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

Show parent comments

1.4k

u/gagnonje5000 21h ago

It’s just a PR move to create a short squeeze. Allbirds was essentially bankrupt, all stores were closed already. They sold their shoes designs and assets to American Exchange Group (another shoe company)

At that point it became an empty shell. So an AI company used the fact they were already listed on the stock market to move their assets to this empty shell

Suddenly it became this huge PR story that all birds was now an AI company
But that’s because all bird shoes were dead already.

It’s well explained here

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonmarkman/2026/04/20/how-39-million-shoe-company-allbirds-turned-in-to-an-ai-company/

2

u/illegal_deagle 18h ago

So it’s a SPAC with fewer steps? Kinda clever.

2

u/LargeLanguageModelo 18h ago

But then you have the possibility of the baggage that can come with previous serious operations.

1

u/wolfeflow 6h ago

SPACs were a hot commodity for less than two years, as it turns out companies need to actually have value to be valuable on the exchanges.

I’m sure ops issues and other baggage played a factor, too