Business futurist. Innovative strategist. Leadership advisor. Bestselling author. Inspiring speaker.
New Story is a homeless charity backed by Y Combinator that works to build houses for people in developing nations, It works with Icon, a robotics construction company to build 3D-printed houses, typically for people who have lost their homes through natural disasters.
The two organizations came together to show that it’s feasibly possible to build an easy-to-replicate house in under 24 hours. They plan to take this proof-of-concept and start producing small houses for families in countries like Haiti and El Salvador. The 800-sq-ft house cost around $10,000 to build using Icon’s proprietary Vulcan printer, but the company plans to eventually bring that price down to around $4,000. Theoretically, it could soon print one of the houses in about six hours.
The Vulcan printer is massive (the size of a car wash), but still portable, and excretes a custom blend of concrete that hardens as it’s printed. The concrete is laid in 100 roughly one-inch-thick strands that hold their shape as they harden. Icon cofounder Evan Loomis says that the strength of the printed walls is stronger than typical brick structures after a few days of hardening, although the house is entirely habitable as soon as the printer stops.
After the walls are printed, New Story crew members come in and install windows, a wooden roof, basic plumbing, and electrical wiring which can be drilled right into the walls. The entire setup, including the finishing, takes under a day.
In the future, Icon would like to be able to develop robots that could automatically install the windows after the Vulcan finishing printing, and drones that could spray-paint the exterior walls. It’ll explore the possibility of printing roofs as well, but the technology for suspending concrete as it prints isn’t really feasible yet.
Icon hopes to eventually commercialize its house-printing technology in the US, where housing shortages are reaching severe levels in some larger cities. “Affordability is important,” Loomis said, “regardless of whether you’re in Austin or El Salvador.”
Eventually, families could customise the design, arrange for a printer to come plop down on their land, and have a ready-made house to move into a day later. Or if you don’t like it, build a new one. A bit like the fashion concept of the Swatch watch.
SoftBank started out in 1981 as a distributor of computer software. As software is called “soft” in Japanese, the name “SoftBank” literally means “a bank of software.” The word “bank” is chosen based the company’s aspiration to be a key source of infrastructure for the information society.
“The power of intellect to discern what lies ahead, to be one step ahead of the times, and the power of execution to realize that vision” are the essential qualities demonstrated by Ryoma Sakamoto, leader of Japan’s enterprising naval trading company, the Kaientai, in the 19th century. These qualities also represent the core ideals pursued by SoftBank.
The corporate brand reflects the banner of the Kaientai led by Sakamoto.
When he founded the company, Masayoshi Son had a vision. The SoftBank logo evokes the Kaientai, a modernising and enterprising naval trading company that operated during the last days of the Tokugawa Shogunate in Japan. They had an advanced information and knowledge and served as a catalyst for Japan’s transformation into a modern, free-thinking, boldly decisive state, untrammeled by tribal rivalries or the conventional limits of the time. They had a vision for a future Japan 50 or 100 years from then and sailed boldly forward through turbulent seas, giving everything to achieve their goal. As a mark of respect for their passion and empathy with their vision, the brand symbol is designed based on the banner of the Kaientai.
Son says “The SoftBank Group is a ship of comrades with the banner of a 21st century Kaientai flying on its mast. This symbol represents our ardent passion for the kind of enterprise that makes people happy through the Information Revolution and will be admired by people around the world 30 or 300 years from now.”
A corporate group growing for the next 300 years
To continue to grow as a corporate group for the next 300 years, the SoftBank Group strives to develop over the long-term by forming partnerships with the most superior companies at the time in the information industry, without adhering to particular technologies or business models.
The SoftBank Group’s aim is to contribute to people’s happiness through the Information Revolution, and to become “the corporate group needed most by people around the world.” To achieve its vision, SoftBank advances the Information Revolution with leading technology essential to the times and superior business models.
Core to SoftBank’s Values is “Try hard, have fun”. This is the DNA of the SoftBank Group, which aims to keep growing for the next 300 years. “No.1”, “Challenge”, “Reverse Planning”, ”Speed”, and ”Tenacity” are the values central to the way we conduct ourselves.
Son used Twitter to ask what the saddest things are in people’s lives. The most common answers were death, loneliness and despair. Persons who lose loved ones feel lonely, and despair also causes loneliness. The saddest thing in people’s lives may be loneliness. “We want to reduce loneliness and ease the sadness of people as much as possible. Our corporate philosophy “Information Revolution — Happiness for everyone” reflects our thoughts and determination to ensure that no one is left alone and that we can change the world for the better through courage and love”.
The most powerful man in Silicon Valley
The Japanese billionaire bases himself just outside Palo Alto in a palatial estate just off the Sands Hill Road.
Startup founders fortunate enough to earn an audience with Son recall being led down a hallway lined with artwork to make the pitch of a lifetime. Some were ushered into a large conference room with an enormous table, spotless marble floors and ornate woodwork. Others found themselves in a small side room illuminated by chandeliers waiting for the meeting to begin. Eventually they met Son in an intimate sitting room where a two-seater couch faces a couple of chairs and a small coffee table.
Under Son’s guidance, the Japanese conglomerate, which he founded in 1981, has repeatedly shaken up entire industries with blockbuster acquisitions of companies like Sprint and prescient investments in startups like Alibaba.
Son capitalised on the rise of personal computing in the 1980s and bet so heavily on the dot-com boom of the 1990s that he is said to have at one point owned 25% of the Internet. He lost billions in the dot-com bust, but sinking $20 million into Alibaba in 2000 helped revive his fortune. Son is now worth about $15 billion — and, remarkably, maintains his tremendous appetite for risk and long-term thinking. At a time when most CEOs look no further ahead than the next quarter, Son forges ahead with a 300-year plan for his company.
At the heart of his plan lies the Vision Fund, a $93 billion pool of money that he intends to use to shape the future for centuries to come.
If that kind of timeline seems odd, well, Son is something of an eccentric. He often quotes Yoda, passionately prepares for the singularity, and has been known to make big bets on companies based upon what he once called his “sense of smell.” He plays an active role in SoftBank’s investment decisions, and Aron recalled being told that Son has “final say” on each Vision Fund deal.
Son has always had a penchant for making deals. As a student studying economics at UC-Berkeley forty years ago, he convinced Forrest Mozer, a professor who had invented a talking calculator for the blind, to join him in building a pocket translator.
