Allbirds

The sustainable footwear company that proves convergent evolution can happen in business models as easily as products.

Allbirds launched in 2016 as a direct-to-consumer (DTC) footwear brand, and if you weren't paying attention, you'd think it just copied Warby Parker's playbook: skip retail middlemen, sell online, control brand experience, use savings for better products and lower prices. But Allbirds didn't copy Warby Parker - they independently discovered the same fitness peak. Casper (mattresses), Dollar Shave Club (razors), and dozens of other DTC brands all converged on nearly identical business models between 2010-2016 because environmental pressures (high retail margins, e-commerce maturation, brand commoditization, social media for customer acquisition) made the DTC model the optimal solution.

But Allbirds diverged by making sustainability central from Series A. The company invested in carbon footprint measurement, supply chain transparency, and circular design when most DTC brands treated sustainability as marketing. This wasn't greenwashing - it was core infrastructure: tracking emissions across the entire supply chain, publishing carbon footprints on product pages, investing in regenerative materials. The sustainability infrastructure became a defensible moat in a crowded DTC market.

The lesson: convergent evolution means business model innovation is temporary - strong environmental pressures push all optimizers toward the same solution. Sustained differentiation requires diverging on dimensions competitors can't easily copy, preferably dimensions that create compounding advantages over time. In Allbirds' case, sustainability infrastructure built early is harder to replicate than DTC mechanics copied from Warby Parker.