Everything Tim Brown said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Brown: Consumers do not buy sustainable products; they buy great products
“People don't buy sustainable products. They buy great products.”
Brown: Design is a problem-solving process, not just an output
“The design was actually not about the output. It was a process of problem solving, and if you applied it, you could apply it to all sorts of different things.”
Brown: Late 2000s footwear was overly complicated and dominated by excessive logos
“It was a design observation about a category that I thought was super
Complicated and overcrowded and over-logoed.”
Brown: A minimalist design alone cannot sufficiently differentiate a physical product
“I realized too, in the process of selling the shoes, the design story was one part of it.
I think it resonated with people, but it needed something more, both for me and for the product.
The product was okay, but it wasn't differentiated.”
Brown: Consumers buy shoes for comfort, but equate comfort with ugly design
“Comfort is the number one reason why people buy shoes, and comfort often is equated with ugliness, so if your dad tells you he's got a comfortable pair of shoes, you assume they don't look very good”
Brown: Founding a business brings more sustained pressure than professional sports
“It's like when you start something, this thing embeds six inches in your brain, and you don't shut it off, and it's a voice that's there, 24 seven all the time, and you're constantly thinking about it, and I, you know, I retired from sport, and I, That, that h…”
Brown: Founders greatly underestimate the complexity of manufacturing shoes
“And I had greatly
Underestimated, as I'm sure Joey would attest, how complicated it is, actually, to make a shoe.”
Brown secured a New Zealand government grant to engineer woolen shoe textiles
“With the help of you know, some friends at the time put together a grant on a whim to develop a woolen textile for making the upper of a shoe out of.”
Brown: Allbirds precursor Kickstarter raised $120,000 in four days before being halted
“Ah, and then it went on the Kickstarter's homepage, and on their mailing list, where they send out sort of interesting projects, and, ah, it went to a hundred and, you know, 20,000 dollars in four days, and I had to stop it.”
Factory erroneously produced early Kickstarter shoes in identical men's and women's sizes
“The factory's made the men's and women's shoes exactly the same size.”
Portuguese supplier went bankrupt shortly after delivering the initial Kickstarter order
“The factory in Portugal decided to go bankrupt right at the end of this shortly after we just delivered it.”
Brown: Americans view wool as scratchy, so marketing must emphasize merino
“Well, first of all, I realized that wool to Americans meant hot and scratchy. So all of a sudden you actually had to talk about merino. It's a different shape. And it's a finer material and it's softer and then you also had to talk about not just the material,…”
Brown earned more playing pro soccer than his peers did in consulting
“I was being paid a good living, better than my friends that had gone to university and were getting consulting jobs, and it became a job for the first time.”
Tim Brown
How I Built This 4