“It surprised me,” Mozer told CNN recently. “Here’s this young, little kid coming into my office with a business plan that really made a lot of sense. I went home and told my wife that I just met this guy who is going to own Japan someday. It turned out I was more right than I thought.”
Son sold the device to Sharp in a deal he said netted him “close to $1 million” — an early win for the young entrepreneur. “It was clear if you spent an hour a day with him that his mind was all on business,” Mozer says.
Son returned to Japan after graduating from Berkeley in 1980 and founded SoftBank –the name is short for “bank of software”– in 1981. It focused on distributing software developed by other companies, before branching into computer trade shows and tech magazines. From the start, Son focused on “how he could help change society with technology,” said the longtime SoftBank employee.
By the mid-90s, it seemed clear that answering that question meant investing in online companies. In what could be seen as a precursor to its activities today, SoftBank pumped billions into hundreds of internet startups. Some, like Yahoo and Alibaba, paid off handsomely, helping overshadow losses from notable flops like Kozmo and Webvan. Son bet so heavily on online ventures that people took to calling him “Mr. Internet.”
Son’s net worth soared accordingly, only to collapse when the bubble burst. He is widely reported to have seen his paper wealth fall by $70 billion in 2000. “One year before that, my personal net worth was increasing $10 billion per week. For three days, I became richer than Bill Gates,” Son told Bloomberg TV last year. “Before I told anybody else, our stock started crashing… We almost went bankrupt. Somehow. I survived.”
Son started rebuilding immediately. “When something like that happens he doesn’t sit back and sulk and become inward looking,” the longtime SoftBank employee said. Son looked to new opportunities, including investing in broadband services in the early 2000s, acquiring Sprint for $20 billion in 2013 and buying multiple robotics companies in 2017 — among them Alphabet’s Boston Dynamics, which builds robots that run, jump and climb stairs. More than a decade after the Dot Com bubble burst, SoftBank reaped the financial rewards of the early Alibaba deal. When the Chinese e-commerce company went public in 2014, SoftBank’s $20 million investment was worth nearly $75 billion.
“He likes to joke he has had more failures than anyone else, but has learned from all of them,” says Chris Lane, an analyst with Bernstein who tracks SoftBank. “Most people still admire his track record, and the amazing success he has had despite these setbacks.”
300 year “number one” strategy
Son laid out his investment plan during the shareholder meeting in June 2018. He called it his “cluster of number one strategy”, meaning investing in unicorns that are, or could be, “the number one players in the market.”
Near the top of that list is We, the 8 year old business that provides coworking spaces in 80 cities worldwide. SoftBank invested $4.4 billion in them in 2017, despite the fact the company wasn’t actively seeking funding.
“This company,” he told shareholders, “is ready to become next Alibaba.” explaining the deal which is arguably the signature achievement of his career. But Son’s future as an investor may depend on proving, as he once put it, that his success with Alibaba “was not just one lucky hit.”
It’s been barely a year since the Vision Fund officially launched, but, SoftBank has scored some modest wins with the Vision Fund. It invested $2.5 billion in Flipkart, India’s leading online retailer, in 2017. That investment yielded a 60% return when Walmart bought the company less than a year later in a deal that reportedly pegged SoftBank’s stake at $4 billion. And then there’s Uber, which SoftBank first invested in when the ride-hailing company was valued at $48 billion. Uber is believed to be pursuing a secondary stock sale at a $62 billion valuation — with plans to go public next year.
Son is laying the foundation for a company, and a personal legacy, that endures for centuries.
“In 300 years’ time, we would like to become that company that makes the most contribution to human evolution — the company that has greatest impact on humanity,” he said during a recent shareholder meeting.
To achieve that grandiose goal, Son continues pursuing bold, almost brash, deals designed to keep SoftBank at the center of any trend he believes will fundamentally shape world. In the past, that meant telecoms and internet firms. Today it means big data, biotechnology, robotics, agriculture, ride-hailing and autonomous vehicles. Son likes to say he is preparing for the day when “all sectors of society and industry will be redefined” by super-intelligent machines.
In a conversation with Eric Gundersen, CEO of mapping startup Mapbox, the entrepreneur marveled at how Son was able to discuss ideas that were “multi-decades out” before going back to “specific customers” and industry details in the present. “You can’t have a visionary strategy unless you know the details,” Gundersen said. And he has an idea what Son’s visionary strategy is. “You’re seeing him own the infrastructure for the future.”
Son’s Success Pyramid
Son says he developed his decision-making framework when he was 26 years old. And the 30 years of success is the proof of the validity of it. He continues to revise and improve on it.
His framework is based on Lanchester’s Law (which “specifies the casualties a shooting force will inflict over a period of time, relative to those inflicted by the opposing force”), Sun Tzu’s Art of War, and his own thinking
The framework has five pyramid levels, from top to bottom: Ideology, Vision, Strategy, Leader’s Competence, Tactics. Each level has then five attributes:
Son says all his decisions can be based on those 25 attributes. Let’s consider each of them:
Ideology
Road: Use information revolution to make people happy
This is Softbank’s universal mission. Everyone in the company has heard of it and is familiar with it. It was mentioned several times also during the 30 years plan talk.
Sky: The information Revolution
The sky is for timing. There are unique things to be alive under this sky at this particular time. He gives few example of some of the unique things happening during this time:
Information Big Bang
Microprocessors
Internet
No matter how great of a person you are, if you were born during the wrong timing, your opportunities are limited. The present people are extremely lucky to be living at this time and there is an unique and huge opportunity. Son reminds of the previous revolutions:
Agricultural Revolution
Industrial Revolution
Information Revolution
The Information revolution is likely to be by far the biggest one. They got so lucky to be here during this timing. The opportunity is here and it should be taken advantage of.
Terrain: Terrain advantage: the epicenter of the Internet is Asia.
In the past, the United States had 50% of the world’s internet,
In 2015, Asia will have 50% of world’s internet users.
In the past, you had to be in the US and had to speak English, simply because the users were there. All big internet companies have historically come out of the US.
But the times have changed, the internet is shifting to Asia. Softbank Group has already been making a presence in Asia for a decade, notably by making investments in China such as Alibaba, Renren, etc…
With both this godsend opportunity from the Sky(Timing), and Terrain advantage, there is now no reason why Softbank should not take full advantage of the opportunity.
Leader: In order to succeed, you need to gather great leaders.
Of course the CEO must be a great leader, but he/she must also have at least 10 leaders below him/her. Nothing can be done alone, Softbank needs to accumulate great leaders. Softbank, by looking and picking great ventures to invest in Asia, is also gathering another great leader to join the Softbank family.
