When Amazon copies you: A response from Allbirds CEO to Jeff Bezos.

While America was built on capitalism where “the person with the most toys wins”, Americans also love the narrative of an underdog grinding away day after day to outperform market incumbents.

While the underdog narrative is especially compelling in physical competition (take nearly any motivational sports movie… Rocky, the Replacements, etc…) things can be much more difficult in business., especially when you’re going up against an industry giant.

With more resources at their disposal, Facebook has copied apps and features from competitors. In similar fashion, Amazon uses it’s sales data to identify which products to create on its own.

Recently, Amazon released a shoe that resembles Allbirds most popular shoe at a much lower price point and supporters of small businesses took notice. Though, in doing so, they forgot to copy the most important feature of the sneaker, sustainability.

In response, Joey Zwillinger (Allbirds CEO) wrote a letter to Jeff Bezos on Medium encouraging collaboration.

It’s worth the read…

Adam

PS: Check out this phenomenally informative video of how to knock off a Saddleback briefcase.