THE INNOVATION SECRET
Take a look around you right now. At the seat you’re sitting on. The shirt you’re wearing. The light bulbs illuminating the space you’re in. The phone in your pocket. Maybe the earbuds in your ears.
If these items have anything in common, it is that none of them looked like they do now when they were first conceived by the people who invented or designed them. And that’s because a lot happens between conception and first production for nearly every idea that gets turned into a business. Shape changes. Materials change. Offerings change. Names change. Process changes. Construction methods change. Look and feel and taste change.
As I type these words, I’m wearing a pair of Allbirds wool runner shoes. They’re super comfortable. When Tim Brown first conceived of the idea for a simple, clean, logo-less sneaker in 2009, the Merino wool fabric that has been the signature element of Allbirds since their debut in 2014 wasn’t even in the picture. The first shoes he produced, in fact, weren’t even called Allbirds; they were called TBs, and they were made from canvas and pieces of leather that he shipped from New Zealand to a factory in Indonesia, which produced two versions — high-top and low-top. Fit and comfort weren’t really part of the brand vision either. “It wasn’t about comfort at that time,” Tim said. “It was a design observation about a category that I thought was super complicated and overcrowded and over-logoed.”
Then Tim got a whiff, quite literally, of what went into making shoes, especially with leather, and his vision for his shoes began to change. “When I walked into a tannery for the first time,” Tim said, “it was an eye-opening experience. I started to understand where these materials were coming from. And what I realized was that the materials that shoes were made out of were not very nice. And I think that opened up the idea of exploring different materials.”
One of those materials was wool. “I remember reading a magazine one day about the