*Son actually uses the word General, but I’m translating it as Leader.
Systematisation: Systematisation is needed for continuous innovation
With willpower or luck, you may be able to get one win. But you cannot expect that to continue forever.
In order to keep winning and keep generating innovation, you need to create a system where it will make it happen again and again. Some examples of the systems Softbank has already implemented include:
Accounting is divided by departments
Introduction of new business models
Without the systematisation, it will impossible to execute at a scale.
Vision
Summit: The scenery you see when you have climbed to the top of the mountain
This is vision. The leader must be able to vision that scenery at the top of the mountain. He must be able to choose which mountain to climb. By choosing the correct mountain, you have already won 50% of life’s battle. You must have a great convinction that the mountain is correct be able to have a good idea of what the scenery on the top of that mountain looks like before you climb it. The leaders without a vision are the worst ones of all.
The vision does not come out in a day or two, you must think about it everyday. The vision for his 30 year plan took a whole 1 year of intensive thinking, and input from many many people.
Information: research
“He did research on 40 businesses, and in the end, the pile of papers he had accumulated were 1 meter in hight”
When son graduated from university and came back to Japan, he wanted to start an enterprise. But it took him 1.5 years before he did it. During this period, he was researching and accumulating information. He had came up with 40 businesses. He would create a very thoughtful plan for one business, create the business plan, financials, competitor’s analysis, plan for 10 years, expected revenue etc. And he would think that his was the best business in the world. 2-3 weeks later, he would come up with another business, a business better than the one before. He would then redo the research and create the new plan. He repeated this 40 times, each time with a business better than the one before. And the last one of his business plans turned out into Softbank. He emphasizes the importance of information accumulations (research).
Strategy: Strategy is basically the implementation for the vision.
After the reasearch you may have 40 choices, strategy is when you decide to go with one of them and never look back. Strategy takes a vision into reality.
Seven: The on who fights a battle with 50% winning chance is a fool. The one who fights a battle with 90% winning chance has made his move too late.
The best generals only fight battles they know they are going to win. Son is regarded as an agressive risk-taker but in reality he is very careful. He never risks more than 30% of the business. Even if the business is to fail, he can close it down and the core business can still go on. You must be sure that your math is right.
The leader must close down, make a retreat when that must be done. It is one of the hardest things to do. This is even harder for the next generation of leadership because they will be critisized to be not as good as the previous generation. Needs extreme courage to close a business down, you’ll be criticised by all points of view. When a general has lost 30% of his troops, he should immedialy call for retreat, any other decision is foolish. Not understanding this concept will bring Softbank into ruins.
Fight: The are things that can be seen during the fight
Words are cheap. Execution is hard. There are always competitors. Things change during the fight. No matter how good is the vision, strategy or research, it is all useless if you don’t come down and do the actual execution. He mentions that all companies fought their way into their current position: Toyota, Honda, Ford, Rockefeller, Billl Gates, Steve Jobs. Vision = Execution. Execution = Vision. Why one must fight? In order to make the vision come true.
Strategy
One: Must be by far the number one
Must own the specific market. You only make long-term profits if own the market and are far ahead of number two. If you are ahead by only a littile, it will probably me only a matter of time before you lose all profits. This is even more true in the technology space. Only if you are number one, you will be able to build a platform and define the de facto standard. Examples of platform that he mentions are: Microsoft’s Windows, Intel’s CPU, Google, Amazon, Yahoo.
The company must have a #1 culture. You must always strive to become number one. A culture that starts to become comfortable of not being number one is a very negative culture, it’s very bad. Son says he has always been number one since elementary school. He just can’t sleep if he is not number one.
Wave: Do not go against wave
Don’t go agains the wave. Get the direction right. Which OS should you choose? Of course the one who will become most used. Do not choose a niche.
An enterpreneurs who succeeds in a niche is not a successful entrepreneur. The successful entrepreneur succeeds in the mainstream market, that might as well be an othodox way. Softbank does not invest on niche markets, it invests on markets that will become big in the future. There is no meaning in winning a small market. If you choose to pursue a niche market because you are afraid to fight in the main market, then you are a loser.
Offensive
Sales
Technology
M&A
Development of new businesses
etc. etc.
Must be good in multiple skills.
Defensive
Cash Flow
Cost reductions
Investment Relations
Close down a business
Compliance
Auditing
Media Reputation
etc. etc.
Many ventures today die because of financing. Softbank has a commitment to become zero debt financing in 4 years.
Group: Synergy 5000 companies.
Softbank Group will be compromised of 5000 companies. It will be a multi-brand, multi-business model. This may not be necessary if you want to survive for the next 30 years, but it is must have to survive for the next 300 years. Companies like Microsoft and Intel are struggling today as they have only a single brand.
Leader’s Competence
Knowledge
Critical Thinking
Global negotation
Presentation skills
Technology
Finance
Analytical Skills
etc etc.
The leader must posses multiple skills, and have a good banance of skills. Must be very proficient in one skill so that he can make most out of the specialistz. The leader does not rely on specilists, he/she makes best use of them.
Trust: Mutual voluntary cooperation
Trust and be trusted. Partnerships. If you lose trust, others will not work with you.
Benevolence: For the happiness of people
Recall the vision. For the happiness of people.
Courage
Courage to fight against a big opponent. Courage to shut down a business.
Strictness
Strict with self. Strict with others when necessary. If you truly believe in the vision and the good for everyone, you must become a demon at certain times.
Tactics
Son skips the following are they are already well covered in Sun’s Art of War and other literature. however Sea is a original from Son.
Sea
The fight has ended only when everything has been engulfed and remains only complete silence and peace. As the sea.
When it comes to grocery stores, there’s nothing quite like Trader Joe’s. Thanks to its mix of clever marketing and proprietary food options, Trader Joe’s has amassed a cult following across America.
Trader Joe’s calls itself a neighbourhood store, yet boasts 350 locations and $8 billion in annual profits. Unlike most stores sprawling with 50000 or more items, curation is key here, with less than 4,000 different products on the shelves. Careful selection helps the chain generate $1,750 per square foot, twice as much as Whole Foods.
Joe Coulombe was the original Trader Joe, and having started out as Pronto Market convenience stores in 1958, moved to his own name two decades later. Joe did things differently, and his stores reflected his love of Hawaiian beach culture with walls decked with cedar planks and staff dressed in cool Hawaiian shirts. Most importantly, he started putting innovative, hard-to-find, great-tasting foods in the “Trader Joe’s” name.
