Not Everyone in Sneakers Is a Sneaker Person
The Allbirds pivot says more about Wall Street than it does about footwear.
By now you’ve probably seen the news. Allbirds is selling its footwear assets and pivoting to AI compute infrastructure, with plans to rename itself “NewBird AI.” The company secured a $50 million convertible financing deal to make the move happen. The stock shot up more than 600% on Wednesday, then fell 35% on Thursday.
My honest first reaction? Good riddance.
I know that sounds harsh. But between 2022 and 2025, Allbirds saw its sales fall nearly 50%, dropping from $298 million to $152 million. Earlier this year they closed all of their full-price retail stores in the U.S., shifting completely to online sales. The brand was already gnoe in every way that mattered. Now the company is just making it official.
To me, the stock movement says everything. A 600% jump followed by a 35% correction in 48 hours isn’t a vote of confidence in a business... it’s a Pavlovian response to the word “AI” in a press release. This is what happens when Wall Street gets excited about a story before anyone has asked whether the people telling it actually know what they’re doing.
And that, honestly, is the whole Allbirds story in miniature.
When you’ve been in this industry long enough, it’s easy to spot the difference between a brand that was built for people and a brand that was built for a demographic. Allbirds was always the latter. It wasn’t created because someone loved shoes, or because they felt something was missing from the culture. It was created because someone identified a customer profile... coastal Millennial tech workers who wanted comfort, simplicity, and a way to signal their values without trying too hard... and then built a product to fill that profile.
That’s not a community. That’s a market segment.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with that as a business model. But it has a shelf life, because demographics shift and values evolve and the signal you’re sending eventually stops meaning what it used to mean. When the tech worker aesthetic fell out of fashion, when sustainability stopped being a differentiator and became a baseline expectation, when the product itself wasn’t compelling enough to stand on its own... there was nothing left to hold the brand together. No culture. No community. No real reason for anyone to care..
Compare that to how GOAT was born.
Before GOAT, founders Eddy Lu and Daishin Sugano were running a social dining app called GrubWithUs. The idea was simple and genuinely human... get strangers to sit down and eat together at restaurants, break down social barriers over a shared meal. It wasn’t a particularly scalable business, and they eventually shut it down. But the impulse behind it wasn’t profit. It was connection. It was the belief that people are better together than apart, and that a well-designed experience could make that happen.
Maybe I’m being overly optimistic here, but it feels like that DNA never left.
When GrubWithUs wound down, the founders didn’t immediately pivot to whatever the hottest sector was. They kept building, kept looking for a problem worth solving. Then Daishin ordered a pair of Space Jams on eBay and opened the box to find fakes. That moment of frustration... that specific, personal, this-is-wrong feeling that any sneakerhead has either experienced or quietly feared... became the foundation for one of the most important companies in sneaker history.
GOAT wasn’t built around a customer profile. It was built around a feeling. The feeling of getting burned, and the community-wide desire to never feel that way again. Authentication wasn’t just a feature, it was a promise to the culture. We see you. We know what this means to you. We’re going to protect it.
That’s a fundamentally different starting point than “tech workers want sustainable footwear.”
I’m not naive about what businesses are. They exist to generate revenue, to grow, to return value to investors. I understand that. I’ve worked inside enough of them to know that idealism has limits and payroll is real. But I’ve also spent two decades watching brands succeed and fail in this industry, and the ones that last... the ones that actually mean something... are almost always the ones that started from a place of genuine human motivation. Not a market gap. Not a demographic. A feeling, a frustration, a community that needed something and didn’t have it yet.
Nike SB is a good example of a brand that had to rediscover that truth after losing sight of it for a while. I wrote about how that door keeps revolving... the cycle of a brand finding its footing, scaling past its culture, and then having to claw its way back to credibility. It’s a pattern I’ve seen more times than I can count. And it usually starts the moment a brand stops thinking about people and starts thinking about positioning.
Allbirds skipped the people part entirely. The brand was positioning from day one. And when the positioning stopped working, there was nothing underneath it. No community to rally. No culture to lean on. No one who felt genuinely, personally connected to what the brand stood for... because what it stood for was never really about them.
That kind of credibility isn’t something you can manufacture, even when the hunt for it never really goes away.
And it shows up in the people they hire.
There are more than a handful of genuinely great sneaker people working at GOAT right now, and if you know the industry, their influence is obvious. You can feel it in the way the platform talks to its community, in the editorial choices, in the cultural moments they choose to show up for. These aren’t people who learned about sneakers because it was their job. They came in already fluent... already invested... and that changes everything about how a brand behaves.
I can’t say the same about Allbirds. Throughout the company’s entire history, I can think of maybe two or three people on their roster who were genuinely connected to sneaker culture. Two or three people who probably fought for the right things internally and didn’t always win. That’s not a knock on them individually... it’s a structural problem. When sneaker people are the exception rather than the foundation, the culture never really takes root. It stays decorative. And decorative doesn’t survive a down market.
Not everyone who calls themselves a sneaker brand is really a sneaker brand. And not everyone who identifies as a sneaker person is really a sneaker person. Allbirds built something that looked like footwear and felt like a lifestyle accessory, and the industry knew the difference the whole time.
But here’s what gives me some optimism... when actual sneaker people are at the wheel, they can take almost any starting point and build something real. GOAT started as a food app. Technically. But the people running it were always, fundamentally, about bringing people together. That instinct doesn’t disappear when the business model changes. It shows up in every decision, every feature, every promise made to the community.
The brand is gone. The ticker remains. And a company called GrubWithUs is still echoing in everything GOAT built.
I’m Nick Engvall, and I’ve been writing about sneakers and culture for two decades, from Sole Collector Magazine to building Eastbay’s first blog to being employee #9 at StockX. I run Sneaker History (website and podcast) and write The Sneaker Newsletter... the people, the stories, and the business of sneakers. If you want the deeper stuff... the industry analysis, the “From the Vault” stories from inside the business... become a paid subscriber.