Kelly Olmstead

There is a peculiar kind of luxury in being loved by people who cannot quite find you. Allbirds, the San Francisco company that once persuaded a generation to walk around in merino wool, has exactly this problem. Its customers adore it. Its Net Promoter Score sits north of 80, a figure that in the footwear trade is the equivalent of a standing ovation from a very hard-to-please room. And yet, ask a stranger on the street to name the brand, and roughly six in seven will draw a blank. Love, it turns out, does not automatically come with fame.

Kelly Olmstead was hired to close that gap. She became Chief Marketing Officer of Allbirds in December 2023, arriving not with a flourish but through the side door - first as a contractor, then, once the culture had its hooks in her, as the person running the whole brand. It is a career move that reads like understatement, which suits her. She has spent more than twenty-five years in sporting goods, footwear and apparel, most of them learning the trade at Adidas, where she led brand, retail and digital marketing across North America.

She had, in fact, watched Allbirds from a distance and remained politely unconvinced. A small outfit in San Francisco was announcing it would revolutionise footwear. Olmstead had heard bigger companies make smaller promises. Then she looked closer.

What she found was not the polished machine she had expected to be pitched, but a company still behaving like an insurgent. She has a phrase for the atmosphere that convinced her to stay: "high horsepower, low ego." It is the sort of four-word summary that marketing people either love or quietly envy, and in her case it doubled as a hiring rationale. She came for a project and stayed for the temperament.

The Adidas years matter here, because they explain the calm. A person who has run North American marketing for one of the largest athletic brands on earth is not easily rattled by a start-up's mood swings. Before Allbirds she had also served as Chief Marketing Officer of Hanna Andersson, the children's clothing brand, a stint that added a softer, more domestic register to a resume otherwise built on stadiums and sneakers.

Most marketers, handed a company in the middle of a turnaround, reach for the scalpel. Olmstead reached for the opposite. Her wager is that brand building - not operational cutting - is what carries a consumer company through a downturn. It is a contrarian position stated without drama, which is rather how she states most things.

The vehicle for the argument is "Allbirds by Nature," the brand platform she helped shape. The idea is to stop selling a wool sneaker on its features and start claiming something larger. "The 'Allbirds by Nature' campaign realizes that nature is a much bigger, more aspirational position," she has said. It is a bet on meaning over spec sheet, and on patience over the quarterly sugar rush.

That patience shows up in the channels. Money that once chased short performance clips has moved toward the long form - streaming, television, YouTube, the kind of content a person chooses to watch rather than waits to skip. Her reasoning is refreshingly free of jargon: "People don't want to be sold to constantly. People want to see content that's entertaining, inspiring, and adds value."

If there is a single word doing the heavy lifting in her strategy, it is comfort. "Comfort is universal, and that's why comfort is paramount to our product design," she says - a sentence that manages to be both a design principle and a marketing plan. The genius of it is that it needs no translation across borders, demographics or seasons. Everybody, everywhere, would like their feet to stop complaining.

The through-line is consistency. Where a lesser strategy would reinvent itself every campaign season, Olmstead is trying to build something dull in the best sense: a platform steady enough to compound. Repetition, in her telling, is not a lack of imagination. It is the imagination, applied over years rather than weeks.

The steadiness has a geography to it. Olmstead is based in Portland, Oregon, a city that treats the outdoors as a civic religion and where a sustainability brand's pitch does not need translating. She earned a degree in business economics from Willamette University, in nearby Salem, before later sharpening the executive edge with a stint of executive education at Harvard Business School.

It is a resume that pairs the analytical with the instinctive - the economist who can read a Net Promoter Score, and the brand person who knows that a score is not the same as a story. Between Adidas, Hanna Andersson and Allbirds, she has now marketed footwear, apparel and children's clothing, which is to say she has sold comfort in most of its consumer disguises.