Value mattered to Joe. And the premium, exotic specialities he brought together were complimented by his low-priced own-label ranges which combined quality and quirkiness. In 1979 Joe sold his brand to Theo Albrecht, better known for his low priced Aldi food stores in Europe. Aldi and Joe both believed in keeping things simple. No discounts, points cards, or members clubs. With a limited range the store drives a better supply deal in return for bigger volumes, and quickly drops unpopular items.
Storytelling is everywhere at Trader Joe’s, from the hand-written signage and rustic displays, to the free coffee and sampling, the radio ads and chatty check-out dudes. Whilst most stores focus on automation and speed, this store is real and human, worth coming just to chill out. Even if you never get to visit a store, sign up to the Fearless Flyer online. With off-beat stories and cartoon humour, unusual recipes and showcased products, it’s an intriguing read.
Most cows’ milk brands today contain a mix of both A1 and A2 proteins. All a2 Milk™ products come from cows hand-picked to naturally produce only A2 protein and no A1 – and that makes all the difference.
The A1 protein in regular cows’ milk might cause stomach discomfort in some of us. If that’s you, a2 Milk™ may help. But for the unique benefits of a2 Milk™ to work it needs to be the real deal – true a2 Milk™. From cows that naturally produce only the A2 protein and none of the A1.
McLachlan discovered there was a safe and simple way to identify cows who produced milk that was naturally A1 protein free. From there The a2 Milk Company was born. Research over the years demonstrates that many people who have digestive discomfort when drinking ordinary cows’ milk find a2 Milk™ easier on digestion. That’s because a2 Milk™ contains only the A2 protein and no A1.
Today, The a2 Milk Company mission remains the same: to pioneer the scientific understanding of the A2 protein type so more people can enjoy the nutritional goodness that only comes from real and natural milk. The a2 Milk Company has products and trading activities in Australia, New Zealand, China, the US, UK and a number emerging markets in Asia.
Dual listed in Australia and New Zealand the company has grown rapidly. Revenues have grown fivefold between 2014 and 2017 when the company reported $NZ550 million worth of sales as demand continued to rise in ANZ, China, the US and UK.
Here is an extract from FastCompany magazine, taking up the story:
In 2016, overall sales of milk dropped 5%, representing a loss of more than a billion dollars for dairy producers. That caps more than 10 years of declining sales of conventional milk. Amid a new environment in which more than 25% of Americans now identify as lactose intolerant (and many more others avoiding animal products), the stuff from cows is losing market share to “alternative milks.” To stop the churn, the industry has fallen to desperate measures: A Wisconsin state legislator recently introduced the Dairy Pride Act, which would place limits on what exactly deserves to be called “milk,” claiming that many nut, seed, plant, and algae alternatives are often less nutritious, which may mislead customers about their health benefits and damage the inherent value of that once classically cow-made drink.
Why not sell real milk to those supposedly lactose intolerant people instead? That’s the promise of The a2 Milk Company, an Australia-based venture, which formally entered the U.S. market in 2015 after success in Australia and China. The company’s basic argument is that while milk may cause digestive issues, most Americans who believe they are lactose intolerant actually aren’t.
“The reality is, research shows only 4% to 5% of people in the U.S. are really lactose intolerant,” says a2 Milk U.S. CEO Blake Waltrip. “So what that leaves is a huge swath of consumers, say 65 million or 70 million people in the U.S., who have a milk intolerance that is very likely not lactose-[based]. It’s something else.” Waltrip’s big bet is that the true problem is from exposure to what’s called A1 beta-casein protein, which only certain cows produce and has also been linked to digestion issues. While it’s only associated with two-thirds of cows, the milk industry combines product from numerous herds into large batches, so A1 gets swirled into nearly everything that’s offered in traditional cartons and gallons at the grocery store.
To solve that, a2 Milk doesn’t source from A1 protein-making cows at all. They recruit farmers to corral only those capable of producing a differently structured variation called A2, which one-third of cows still do. The result is still milk. It has the exact same nutritional value any A1 iteration. Except this version should be drinkable by nearly everyone.
Cows didn’t use to cause this kind of trouble. Roughly 1,000 years ago, scientists hypothesize that cows produced only what’s been classified as A2 beta-casein, a different type of protein that didn’t cause any stomach problems. That changed with industrial farming practices, when herds were rounded up, bred often, and put into milking lines to increase yields. At some point, there was a genetic mutation that occurred within some European herds, leading to lineages that now produce either entirely A1-based proteins or an A1 and A2 blend, along with just A2-specific cows from those who don’t carry the trait. “The A1 protein is very likely the culprit creating that gut inflammation in these people’s bodies, and that creates symptoms that mimic the same kinds of symptoms you would experience if you were lactose intolerant,” Waltrip says.
To avoid that, a2 Milk producers start with a bovine genetic test (it requires a hair sample) to spot A2-specific cows, and then milks those separately, requiring farmers to segregate their herds and do numerous tests to ensure everything remains pure during processing.It’s a complicated selling point that ultimately requires a leap of faith. “I sometimes say this is . . . a completely natural innovation,” says Waltrip, who notes tactfully that lactose-fearing consumers have their own internal “feedback mechanism” to tell pretty quickly if the beverage works or not. “If I have a milk sensitivity, I’m going to know within an hour or two whether this solved my problem, and I think that’s pretty phenomenal in terms of consumer benefit,” he says. (For the record, Waltrip used to avoid conventional milk because of his own digestive issues, which appear linked to A1 sensitivity. He now happily drinks his own product.)
The a2 Milk Company’s offerings cost about a third more than conventional milk, as much as $1.50 more per gallon. Because it has the same nutritional profile as any other milk, though, it solves the alt-milk nutrition issue: The exact product claim is “six times more calcium than soy milk, eight times more protein of almond milk, and six times more potassium than rice milk.” That still doesn’t help consumers who might be uncomfortable with the ecological footprint of dairy operations, but it does help struggling farmers. Waltrip says he pays his ranches a premium to do the work because it’s more intensive.
In supermarket, A2 lives alongside lactose-free options in the specialty milk category; sales in that category have risen 16% year-over-year as of late March. In 2016, the company, which is also available in Australia and China, earned $222 million worldwide. In the first half of 2017, overall sales are up 84% year-over-year. They’re now expanding nationally through a network of different retailers including Whole Foods, Sprouts, Safeway, Kroger, Target, Trader Joe’s, and Publix.
