Shares in shoe brand Allbirds rise 580% after it pivots from footwear to AI
69 points by tcp_handshaker
by shantocv
3 subcomments
This feels like the 2026 version of companies adding "blockchain" to their name in 2017 and watching
the stock jump. The shoe business was real — they had a genuinely differentiated product with the
merino wool. Pivoting from a physical product with brand recognition to "AI" when you have no
obvious AI expertise or data moat is a tough sell beyond the initial hype pop.
by nikolay
1 subcomments
Absolutely ridiculous. Their shoes business was going in the wrong direction - they started to offer plasticwear - and recently had to return a lot of merchandise as they didn't bother to put on the wool brand's website that their socks are mostly plastic. Their original hit was gone, replaced by lackluster versions. By the way, the shoes were made in South Korea.
by lagniappe
2 subcomments
Reminds me of Long Island Blockchain
by ChicagoBoy11
5 subcomments
Am I the only one who couldn't tell whether this was real or not for a good long while? I legitimately wondered whether the BBC site might have been hacked. I just simply cannot find a way to make sense of just about anything in the news story; I had just assumed it would go under and that's that. Why would someone who has that kind of money to invest put it into this pivot as opposed to a completely fresh, new effort? What's the efficiency I'm not seeing?
by heywire
1 subcomments
This new season of HBO’s Silicon Valley is wild!
by ninju
1 subcomments
They should go ahead and drop one the L's from their name and become ALBirds and further embrace the lunacy :-)
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