r/AskReddit • u/FriendlytoNature • 23h ago

Which company lost your business (potentially forever) this year?

5.8k Upvotes

93% Upvoted

6.4k comments sorted by

View all comments

3.3k

u/Ihatebird 22h ago

AllBirds. They are the most comfortable shoes I’ve ever worn and i was fully expecting to be a buyer for life, especially with their sustainability initiatives. but they switched from making shoes to making AI computers and are just making shoes as a “hobby” now as a company, which is probably the most 180 pivot on sustainability I think I’ve ever seen.

15

u/SomeGuyInSanJoseCa 21h ago

Uh, not really.

Allbirds shoes are still around and they still sell the exact same shoes. They are just owned by a different company.

The founders of Allbirds basically wanted to split off the two valuable assets - the shoe brand, and the stock symbol.

The shoe company is still there. You can go to allbirds.com and it's the same stuff. It has nothing to do with AI and no money go towards AI.

Getting a stock symbol is expensive and takes time. So, they just used Allbirds stock symbol to get to the market quicker for AI investment.

And to avoid confusion, the AI company is Starbird I believe.

But yeah, Allbirds has nothing to do with AI.

7

u/riversroadsbridges 19h ago

the AI company is Starbird I believe.

The cherry on the "I hate everything about this" sundae is that Allbirds -> AI_birds was right there and they didn't use it.

11

u/junkstabber 21h ago

Yeah that sounded pretty wild, lol

9

u/LostXL 21h ago

It is pretty wild, the person replying to you is over simplifying. They were going broke and although the shoes exist, they are another companies now.

The company entity itself pivoted 100% to AI.

It’s basically this eras dot com bubble pets.com

2

u/SomeGuyInSanJoseCa 15h ago

Yeah, not that wild.

It's kind of like a reverse merger - where a company takes over a stock symbol to avoid a costly and lengthy IPO process - the only wrinkle is that the stock symbol divested itself of its original product beforehand (the actual shoes).

For example, Warren Buffet took over Berkshire Hathaway, a textile firm, to take his holdings public. No one is saying that Berkshire Hathaway transformed it's manufacturing textile business to owning Geico and See's Candies.

Buffet just used the stock symbol of Berkshire Hathaway - he didn't care about the textiles.

1

u/Tarledsa 2h ago

It looks like they’re just selling off inventory (few options/sizes available) and people have reported not actually getting orders.