Waltrip knows a thing or two about selling seemingly healthful groceries. He worked previously as the CEO of Ancient Harvest, which delivers quinoa-based foods, and before that as chief marketing officer at Celestial Seasonings tea. He also supports the Dairy Act. “We . . . agree that plant-based alternatives should not be able to use the term ‘milk,’” he writes in an email, noting that “plant-based alternatives do not deliver . . . nutritional benefits in the same way.” (That’s not to say that innovators can’t offer an even more enticing substitute for some people: Pea-based Ripple, for instance, promises similar protein levels and 50% more calcium than standard 2% milk.)
As with all aspiring entrepreneurs, Waltrip sees a2 Milk not just as a milk company but as something much bigger: expanding to capture more of the shopping cart, through lines of yogurt, cheese, cream, and ice cream. Meanwhile, the company already has a line of infant formula that’s doing well overseas. “Look, we started as a milk company and that was our foundation, but what we really are is a dairy nutrition company,” he says.
Meituan Dianping is China’s largest platform for lifestyle services and products ordered through smartphones. It’s an all-in-one app for food delivery, movie tickets, restaurant reviews, group discounts, among other things, for nearly 300 million Chinese. The Beijing-based company, led by Wang Xing, was created through a 2015 merger of two archrivals, Meituan and Dazhong Dianping, which were backed by Tencent and Alibaba, respectively.
Tencent has since become the main backer of the new combined company, while Alibaba cut its stake in Meituan Dianping, and instead invested $1 billion in May in rival service ele.me. Wang told Chinese media that Meituan Dianping’s competition with ele.me would last for a long time, and that neither of either of them should expect to dominate the market anytime soon.
Wang is a 38-year-old entrepreneur with a track record of failure. In 2005, he founded Xiaonei, the first Chinese version of Facebook, but was forced to sell the business in less than a year after running out of cash. In 2007, he cloned Twitter to launch Chinese microblogging site Fanfou, which was later shut down by the government amid ethnic riots. In 2010, he founded Meituan as a group-buying site similar to Groupon. The story took a different turn from here, to be sure.
“We help people eat better, live better” is a slogan Wang created for Meituan. He told Chinese media that the company will keep expanding into news areas that fufill this mission. “I don’t think I have to set limits on myself,” he says.
Meituan is now developing artificial intelligence and drone-delivery technologies, and it also intends to launch its own offline retail stores and a ride-hailing service—a surprising move considering Didi pretty much has a monopoly in China’s car-sharing market.
Fast Company ranked Meituan Dianping as the World’s Most Innovative Company in 2019.
The magazine said, in the first half of 2018, Meituan Dianping—a Chinese tech platform that expedites the booking and delivery of services such as food, hotel stays, and movie tickets—facilitated 27.7 billion transactions (worth $33.8 billion) for more than 350 million people in 2,800 cities. That’s 1,783 Meituan-enabled services every second of every day, with each customer using it an average of three times a week.
Meanwhile, in Southeast Asia, Grab, the Singapore-based ride-hailing company, forced Uber out of the region in 2018 and acquired its local operations. A few months later, it expanded its app to offer its 130 million users not only food delivery and travel booking, but also financial and other services. These efforts helped Grab hit $1 billion in revenue in 2018 and attract more than $3 billion in fresh funding to expand. Later this year, it’ll add healthcare services from Ping An, the Chinese digital health giant.
Both Meituan and Grab are what’s known as transactional super apps, amalgamations of lifestyle services that connect hundreds of millions of customers to local businesses. “We want to help millions move through the economy and up the social ladder,” says Grab cofounder Hooi Ling Tan. They may not be well known in the U.S., but Meituan and Grab are changing the lives of hundreds of millions of consumers and millions of merchants with highly complex operations disguised as simple transactions—elegant tech to enable real-world experiences.
Meituan, which views food as its core offering, is skilled at leveraging its data regarding users’ consumption habits, including price sensitivity, to recommend other things they’ll like. “Our strategy in integrating different businesses,” says Xia Huaxia, Meituan’s chief scientist, “is to attract a large volume of users with high-frequency services, and then push forward some low- and medium-frequency ones like haircuts and marriage services.” Grab uses transportation data to figure out what services to roll out next. “We’ve been bringing users to these businesses,” Tan says. “Now they can come to you.”
Success for a transactional super app requires what Xia calls “a culture of long-term patience.” Meituan is competing fiercely with Alibaba, and although its revenue in the first half of 2018 was $3.8 billion, the company has sustained significant losses as it pursues its vision. Grab is fighting with another startup, Go-Jek, in parts of Southeast Asia. In its effort to win, Grab has opted to partner with the likes of Toyota, Microsoft, and Mastercard rather than build everything itself. “We can be smarter and faster by making the platform more open,” says Tan.
Efficiency also drives innovation. Meituan’s Smart Dispatch system, introduced in 2015, schedules which of its 600,000 motorbike riders will deliver the millions of food orders it fulfills daily. It now calculates 2.9 billion route plans every hour to optimize a rider’s ability to pick up and drop off up to 10 orders at once in the shortest time and distance. Since Smart Dispatch launched, it has reduced average delivery time by more than 30%, and riders complete 30 orders a day, up from 20, increasing their income.
Uber was once poised to popularize the transactional super app. Instead, Meituan and Grab—and the companies emulating them globally, from Swiggy in India to Rappi, in Latin America—are leapfrogging ahead to build a new model for the service economy for billions of people.
Lemonade is led by Daniel Schreiber, a British-trained lawyer, who was previously SVP corporate marketing at Sandisk where he was in charge of the press relation and social media. He then became president at Powermat, where he oversaw major transformations in the industry and various features for top brands like Samsung, Starbucks and GM. He also co-founded content security company Alchemedia.
In 2015, Schreiber and tech entrepreneur and inventor Shai Wininger founded Lemonade. Schreiber believes the current insurance model is outdated, frustrating and brings out the word in people. Quoting data from the Insurance Research Council, which suggests that insurance fraud costs an average family around $1300 yearly.
Lemonade prides itself as being a gamechanger in the insurance industry. He sees technology as the way going forward “We’ve got over a quarter million customers but less than 100 employees. It’s about using technology to do stuff that humans would otherwise be doing so that as we scale our company, there’s continuously innovation and processes that we try to automate both to collapse time and the hassle for customers and to collapse cost concurrently.”
