Allbirds the canary?
When shoe companies pivot to AI
Have you ever heard of All Birds?
This was a company that made supposedly super comfortable wool trainers.
A quote from the CEO: “Allbirds was founded to help nature make a comeback.”
Ok…
Anyway, this was a listed stock.
ALLBIRDS THE CANARY?
As you can see from the chart, they IPO’ed at $2 billion and pretty much just sold off from there, down to a $40 million valuation…
It seemed like the market for wool shoes was just a fad…. (don’t say it)
So, what does any self-respecting CEO do in this situation? He rebrands.
Taking the playbook from Long Island Ice Tea, who rebranded to Long Blockchain Corp at the peak block chain bubble in 2017, sending their stock up 200% (yep really.)
He decided to rebrand to the hottest thing right now. Which is…. of course AI.
Goodbye boring old wool trainers, hello NewBird AI… a revolution in Artificial Intelligence (I think the nature thing’s been forgotten, shhh.)
Stock price after the news?
Up 583% in one day.
This is the efficient market at work, boys and girls.
I’m joking, of course, and I’m not touching this thing with a barge pole.
But it does tell us something interesting about the market and sentiment.
Two schools of thought here:
- This is bubble-type behaviour and an obvious sign of unsustainable exuberance
- This gives us a true insight into investor appetite for AI, still red hot
I’ll let you decide, but I’ll leave you with this.
Long Island changed their name on 20th December 2017, and this was the Bitcoin chart afterwards…
