When the sustainably-minded footwear company chose partnership over building in-house, the decision highlighted what modern commerce fulfillment optimization really requires.
The Company That Made Sustainability Stylish
In 2016, Tim Brown and Joey Zwillinger launched Allbirds with a radical premise: comfortable shoes could be sustainable. Brown, a former New Zealand football captain, and Zwillinger, a renewable materials expert, wanted to go beyond what DTC footwear brands were doing at the time, and reimagine what materials could be.
Merino wool from New Zealand sheep. Eucalyptus tree fiber. Sugarcane-based foam. These innovative materials were born from a commitment to radical transparency about carbon footprint and environmental impact.
The market responded. Allbirds became the DTC darling of San Francisco’s tech elite, then expanded into mainstream retail consciousness. The company’s first retail store opened in the heart of the city, followed by strategic expansion to >40 countries. By 2021, Allbirds went public, cementing its position as a sustainability-first brand that proved purpose and profit could coexist.
But hypergrowth brought operational complexity. Selling in dozens of countries meant managing multiple fulfillment models, diverse selling channels, and increasingly sophisticated customer expectations. The company that had revolutionized sustainable materials now needed to revolutionize how it operated at scale.
The challenge was clear: maintain the agility and customer experience that built the brand while supporting a leaner, more efficient business model that could result in profitable growth.
That’s when Allbirds realized they had outgrown their OMS solution. They were happy with SAP as their ERP and Shopify as the backbone of their ecommerce, but needed to improve the way in which they were threading the entire operation together. The decision was there for the making: was the ideal move to build in-house or to find a new partner who could support its DTC + retail model?
The Build-vs-Buy Calculation
For most companies, the need for change triggers a vendor search. For Allbirds, it triggered an architectural debate.
Micah Nelson, Director of Product Management overseeing the company’s integration and back-office technology, had the technical background to build. With six years of experience building alongside their previous OMS vendor at Allbirds, he understood order management systems intimately.
“I wanted to build my own,” Micah admits. “I spent enough time building software. I was like, we should build our own.”
Three Reasons to Buy Instead of Build an OMS
What shifted Allbirds’ perspective was an honest evaluation of three operational realities:
1. Maintenance Cost vs. Build Cost
Building core functionality was feasible. Maintaining the unglamorous operational infrastructure (permissions, retry logic, exception handling, logging, alerting, recoverability) was where the real work lived.
“It’s just the little things that really make a difference when you’re building something like this. Not the crazy stuff. Just the run of the mill: when something goes wrong, you know about it, and someone in the business can fix it without needing an engineer’s help.”
Micah Nelson, Director of Product Management, Allbirds
2. Dual Integration Maintenance Burden
Both the warehouse and Shopify update regularly. Building a custom solution in-house meant Allbirds would need to maintain both ends of every integration as they evolved.
“The warehouse comes out today and they’re like, ‘we have an updated spec: change these six mappings,'” Micah explains. “And Shopify is innovating all the time, as a result they’re releasing new APIs and constantly changing their current ones.”
With a lean technical team and broad responsibilities, maintaining integrations on both sides indefinitely wasn’t sustainable.
3. Unknown Future Requirements
Allbirds, like many other retailers, was experiencing such rapid expansion that it had trouble predicting what the business would need next year, let alone in five years, in order to best respond to their own changing dynamics and those of the market.
“You never know what you’re solving for. A pandemic hits, and now you have to ship from Canada into the US. There’s always gonna be unexpected challenges along the way. One of the most attractive things about Pipe17 was that we knew we were picking a software that would allow us to be extensible and would provide us with the right principles to continue building and scaling in the future.”
Micah Nelson, Director of Product Management, Allbirds
The company needed infrastructure built on principles that could handle unknown future requirements, not just today’s specific use cases.
The Architecture and Economics That Drove the Decision
When Allbirds evaluated Pipe17, the company assessed two dimensions:
The Architecture That Supported Long-Term Vision
“I could see just in a couple quick demos the segregation of duties and how you built the product: the ins and outs and the canonical data model,” Micah recalls. “This could solve any problems I have.”