Schreiber told Business Insider that “Insurance companies make money by disappointing their consumers.It’s difficult to think of another sector where that’s true. But if they delighted all of their consumers, they’d go out of business, because the way insurance providers make money is by denying your claim.Insurance companies now are justified in treating them with suspicion, and that spirals onwards and downwards.”
“Lemonade was founded on the idea that the current state of the insurance industry was frustrating, outdated, and brought out the worst in people,” says Schreiber. “Lemonade, built on AI and behavioural economics, is trying to change that. We’ve seen that a whopping 90 per cent of our consumers are first-time buyers. This means they did not have insurance before, and now they need coverage for their stuff and a home! The extraordinary benefits of having simple and inexpensive protection versus not having any coverage is significant.”
Like most startups challenging the increasingly creaky financial institutions, Lemonade has a familiar advantage: it’s nimble. Users (currently limited to certain states in the US) can make claims via their smartphones, and because the company only employs around 30 people and uses algorithms to process claims, it can make decisions more quickly, for less money. On top of that, Lemonade takes a flat fee out of its customers’ monthly payments which it uses to pay out on claims, taking away the traditional incentive for an insurer to deny claims to save cash.
“We have bots instead of brokers, and an app instead of paperwork. You can get insured in seconds, and get your claims paid in minutes. Insurance shouldn’t be more difficult than that. In fact, we recently reviewed, approved, and paid a claim in three seconds, setting a world record for fastest claim ever.”
There’s one more part in Lemonade’s pitch to potential customers that’s a little more left-field: when you sign up for its service, the company asks you to pick a charity. And then at the end of each year – if you and other supporters of the same cause don’t make too many claims – a portion of the money that you have paid to Lemonade is then passed on to your chosen nonprofit, as part of what Lemonade calls ‘Giveback’.
Lemonade is designed differently. Powered by technology and transparency, you can get homeowners and renters insurance fast and simply, all from the comfort of your phone. Say goodbye to paperwork and agents, file claims instantly, and choose a cause you believe in to giveback money to at the end of the year:
Here are Lemonade’s co-founders Daniel Schreiber and Shai Wininger, together with Lemonade’s Chief Behavioral Officer Professor Dan Ariely, explain the science behind Lemonade, a new kind of insurance company replacing brokers and bureaucracy with bots and machine learning:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6U08uhV8c6Y
The old world was about brand exclusivity and personal service, a boutique store on the Rue St Honoré in Paris, or Via Montenapoleone in Milan. Today’s luxury fashionistas sit online searching from their homes of Los Angeles or Shanghai.
They expect new collections as soon as they are shown in fashion shows, and personalised to their tastes. In particular the rapidly growing markets of Asia see luxury brands as a symbol of progress and status.
Bernard Arnault might be a 70-something Frenchman, but he understands this new world.
CEO of LVMH, the world’s largest luxury goods business, his personal wealth of almost $100 billion makes him the wealthiest man in Europe, and fourth richest in the world, which is not bad for an engineer who joined his father’s construction company at 22 years old.
Within a few years, Arnault already saw the world differently, persuading his father to sell the construction business and move into the real estate market. They created Férinel, a speciality vacation property business, of which he became leader in 1977, just before his thirtieth birthday. During this time, Arnault started to understand the luxury consumer, the power of brands, and how targeting premium niches could be incredibly profitable.
In 1984 he spotted an opportunity to acquire a finance company that had lost its way, but still owned some interesting assets including a rather staid and sensible Christian Dior, and department store Le Bon Marche. He quickly set about refocusing the business, and reenergising its best assets for a changing world.
The rebirth of Dior fuelled his vision and acquisition power in the luxury fashion world, and within 5 years by working with other investors, he had become the largest shareholder in the recently merged Louis Vuitton and Moet Hennesey, becoming the chairman of LVMH in 1989. The New York Times Magazine hailed Arnault a “superstar who has risen spectacularly to become head of the world’s largest luxury-goods company aged just 40”.
In the 30 years that followed, Arnault’s ambition has turned LVMH into the world’s largest luxury goods business, bringing together over 70 brands, or houses, like Givenchy and Fendi, Donna Karan and Marc Jacobs, retailers like Sephora and DFS, and jewellers Bulgari and TAG Heuer. Newer brands include Chinese red wine Ao Yun, as well as Rihanna’s Fenty Beauty range, whilst the oldest brand is wine producer Château d’Yquem, which dates its origins back to 1590.
Arnault has long realised that managing such a large and diverse portfolio requires a delicate balance of financial control and creative independence. Designers like John Galliano and the late Alexander McQueen demanded freedom to create, whilst brands in the group benefit from the long-term financial approach that can nurture brands over time, and support less profitable ones to grow stronger.
He sees LVMH as a family-business, with 4 of his 5 children working in different parts of the organisation, but also seeing all of his employees and brands as part of a long-term relationship. Indeed his motivation is much less about financial results, and much more about brand legacy, saying he is much less interested in quarterly results than he is in brand health and growth. During his leadership, however, has multiplied 20 times in value.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_CbO7XIxAW4
With rapid growth in Asia, but fairly stagnant performance in Western markets, Arnault is acutely aware of the changing global marketplace. In recent years he has accelerated online developments of each brand, often partnering with retail platforms and local businesses. He has also driven rapid growth of brand stores in major cities. With a personal fortune similar to Warren Buffett, his personal investments focus on digital businesses like Netflix and global retailers like Carrefour, keeping him tuned into a changing world.
The French billionaire likes to tell the story of how “Steve Jobs once asked me for some advice about retail, but I said, I am not sure at all we are in the same business.” However Jobs famously went on to say “You know Bernard, I don’t know if in 50 years my iPhone will still be a success but I can tell you, I’m sure everybody will still drink your Dom Pérignon.”
Lilium wants to change the way we travel. By developing a new type of hybrid aircraft, one that has vertical take-off and landing capability as well as a fixed wing for fast flight, it hopes to make real the possibility of a electric plane that can travel at speeds of up to 300kph over a range of 300km – all on a single charge.
This is no flight of fancy, either – founded in 2015, Lilium conducted test flights of its two-seater full-scale prototype last year. The company estimates its jet to be up to 90 per cent more efficient than competitors, allowing it to deliver an affordable, on-demand air transport service to cities around the world.
