Allbirds is closing its last brick-and-mortar store in San Francisco

If the final San Francisco Allbirds store closes its doors and no one is around to hear them shut, did it make a sound?

Once symbolic of a mid-2010s San Francisco tech bro, the shoe brand Allbirds is closing almost all of its physical stores by the end of February. Just two outlet stores in the US and two full-price stores in London will remain.

“This is an important step for Allbirds, as we drive toward profitable growth under our turnaround strategy,” Allbirds CEO Joe Vernachio said in a statement. “We have been opportunistically reducing our brick-and-mortar portfolio over the past two years. By exiting these remaining unprofitable doors, we are taking actions to reduce costs and support the long-term health of the business.”

The typical Allbirds wearer knows that this kind of corporate speak is a thinly veiled way to say the current financial outlook of the company isn’t great.

Allbirds was founded in San Francisco in 2015 and quickly became the “it” shoe among startup employees (even TechCrunch staffers once received branded grey Allbirds shoes as company swag — is our current lack of matching footwear a recession indicator?). The shoes are admittedly quite comfortable, but ugly in a way that only unstylish tech bros would seek out (the white wool runners are cool in a minimalist way, though). They’re like Skechers, embracing comfort above all else, but they’re more expensive. And unlike Skechers, Allbirds did not create a line of footwear with the one and only Martha Stewart.

Like the companies that its customers probably work for, Allbirds raised enough venture capital to secure an overly inflated unicorn valuation, only to go public in 2021 and flounder. The company’s market capitalization is now about $32 million and its stock hovers at just a few dollars per share, but at least it has the very cool NASDAQ ticker symbol $BIRD.

This isn’t quite the end of the Allbirds era. The shoes remain available online, and while expensive, they are genuinely pretty good shoes. But perhaps it marks the end of an era in which working in tech seemed like the ticket to lifelong stability. Now, your company can only afford branded Patagonia vests if you’re working in AI, and even then, you might be haunted by an undercurrent of anxiety that the AI bubble might burst.

Perhaps this anxiety is fueling the next era of Silicon Valley style, in which everything needs to be as efficient as possible. Tech bros now wear Oura rings to track their biometric data, log their macros on MyFitnessPal, and eat Sweetgreen “Power Max” protein bowls with over 100 grams of protein.

In that light, maybe it makes sense that people are so nostalgic for 2016.