Social · Brand campaign · Sustainability · 2021
Allbirds × Travis Barker
V-IPO.
VIP meets IPO.
When Allbirds went public, the brand wanted everyone — not just investors — to care. So we enlisted Blink-182 drummer Travis Barker to break it down. From a bathtub. For obvious reasons.
The brief
A public offering. A public who didn't know what one was.
On 3 November 2021, Allbirds rang the bell at the Nasdaq, joining a wave of direct-to-consumer brands going public. The ticker was BIRD. The story, on paper, was a sustainable wool sneaker company hitting the markets with a novel governance framework: the Sustainable Public Equity Offering, or SPO: a structure setting out the company's environmental and social commitments alongside its financial filings.
The brief was simple to write and difficult to make true: get the people who wear Allbirds — not the people who buy IPO shares — to understand what was happening, and why it mattered. The Nasdaq bell would take care of itself. The Instagram feed wouldn't.
The idea
When in doubt, ask a punk.
The IPO copy itself was never going to do the heavy lifting. So we found a Trojan horse, and put him in a bath. Travis Barker was a recognisable cultural figure for an audience that doesn't read the NYT, a Blink-182 drummer suddenly turning up on every tabloid front page thanks to a new and very public romance with Kourtney Kardashian, and — crucially — a man whose entire public identity is the opposite of corporate finance.
The setting did the rest. There is a particular kind of attention you only get when a tattooed rockstar is explaining a regulatory framework while sitting in foam. We leaned into it.
The execution
A drummer and a great deal of bubbles.
Posted to Allbirds's YouTube and Instagram in the days after the listing, Travis, in the tub, gave a deadpan walkthrough. Watch below.
The film. Roughly the only IPO explainer you'll ever rewatch.
The result
A regulatory framework that made it to the celebrity press.
The IPO itself did the IPO things. The film's job was somewhere else entirely: to drag a piece of corporate sustainability governance into places it had no business being.
That, it did. E! Online were amongst those covering the viral smash-hit. Five years later, retrospective coverage of Allbirds still listed Travis Barker as one of the two celebrity partnerships that defined the brand's market era, alongside Lindsay Lohan.
For a brand whose entire pitch was to bring sustainability principles into a market that doesn't usually price them in, a regulatory framework crossing into the celebrity press is exactly the point.
What was said
-
"Travis Barker in a bubble bath explains why Allbirds going public is different."
Footwear News -
"Travis Barker became the latest star to voice his support for the brand."
E! Online
Credits
- ECD
- Lee Price
- Talent
- Travis Barker
- Client
- Allbirds
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