“We sold $120,000 worth of shoes in four days.” (The name the company settled on derives from a supposed saying among New Zealand’s early settlers that the landscape was “all birds.”) “The thing blew up,” he told Footwear News. No smell.” He received an overwhelming response. His shoes would be sustainably made, unisex, and machine-washable design-wise, as Brown told The New Yorker’s Nathan Heller earlier this year, they would be “the simplest sneaker we could imagine.” In 2014, Brown floated a proposal on Kickstarter under the name Three Over Seven, with the tagline “No socks. Brown, coming from a sheep-rich nation, cooked up the idea for a woolen product while at business school in London. But Allbirds, which are billed as “the world’s most comfortable shoe,” cannot really be categorized as ugly footwear, because the idea behind them is not proud unstylishness but technical perfection the writer Emily Gould has aptly described her Allbirds as “an algorithm on my feet.”īefore starting Allbirds, in March of 2016, the company’s founders-the former New Zealand soccer player Tim Brown and the biotech engineer Joey Zwillinger-had no experience in the footwear business. Scholl’s inserts and podiatry foam the new thousand-dollar Louis Vuitton “ Archlight” sneakers look like something an extraterrestrial might wear to a Jazzercise class. Even high fashion is purposefully cribbing an “ugly” aesthetic from the world of Dr. 13 on the list of footwear brands that teen-agers desire most. Or take the bizarre fact that Crocs has surged to No. Take the slow reinvigoration of Birkenstocks, or the popular #cloglife tag on Instagram, which features women sporting buttery leather clogs inspired by Dutch farm shoes. Allbirds are so meticulously basic that, when clad in them, your feet almost cease to exist.įor quite a while now, “sensible” footwear has been enjoying a curious vogue. This is perhaps their biggest innovation. The shoes are, for all my attempts to describe them, excessively nondescript. The only visible branding is a small tab on the back and a cursive, lowercase “allbirds” carved into the heel.

The eight lace holes of the original Allbirds “Runners,” embellished with contrast stitching, have a dad-ish quality to them. It is thin enough that you can see the outline of your toes as you walk.

The merino-wool fabric, in a variety of neutral and pastel shades, is reminiscent of an expensive Fair Isle sweater, except somehow not at all itchy. The “S-curve tread array” carved into the bottom of the sole is supposed to distribute your weight evenly as you walk the insoles caress your arches and make walking feel like gliding. When worn, the lightweight rubber soles flare out at the ball of the foot, creating a slightly geriatric silhouette. The San Francisco-based brand Allbirds makes shoes so soft and flexible that you can bend them almost a hundred and eighty degrees in your hands.

Bird color changing boots