Plus what Shoptalk actually told us about AI, and why creatine is having a moment with women.
$39 million. That's what Allbirds sold for this week. A brand that peaked at a $4 billion valuation in 2021, raised over $200 million in private capital, and became the poster child for the DTC boom just traded hands for less than the catering budget of its last investor roadshow. We're going to give that the autopsy it deserves below.
We're also just back from Vegas. Three days at Shoptalk, 10,000 people, and one conversation that kept repeating itself in different rooms: stop debating AI and start doing something with it. The brands winning right now aren't the ones with the best AI strategy decks. They're the ones that quietly built something, tested it, and are already seeing results. Less evangelical, more honest. That was the vibe.
While we were on the floor we grabbed some tool teams and put them on the spot. And Create Wellness just closed $20M by turning creatine into a women's wellness product. A lot happened. Let's get into it.
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We handed a jar of unfiltered founder questions to tool teams on the Shoptalk floor and filmed what happened. No prep. No polished talking points. Just quick, honest takes from the people behind the tools brands use every day.
We sat down with teams from Stay AI, Forter, Airwallex, and FlavorCloud and asked the kinds of questions founders actually want to ask but rarely get straight answers to in a demo call.
The result is one of the more honest vendor conversations we've put on camera. If you've ever sat through a pitch and wondered what the team would say without the script, this is that.
Instagram post
💡Operator Takeaway: The best vendor relationships start with uncomfortable questions. Ask them early.
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The DTC world moves fast. These are the stories worth your attention. The ones showing where strategy, spend, and consumer trends are headed next.
This one deserves a moment of silence.
Allbirds peaked at a $4 billion valuation after its 2021 IPO. The deal price is a 99% haircut. American Exchange Group, a wholesale-focused footwear roll-up, is acquiring all assets for $39M. Market cap at time of deal: $26 million. Revenue peaked at $297.8M in 2022 and dropped to sub $160M by Q3 2025, nearly a 50% decline.
What went wrong is not a mystery. Allbirds confused being a sustainability brand with being a shoe brand. The product stopped evolving. The price point stayed premium while the novelty wore off. When they tried to expand into performance, it was too late.
Being first with a compelling DTC story is not a moat. Product evolution and unit economics are. That's the lesson here.
Create Wellness, the creatine gummy brand, just closed $20M led by Alliance Consumer Growth and Impact Capital. Total raised: $27.3M. Alliance brings a track record of backing Siete Foods and Vital Proteins.
The thesis: creatine is one of the most researched supplements in history, it works, and almost nobody had positioned it as a daily wellness product for women. Sales to women jumped 320% in Q1 2025. The brand currently sells through Vitamin Shoppe, GNC, and Target and is using the new capital to expand retail and double down on consumer education.
Create didn't invent a new ingredient. They found a new audience and reframed the story. That's a repeatable playbook.
While the Shoptalk main stage debated the future of agentic commerce, Tecovas CTO Kevin Harwood was talking about something more immediately valuable: getting the right boot in the right store at the right time.
Tecovas built a tool called Boot Runner in 36 hours using AI. It gives store associates real-time access to full inventory so they can find the right size and product in seconds instead of minutes. AI-managed categories showed a 9.6% revenue lift versus human-managed ones.
The Shoptalk consensus backed this up: AI's most immediate role in physical retail is not replacing your team. It is making them faster and better at the things that drive the sale. The retailers presenting results right now started building two years ago.
💡Operator Takeaway: The gap between brands using AI operationally and brands still treating it as a future project is widening fast. Shoptalk made that impossible to ignore.
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