It's not really a pivot though, is it? As I understand it, the company went bust and sold their branding to a different company that wants to do AI infra.
What I saw somewhere, don't know if it's true or a rumour, was that it was a wallstreet guy offering them $5M for if he could shift the strategy. So be bought a _lot_ of shares of the very cheap pre-pivot price, paid them $5M for the pivot, sold the shares at the now 600% stock increase. Netted a tidy profit after the $5M.
They didn't trade company fundamentals, they traded the market sentiment.
Didn’t even sell the branding since that got sold to the same company that buys up all sorts of brands. The ai “pivot” was a blatant last ditch effort to milk some of the stock. It’s nothing more than fraud.
To be clear, everything about Allbirds including the brand name and other IP was sold off. The shoe store will continue operating (unless or perhaps until the new owners choose to shut it down) under the name "Allbirds"; the public company doing AI infra with the stock ticker BIRD will be named "NewBird AI".
They didn't pivot. Their company is worthless, they sold whatever meager assets were left until they were left with only their name, and then they made an AI investment announcement to pump and dump their stock.
They should make an app that can identify any bird. Then they will be able to justify it: we always wanted to live up to our name, the shoes were a side quest.
We live in an age when a guy who designed overblown mass-market "luxury" handbags and zero tech industry experience ends up in charge of software and hardware UX at the world's most successful mobile and computer hardware company. And be grossly incompetent, but still manage to last nearly a decade.