Tim Brown, co-founder of Allbirds, explains how he shifted his messaging to pitch wool shoes to American consumers who initially perceived wool as hot and scratchy.
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“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, you actually had to talk about the benefits of the material.”
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