbirds was a part of bringing that clarity to what we were doing and that was far from easy and we worked with a lot of talented people on that. But I think at the end of the day, the DNA of this was really strong and we also had some luck along the way and we caught the right moment. So given your focus on design and sustainability, were there other companies, not necessarily football companies, but companies that you look for inspiration or maybe even what not to do as you're building the company?

16:19It was all over. And I think from an early age through design school, I'd been encouraged to take notes and keep really a scrapbook of visual inspiration. There was a book that I got gifted when I was really young. I forget the name, which is bad, but it was one of the pentagram partners. And the book was called The Art of Looking Sideways. And it was effectively a memoir of all his visual diaries through his career. It had a big impact on me. So I started writing things down and I had a teacher or two that encouraged me to do so with the belief that over time they might add up to something useful.

16:49And it's a piece of advice I give at every opportunity. I've got a stack of them now. They're filled with largely mediocre thoughts and observations, ticket stubs, things I might have ripped out of the magazine, some fairly poor and average sketches. Anytime I saw something interesting, I'd write it down. I still do. We don't have enough time to list the sources of inspiration. And, you know, there's a bunch. There was a New Zealand company called Icebreaker that had started to make things out of merino wool. I got one of their shirts when I was in New Zealand back in 2000. It's a great, great product.

17:21I really loved it. Yeah, sort of some, you know, wool used to be hot and scratchy and that was the assumption about that fiber, but it's really a miracle. And so there was some really interesting things there and some building boxes of experiences and different people that we met along the way. And then, of course, at the time, I was sponsored by one of these big footwear companies. And a lot of the inspiration to do Allbirds was a reaction to this sort of promotional branding that was so prevalent and continues to be, quite frankly, prevalent in the category. And so, you know, a whole bunch of influences.

17:52And I think you have to have the confidence to be aware of all of those and collect them over a long period of time. And then they added up to the beginnings of what would become Allbirds. When did sustainability become an important focus for you? And why is that part of the core of the business? Well, it wasn't for a long time. And it was only when I met Joey, my co-founder, did that word even enter my consciousness, really. Which would belie the fact that I think growing up in New Zealand, I had a mom that would make me check the tags of the things that we buy to make sure that they weren't plastic.

18:24And so there was an empathy for nature and natural materials that I think was in the background. But I started this project and went through a Kickstarter campaign, post-retiring from sport after the World Cup in 2012, in the early stages of forming what would ultimately become Allbirds with Joey in 2016. And I still didn't have that connection to the word sustainability. It was a design project and a curiosity project focused on natural material innovation, and in the first instance, Merino wool, and making a singular shoe out of that. And the question we were asking ourselves was, there's so many shoes in the world, but if you're only going to make one, a singular shoe and it was going to be anchored on the principles of minimalism and what ultimately we labeled internally, Jamie and I, is the right amount of nothing.

19:10Not nothing, but the right amount of taking everything away. Very much born from my design education anchored in Bauhaus principles of form followed function that had sort of been lost in the category. And so we set out to make that product and really deliver on that alone. And it was only later that I met Joey and we started to uncover a whole nother problem around sustainability, the environment, fashion industry, the use of plastic that we were able to really connect the two. And quite frankly, I was missing it. I think I'd learned through my sporting career the power of purpose. I'd always dreamed as a kid of being a professional athlete and then got the chance to do it and found that a little bit hollow.

19:47But when I was able to connect that profession with the idea of playing for New Zealand at a World Cup, I think it brought me to a whole nother level of performance and possibility. and so too when I was making shoes I remember talking to my dad at the time as I did my best to spend my life savings on this curiosity project and he'd call me a wool cobbler and kind of casually check in on this sort of project but how's that wool project going and I used to just think what am I doing it was horrible I don't know anything about making shoes I don't particularly love shoes I didn't grow up on a sheep farm as much as I have an appreciation for this fiber and I'm working on this thing and I don't really know why and then along comes Joey and we find the purpose and really all birds were spawned when those two things collided.

20:26Maybe we talk through some of the challenges in balancing design and manufacturing requirements with sustainability. You know, in the class we teach, this is a common topic amongst the students where clearly all the students set out to create a very sustainable product if they're working on a physical product, but then you quickly run into the real world challenges where it turns out plastics use a lot because it's very versatile, it's cheap. You know, if you had unlimited resources, you probably wouldn't use it, but you can't sell an$8 ,000 shoe, right? So yeah, maybe talk through some of those challenges and how you work through them initially as you're developing the shoe.

20:59Here's the problem with a word like sustainability is that it means a hundred different things to a hundred different people. It's about air quality and land quality and recyclability and fair trade labor. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at designbetterpodcast.com slash subscribe. Once you do, you'll get access to every full-length episode, all ad-free, monthly AMAs with inspiring people in design and tech, and recordings of all our past AMAs. The podcast is available to everyone through our scholarship program. If you can't afford a subscription, just email us at subscriptions at thecuriositydepartment.com and we'll help you out.

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