"We decided to think of a way to let customers try as many shoes as they like-all the colours, for example. Just as someone would buy a coveted art piece, there are certain coveted sneakers, like the 1985 Air Jordan 1s. A husband, father, grandfather and progenitor of a family that followed his example. She debuted at the Crillon Ball, has arguably one of the most covetable shoe collections and counts Kanye West and Karl Lagerfeld as fans. Like most successful bloggers, the key to Jane Aldridge's popularity is her perfectly curated online persona. They might have started out as the sweethearts of Silicon Valley, beloved by head honchoes at Google, Twitter and Apple, as well as tech magazine editors (apparently "they're as plentiful as MacBooks at the WIRED office"), but their appeal has spread way beyond the tech realm.
Allbirds employs what can be deemed a kind of stealth not the first thing they want you to notice about the brand, and it's not the first thing they talk about when they discuss their philosophy. According to Jad Finck, VP of Innovation and Sustainability, "We don't want to be a sustainable shoe company, we want to be a company that makes great shoes and we do it sustainably." They may not be shouting it from the rooftops but the environment is omnipresent, not just in their thinking but even in their office space. A lush green wall of preserved plants with the Allbirds logo emblazoned across the middle welcomes you to their San Francisco headquarters, where meeting rooms are named after New Zealand bird species (Hihi, Tui, Kiwi), the bathrooms are dubbed Birdbaths, and www.allgoldengoose.com/ the conference room table is a giant slab of redwood, sanded, polished and assembled by the employees themselves.
And this is the time to do it. To survive and actually flourish, fashion will need to mend its relationship with nature. The lofty creations may be exquisitely wrought, but Rosado laughs that he was actually inspired Golden Goose Outlet by the kind of white plastic beads kids play with at camp that spell out their own or a friend's name: "I was feeling nostalgic, and I wanted to re-create those in a very luxurious way." But as it turns out, it is not so easy to find people who can carve pearls. "At the start of lockdown there was a panic and it felt like everyone was switching to jersey, but as time went on, people were wanting to reach out for beautiful things," says Perry. "They wanted some normality," Wright agrees. "A sense of their old selves again." For both Perry and Wright, the pace of their pre-pandemic lives is something they now recognize as unsustainable.