But now that Lilium has a working prototype, founders Daniel Wiegand, Patrick Nathen, Matthias Meiner and Sebastian Born have recruited Frank Stephenson, a car designer, to accelerate their prototype into production. Stephenson has a great background, beginning his career at Ford, working on the Escort RS Cosworth. After this he joined BMW to design the first X5. Then he became design director at Ferrari and Maserati, before taking on the same role at Fiat, Lancia and Alfa Romeo. In 2008, he went to McLaren where he remained until last year.
Stephenson is the man tasked with fashioning the final look, and feel (going on what he has planned for the jet’s futuristic interior) of the production version of the first Lilium jet. He’s got some interesting ideas, such as gel-filled seats that mould to your shape when you sit, and an augmented reality canopy, where passengers can see information on the view around them as well as flight stats and other information. We chatted with him just before he started full time at Lilium this month.
At the moment it is a prototype. It’s not finalised for production. It works well because of the technology where they do a transition from vertical to horizontal flight. That transition is the really hard thing to do. But the technology behind having the electric motors along the trailing edge of the wing, and lots of them, is the way they’re doing it. So, they’re not pure drones, or helicopters, or fixed wing aircraft, they’re a combination. I wouldn’t even say that the aerodynamics are finalised. The looks definitely can be optimised.
The trick is to make the aircraft have the same “wow factor”, the same visual impact, as the technology behind it. Not only that, the interior is going to be amazing because there you have a lot more freedom. For example, on exteriors you’re tied into aerodynamics, but on the interior you’re basically an interior designer converting the space into something that’s pretty much optimised for the enjoyment that you should have going from A to B.
The team are currently working to a timeline for launch of 2025. But it could be sooner. Competitors like Aeromobil and Pipistrel are essentially flying drones, which don’t have the advantage of a fixed wing, so you’re losing a lot of efficiency. The vehicles that sprout wings and take off like a plane, they need runways and landing areas that are much too big. “You might as well fly a plane”, says Stephensen. “For me, that’s the reason why I’m so excited about Lilium because I can’t think of a better way to do it, to get vertical take-off and landing, and vertical flight combined with horizontal flight all together in one aircraft.”
“Started by a woman, in a time when women didn’t start companies.”
These are the powerful first words that introduce the story behind a brand you probably forgot you have in your kitchen right now. Kikkoman is the best selling soy sauce brand worldwide, in a category filled with many fast food service competitors that can rarely lay claim to any sort of cultural heritage – much less one than is more than 300 years old.
In an effort to tell that story, a year ago Kikkoman commissioned Academy Award nominated filmmaker Lucy Walker to produce a short documentary film about the heritage and family creed that has inspired Kikkoman since its beginning. The documentary tells the powerful story of Shige Maki, wife of a slain samurai warrior who escaped Osaka to the city of Edo (today’s Tokyo) in the early 1600s.
Settling in the village of Noda with her son, they learned the craft of brewing shoyu – or soy sauce. As author Ronald E. Yates wrote in The Kikkoman Chronicles: A Global Company with a Japanese Soul, “behind every bottle of Kikkoman, there’s a Kikko-woman. The remarkable, resourceful, Shige Maki.”
Today the heritage of the company is told through these powerful videos and the modern day translation of their longtime family creed: Make Haste Slowly. In a world that doesn’t seem to do anything slowly anymore, Kikkoman’s approach stands out. Even their marketing strategy is slow and steady. The videos were produced more than a year ago, and still have barely a quarter million views – a low number considering the ubiquity of the brand.
Founded in 1917, it is based in Noda, Chiba Prefecture, Japan. It is a combination of 8 family-owned businesses founded as early as 1603 by the Mogi and Takanashi families
Today the management principles of the Kikkoman Group are based on the following three pillars:
To pursue the fundamental principle “consumer-oriented”
To promote the international exchange of food culture
To become a company whose existence is meaningful to the global society
Innovating to stay ahead in changing markets
Like many Japanese food majors, Kikkoman is battling an ageing domestic population. Yet it is also looking to meet changing consumer demand at home, while looking to expand further overseas. Here is an extract from an interview by JustFood with chairman Noriaki Horikiri to discuss the company’s plans:
“We are seeing good growth in our overseas operations and the basic reason is that, as is widely known, Japan has a rapidly aging population and a declining number of children,” Horikiri tells just-food.
Japan’s population is projected to fall by 20m between 2010 and 2040 to 107m people.
“That essentially means that our domestic market will not get any larger and I believe this situation will continue well into the future,” he explains.”As a result, our current aim is to try to continue our sales growth as much as possible and to increase our profitability at home.”
Kikkoman’s decision to expand overseas at a relatively early stage in the company’s history has been beneficial, Horikiri says, giving it a firm foothold in foreign markets, developing knowledge and understanding of different tastes around the world.
The corporation’s first production facility in North America was established in Wisconsin and has been shipping soy sauce from 1972. Building on impressive American demand, a second plant opened outside Sacramento, California, in 1998.
Kikkoman has also opened plants to meet demand in other parts of the world, with factories in the Netherlands, Singapore and Taiwan, and two in mainland China.
“We went overseas at a very early stage, giving us the advantage we have in the overseas market at present. This was good because it would have been more difficult to grow the overseas business later and get quick results,” Horikiri observes.
The news at home is not entirely negative, however, as the company has opened two new domestic production plants in the last couple of years. The facility in Saitama prefecture, north-west of Tokyo, opened last year and manufactures the popular Uchi-no-Gohan Japanese-style seasoning mixes; while the Ibaraki plant, north-east of Tokyo, also opened last year, has enabled Kikkoman to increase its output of soy milk products, a category in which it commands more than 50% of the domestic market.
Horikiri says further domestic expansion will probably involve enlarging existing facilities, but added that should overseas growth warrant the investment, the company would construct new plants overseas.
Changing consumer habits have required Kikkoman to develop innovations that both appeal to potential new consumers and keep existing ones happy.
“There is a relatively new push to have more women in the workforce here in Japan, but we see that as a new opportunity for us,” Mr Horikiri says.
This is because working Japanese women have not shed their home cooking responsibilities, he points out. “Our aim is to make their lives easier in the kitchen and lessen the burden on them of preparing food.”
The Uchi-no-Gohan series meets that need, based on the concept it requires less than ten minutes to prepare a healthy and tasty dish. The product line broke new ground when it was introduced in 2002, but has since been mimicked by virtually all of Kikkoman’s competitors, although the original still controls around half of domestic sales in category.
