In a busy week for Allbirds, the US footwear brand launches its first UK concession – in luxury department store Selfridges – and opens a store on King's Road, Chelsea. Managing director of Europe Jodie Soussan tells Drapers about its plans for the capital.

Footwear brand Allbirds is building nests in London. On Tuesday (23 August), it opened a permanent concession inside London's luxury department store Selfridges.

Today (Wednesday 24 August) it is throwing open the doors to a new store on the King's Road in Chelsea – its third in London. It already has stores in Covent Garden and Marylebone, as well as in  Berlin, Paris and Amsterdam.

The latest openings take Allbirds' store count to 35 sites worldwide, including the US, Canada, China, Japan and South Korea.

Allbirds was launched as a footwear brand in San Francisco in 2016 by former professional New Zealand footballer Tim Brown and biotech engineer Joey Zwillinger. It launched its first clothing collection in October 2020, followed by an activewear line in August 2021. Prices range from £45 for a Tencel lyocell (fibre made from renewable wood pulp) T-shirt to around £135 for merino wool running shoes.

Allbirds launched floated at $15 (£12.67) a share in November 2021, valuing the company at $4.1bn (£3.4bn).

The company has been carbon-neutral since inception: it measures carbon emissions from each of its products – including materials, manufacture, transportation, use and end of life – and offsets its output through various regenerative agriculture and renewable energy projects.

Allbirds plans to cut its carbon emissions in half by 2025, and to reduce this to almost zero by 2030. It aims to do this by sourcing wool from regenerative sources, reducing raw material use by 25% across all products, and using 100% renewable energy for all owned and operated facilities.

Jodie Soussan, managing director, Europe, at Allbirds, tells Drapers how the brand balances growth with sustainability.

Jodie Soussan, managing director of Europe, Allbirds

All of our stores are designed with sustainability in mind. We have developed a signature modular build that allows us flexibility to grow and elevate our store design as the seasons change, or as our business grows. This means we avoid wasteful and costly remodelling, resulting in a more resource-efficient retail design.

The minimalist store follows our design principles of "the right amount of nothing", and we leverage locally sourced natural materials to create a haven of calm. Our wood is European beech, sourced in the UK, which minimises our carbon expenditure. Our seating and displays feature powder-coated steel [finished by using an electric charge that causes a dry powder to fuse to the surface of the metal], which is infinitely recyclable and very durable, minimising the need for repair or replacement. We also source energy-efficient lighting and devices.

In addition, one of the aims of our retail stores is to provide a tactile and engaging experience, where our consumers can learn more about Allbirds and our approach to sustainability. As a new feature in the King’s Road store, we’re introducing three display plinths that break down how we use our hero natural materials – merino wool, eucalyptus tree fibre and sugarcane – to craft footwear that treads more lightly on the planet.

All of our products will also be clearly labelled with their carbon footprint, empowering consumers with information to make better decisions with the planet in mind. Finally, any lightly worn shoes from returns or consumers handing them in get donated to our partner Soles4Souls [charity that donates clothing and shoes around the world].

Serving our customers in the most seamless way possible is very important to us. To help optimise this, we have an "Endless Aisle" feature, so if a product is out of stock in store, our retail team is able to fulfil the order from our warehouse and deliver it directly to the customer, at a location of their choice.

We also use portable devices to process transactions and better serve our customers where they are.

Our first permanent concession in the UK with Selfridges is permanent. When we began identifying third-party distribution partners, Selfridges was an obvious choice because of its commitments to sustainability and leading curation of innovative products.

We are still a young brand, and although Allbirds launched in 2016, our distribution in the UK only began in 2018 via ecommerce and our Covent Garden flagship store. Selfridges provides us with a premium space to increase brand awareness and new customer acquisition, both to a local and international consumer.

It also enables us to tell our sustainability and natural material innovation story in a unique way, with a fit-out that differs from our own-brand stores. We’re hoping this space invites the Selfridges consumer in to learn more about Allbirds and our vision for a sustainable fashion industry, where low-carbon, natural materials replace toxic petroleum-based synthetics.

We have a central display in the space that highlights our hero raw materials – merino wool, eucalyptus tree fibre and sugarcane – which aim to provide a touchpoint for passersby to understand how and why we turn those natural materials into our shoes.

Allbirds' new concession within Selfridges.

Our key markets in Europe are the UK, Germany, France and The Netherlands. Since opening our first store outside the US in Covent Garden in 2018, and then Marylebone in 2020, we’ve been humbled by the response we have received in the UK, and are feeling optimistic about the future.

In the second quarter of 2022, we acquired more new customers in London than in any other city outside of New York, which is hugely encouraging. The Allbirds customer is global, and London is a key shopping destination for both locals and tourists, so our presence in London has the capability of reaching a large audience, and specifically a sustainability-minded consumer group who are looking for products that not only feel good, but do good.

We welcome any brands who are prioritising sustainability and carbon reduction – we can’t solve the climate crisis alone, and brands need to rally together to collectively tackle this issue head-on. We actually open-source resources [and allow other businesses to use these] such as proprietary materials like our sugarcane-based EVA SweetFoam®, and our carbon footprint labelling methodology, for any brand to use.

Most recently, we even partnered with one of our "competitors", Adidas, to bring to market the Adizero x Allbirds 2.94kg CO2e. It is the lowest-carbon footprint performance shoe made by either brand, and illustrates what can be achieved through collaboration with existing resources in just a year – imagine the possibility if this was more widespread in the industry in years to come.

As a B Corp and a public benefit corporation, we set out to do things the right way, not the easy way. Our Flight Plan includes 10 of the most ambitious, science-based sustainability targets in the footwear and apparel industry, and sets out how we’ll do business sustainably in the years to come – with growth factored in.

While we’ve been working diligently to minimise our carbon footprint from the beginning, last July was the first time we announced our forward-facing targets for 2025 and 2030. Instead of first setting climate targets and then figuring out how we might achieve them, which is the path we’ve seen most brands take, we let our carbon reduction and sustainability initiatives inform our commitments. We then ensured that our reduction targets were aligned with the 1.5°C pathway under Science Based Targets [science-based targets show organisations how much and how quickly they need to reduce their greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions to meet the Paris Agreement -  which limits global warming to 1.5°C.].

We were determined to ensure that our plan coupled bold ambition with a detailed roadmap – in other words, we wanted to show our work for how we plan to achieve our stated carbon targets. In short, sustainability will remain at the heart of everything we do, even as we grow.

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