I was standing on a street corner in Pasadena in front of a shuttered Allbirds store when I overheard a stranger say something that stopped me cold: “Allbirds don’t sell shoes anymore. They’re in AI now.”
As someone who’s spent forty years in branding, I had two reactions. First: What? Second: This is the most instructive brand failure in recent memory, and almost nobody is drawing the right lesson from it.
The easy story is that Allbirds was a fad — Silicon Valley’s shoe of the moment, destined to fade when the moment passed. That’s not wrong, but it’s not the real story either.
The real story is positioning. Or rather, the lack of it.