And fast food options may become more popular in Japan: “Women in the US spend around half the time cooking in comparison to Japanese housewives, so we believe there will be a demand for this sort of product in Japan and that it will continue to grow in the future,” Horikiri predicts.
“This demonstrates that when we see changes in the market, we are ready to create products that meet those changes,” he added. “In Japan, a great deal of effort is going into products that are convenient for old people to consume or use.”
Another domestic trend that Kikkoman’s experts have noticed in recent years is a switch in consumer preferences for strong flavours in their foodstuffs to milder tastes, as well as a growing interest in healthy foods.
Horikiri says he believes there is “no particular secret” to making top-quality soy sauce, the product for which the company is most famous. It uses a soy sauce brewing method that has been followed for more than 300 years. The company was founded in 1917, combining eight old family businesses, some dating back to the seventeenth century. Its established knowledge and commitment to using the best ingredients available remains important.
“A lot of food companies are expanding their operations and trying to intrude on our market share around the world, but Japanese soy sauce is a unique product that we specialise in, so we have no real rivals in that area,” Horikiri says.
But for other products, entering foreign markets that have existing and established domestic brands is tougher, he concedes, mentioning entrenched seasoning companies in Thailand, Vietnam and China.
Regardless, for soy sauce and other products, Kikkoman’s strength lies in maintaining quality, he stresses. In this way, Horikiri hopes the company’s business in Europe and North America will continue to grow, wanting “to encourage our existing customers to use our products more frequently at the same time as winning new customers.”
In Asia, the company intends to step up its growth through “fine-tuned marketing” appropriate to different food cultures across the region.
There are also plans to open up undeveloped markets in South America, India and Africa. While the challenge will be tough as none of the regions have an established culture of using soy sauce in their respective cuisines, Kikkoman will try to create demand.
At home, the ambition is more modest, he added: sustaining present sales levels through creating new and innovative products that meet the needs of a changing population that is increasingly elderly and health-conscious.
In 2016 the brand launched with one style of shoe: the Wool Runner; a pair of minimal, slightly fuzzy lace-up trainers crafted from superfine merino wool. They were the first trainers ever to have been made from the material, and in the first week of trading, Time magazine wrote an article billing them ‘the world’s most comfortable shoes.’
Customers – including half of Silicon Valley’s tech bros – and investors – including the likes of Leonardo Dicaprio – came in droves. Fast-forward two years and the company, who recently sold its millionth pair, has just raised an additional $50 million in funding, valuing it at over $1 billion. Impressive given the brand spent its first 14 months in business selling just one style of shoe.
“The assumption is that innovation is about adding stuff, but sometimes it can be about taking something away and in the case of footwear it was very clear there was a problem with simple,” says co-founder, and ex-pro New Zealand soccer player Tim Brown, who first had the idea for the brand when he was playing sport professionally back in 2009. Sponsored by one of the major sports companies, he found sports trainers were over-complicated, over-designed and over-logoed and seemed to change design seasonally for no good reason.
“I stumbled across a category that was enormous – 20 billion pairs of shoes are sold on average a year – but remarkably old fashioned,” says Brown. “It hadn’t really changed in 100 years in the way it made stuff. There was a prevailing low cost mentality where they tended to make shoes out of synthetics and not very nice leathers. I felt it was a category that was paying lip service to the idea of sustainability and saw the opportunity to build a purpose-led brand focussed on making simpler, better products that were also better for the environment.”
So, Brown set about to create a simplified design constructed from sustainable materials, and as a resident of a country where humans are outnumbered by 29 million odd sheep, wool seemed a good place to start. He soon discovered no woollen fabric existed from which you could make shoes, so applied for a grant from the New Zealand government to create one.
In 2011, he left his sporting career to attend business school in London where he had time to develop the highly technical, first-of-its-kind shoe fabric from 17.5 micron superfine New Zealand Merino wool. To do so he partnered with one of the oldest mills in the world, based just outside Milan, which makes fine suiting for the likes of Tom Ford, Armani and Gucci.
With uppers constructed from material as fine as a Tom Ford suit, it’s perhaps unsurprising that the 1000 pairs of shoes Brown piloted in his initial 2014 Kickstarter campaign sold out within four days. “We sold $120,000 of shoes and had to stop the campaign because we didn’t have material to make any more. It was too successful,” he recalls.
Soon after this overwhelmingly positive initial response, Brown’s wife introduced him to Joey Zwillinger (her college friend’s husband), an engineer and renewable materials expert who would quickly became his co-founder. In 2015 Brown relocated to San Francisco (where Zwillinger was based) and Allbirds officially launched with four employees on March 1 2016.
The company, which now employs a team of 150, has evolved on three guiding principles: comfort, sustainability and simplicity.
“We didn’t set out to make most comfortable shoes in the world,” says Brown, referencing the Time magazine accolade, “but over time we definitely realised that people don’t buy sustainability, they buy great product.” And their product is certainly unique. To the initial woollen style they have now added three others, each made from a different sustainable material. ‘Tree’ styles for example are made from Eucalyptus fibre, while ‘SweetFoam’ are constructed from a sugarcane-based carbon-negative foam rubber.
In addition to these powerful community and celebrity endorsements, Allbirds has harnessed the power of an online community, shunning the wholesale selling channels typically used by footwear brands in favour of an online direct-to-consumer model. “Footwear is typically so reliant on wholesale and bricks and mortar retail, but we thought there was a real opportunity to have a relationship with our customers and sell product direct to them online,” says Brown, describing how they changed the exact specifications of their first shoe style over 27 times based on online customer feedback.
The brand initially launched in the USA and New Zealand, then Australia and Canada, and this week has opened its first London store (their third globally after New York and San Francisco) in Covent Garden, bringing Brown back full circle to where the business started.
They have landed in London at a fortunate moment. The casualisation of fashion means the lines are being blurred between work and play, and trainers are increasingly a respectable part of many Londoners’ work uniform. “It’s a fundamental shift rather than a fashion trend,” says Brown. “I think it’s created a new kind of aesthetic, a new uniform.”
That, combined with the growing collective concern among fashion brands and their consumers regarding the industry’s environmental impact, has created a sweet spot in which brands like Allbirds can flourish.
“It’s not just about shoes,” says Brown. “It is about sustainable material innovation and really going after a problem that we thought needed solving. After the oil industry, fashion is the largest contributor to carbon emissions globally,” he continues. “There’s a real problem to solve there and we need to do it. If we can put a man on the moon we can make a pair of trainers and a t-shirt more sustainably.”