If you walk up Hayes Street toward the absinthe bars and modern boutiques, past the designer dogs and techies on conference calls, you’ll see them: a mysterious pair of cork door handles in the shape of two obscenely large, bare feet. 

Though they’re attached to a vacant storefront and surrounded by a gated metal prison, they once guarded the entrance to Allbirds, a San Francisco shoe empire that almost exclusively catered to tech workers. But 10 years after its peak — and its multibillion-dollar valuation — the monochromatic sneaker company sold for a mere $39 million this year, signaling the end of an era for a shoe that once embodied the white-collar world. 

Founded in 2015 by Bay Area entrepreneur Joseph Zwillinger, Allbirds shoes were touted as quality, dependable footwear for everyday life in San Francisco. “We don’t think of ourselves as a fashion brand,” co-founder and co-CEO Tim Brown previously told TechCrunch, explaining that the company’s shoes are meant to be “comfortable, functional” and “simple.” 

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Though they lacked the rigor of high-performance running shoes like the Nike Alphafly 3, they were ideal for 2010s Bay Area culture. After all, Allbirds customers weren’t die-hard athletes racing in marathons; they were optimistic startup employees gleefully lining up for brunch in the Mission and $13 truffle fries at industrial burger restaurants. 

Tim Brown, the co-founder of shoe company Allbirds, speaks onstage at the OMR Festival in Hamburg, Germany. 

By 2016, when the term “girl-boss” wasn’t pejorative and butter-infused coffee was a staple of every young professional’s ketogenic diet, Allbirds was at its apex. Its $95 merino Wool Runners were a unifying symbol among tech workers in San Francisco, becoming a regular sight on private charter buses and Dreamforce events.

When it raised $7.25 million that same year, tech reporters who gushed about the shoe’s impressive quality broke even bigger news — soon, there would be an exciting array of new colors: light red and dark blue for women, light green for men, and black. In 2021, Allbirds went public at $15 per share, reportedly valuing the fledgling startup at $2.15 billion.

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In an optimistic earnings call for Q4 of that year, Zwillinger said that the lifestyle brand had made record-breaking sales and had acquired over 1 million new customers, positioning it for monumental success. “As we enter 2022, we believe we are on a trajectory for the most compelling product road map in the history of the company,” Brown also said in the call, “and we look forward to revealing more of that story as the year unfolds.” 

But somewhere along the way — and for reasons that still haven’t been fully explained — Allbirds’ story took a turn.  

A general view of the atmosphere during the Whitney Port Hikes with Allbirds and Friends in Los Angeles on Dec. 3, 2016.

In a subsequent earnings call, Zwillinger said that the company’s performance in 2022 wasn’t nearly as successful as they had hoped it would be, explaining that weak consumer demand, as well as “strategic and executional missteps,” cudgeled the San Francisco shoe company. According to the former CEO, the brand went beyond its core consumers and chased after wider audiences by developing new colors, silhouettes and materials like SwiftFoam and plant leather. But these changes weren’t commercially successful, executives said, and they needed to return to their core demographic: affluent people in their 30s who lead an active lifestyle and travel the world.   

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According to a company news release, for the third quarter of 2025, net revenue decreased to $33 million compared with $43 million the year prior due to store closures and structural changes. By contrast, during that same period in 2021, the company made about $63 million. Not very reassuringly, executives said in financial documents that Allbirds has netted “significant” losses since its inception and will likely continue to bleed out for the foreseeable future.  

Over the last several years on Reddit, a slew of customers have lamented that newer versions of Allbirds have fallen apart after just a few months, while some said that they feel noticeably cheaper, stiffer and heavier. “I can’t even wear the new ones,” one person wrote under a November 2024 post. “They hurt my feet.” Though this same customer happily bought pairs in 2020 and 2022, they said the quality was noticeably worse when they recently purchased them again.  

“I have never had a pair of shoes do that, ever,” one person chimed in under a 2025 post. “Not even $20 Walmart shoes.”

Paper covers the windows of a shuttered Allbirds store in Chicago on April 2, 2026.

“Like most of you here, I was once very loyal to Allbirds,” one customer wrote. “How did we go from the world’s most comfortable shoe to shoes that will outright cause you pain?”

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For years, Allbirds were manufactured in South Korea, but in 2023, the company switched all of its new footwear to one manufacturer in Vietnam, financial documents show. However, the company stated that it “may be required to shift production capacity back to China (or other countries for which the U.S. government has imposed higher tariffs) due to lack of manufacturing expertise or capacity in relatively lower-tariff countries.” 

“Designing and creating products using innovative, sustainable materials is a challenging process for both us as well as our supply chain partners,” another filing from 2023 said, adding that these unique natural materials make it difficult for competitors to replicate on a mass scale. 

SFGATE reached out to Allbirds press representatives several times for comment but did not hear back before the time of publication.

The exterior of the Allbirds store in San Francisco’s Hayes Valley.

In January 2026, Allbirds announced that it would shut down its last remaining full-price stores in the U.S., including its location in Hayes Valley, and switch to an e-commerce and international model instead. Just two outlets will remain in the U.S., the company said. Meanwhile, on social media, retail associates said that they were given just three hours notice ahead of these closures and fired via email and Google Meet. Despite Allbirds’ mission-based messaging, it all feels eerily similar to the waves of mass layoffs at other Bay Area tech companies, where CEOs terminated employees by silently deactivating their key cards. 

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Today, Allbirds shares are worth about $2.59, around a fifth of what they once were. On March 30, Allbirds announced that it would sell to the American Exchange Group  — the company that owns other fading brands like Mudd, Aerosoles and Ed Hardy — for about $39 million. Zwillinger, who stepped down as CEO in 2024, now runs a hormonal supplement company with his wife.   

Much like Soylent, Allbirds perfectly encapsulates the philosophy of the Bay Area tech world, which often aims to optimize and flatten the human experience as much as possible. In this gray and beige universe, joy and beauty are sacrificed in favor of efficiency and productivity — but it’s possible that Gen Zers and millennials are finally killing the clean millennial aesthetic of the 2010s, paving the way for rococo maximalism instead. 

According to a 2026 trend prediction report from the San Francisco-based mood board company Pinterest, lavish, avant-garde aesthetics like “Glamoratti,” “Neo Deco” and “Glitchy Glam” are taking over the website’s search engine. It seems that the young people chasing after these wild aesthetics are ditching utilitarianism and are literally searching for more. They want to look like vampires and revel in ’80s decadence while wearing brooches and messy lace. They want circus-themed bedrooms, clashing colors and baroque accessories. In the age of artificial intelligence, where everything is becoming startlingly smooth and strangely perfect, such messiness is welcome. 

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In a time when capitalism was considered cool and aspirational, Allbirds made perfect sense. But maybe it’s finally time for the flock to abandon its nest and take flight. 

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