The data model was critical. Unlike point-to-point integrations that require rebuilding for every new use case, Pipe17’s network based approach is built on a canonical data model foundation, which includes managed connectors and open APIs that guarantee extensibility from the onset. For a company that had just restructured its international operations and might do so again, architectural flexibility mattered.
The Economics That Actually Worked
Legacy OMS providers tried to sell Allbirds packages of capabilities they didn’t need: website cart, bundling, products, marketplaces.
“A lot of other OMSs try to overpackage, and I’m paying for subscriptions I don’t need. Pipe17 allowed us to pay only for the stuff we really need, without the extra fat,” Micah says.
When asked about the build-vs-buy economics and what the end result would’ve looked like had they decided to build a custom OMS in-house Micah has a clear idea: “I think it would cost me three times as much to build, and it probably wouldn’t be as good as Pipe17.”
What Changed After Going Live
Once Allbirds operations’ were up and running through Pipe17, the results comfortably validated the partner choice.
Operational Efficiency Without Engineering Dependency
The most immediate impact was eliminating the need for engineers for routine operational changes, enabling the business teams to take control of their order operations.
“It’s just so easy,” Micah says about making adjustments in Pipe17. “You create mappings, use Pippen to write new code, define the connectors.”
Before, mapping changes required submitting tickets, waiting for development work, and deploying updates. Now, it’s near-real-time resolution. “I could identify an issue, deploy a fix in seven minutes, and never think about it again.”
Visibility That Transformed Customer Experience
Moving to Pipe17’s architecture brought unexpected benefits to Allbirds’ customer experience. Previously, Shopify showed orders as simply “unfulfilled” or “fulfilled.” There was no granularity between those states, and no visibility into multi-location fulfillment scenarios.
With Pipe17’s fulfillment service architecture, orders now show detailed statuses: open, requested, in progress. When an order splits across four different fulfillment locations (East Coast warehouse, West Coast warehouse, two retail stores), each fulfillment has independent visibility and tracking.
“The visibility and structure brought a lot of value to our CX team just operationally”, Micah explains.
There’s also a critical operational safeguard: previously, customer experience teams could inadvertently cancel orders already being picked in warehouses. Now roles and responsibilities are enforced at the system level.
Profitability Through Intelligent Shipping
One of the most compelling use cases that emerged was using Pipe17’s routing logic to optimize shipping costs without degrading customer experience. Something critical for a company focused on profitable growth.
Allbirds implemented several profitability-driven routing rules:
- Route to retail stores when inventory is within 30 days of aging out (avoiding costly send-backs to warehouses)
- Identify PO Box addresses and route to the right 3PL partner (avoiding failed deliveries)
- Downgrade expedited shipping to ground when weight is under one pound and SLA can still be met. Allowing for a smaller carbon footprint for many of the sustainability-focused company’s products.
The potential economic impact of the overall logistic changes: shipping optimization alone could cover Pipe17’s entire contract cost.
“If you downgraded 30% of two-day shipments to ground and saved $5 a parcel, you not only reduce our emissions and align with our sustainability view, but you also start to get into the neighborhood of being like, ‘we’re [getting Pipe17] literally free.'”
Micah Nelson, Director of Product Management, Allbirds
Lost Orders That Stopped Getting Lost
Perhaps the most subtle but operationally significant improvement: orders stopped disappearing between systems.
“We used to have a lot of orders that would kinda disappear between the cracks,” Micah recalls. “That’s gone away with Pipe17. Pipe17 is just doing a better job validating, mapping, and going through all the steps down to order fulfillment. Any issue is immediately bubbled back into the app so my CX team can then go and fix it even before the buyers notice there’s a conflict.”
The Network Effect That Enables Future Agility
When Allbirds evaluates the Pipe17 partnership now, the company doesn’t just think about current capabilities, they think about optionality for future strategic moves.
“I think it’s like, I have access to the concert, and now I can walk around and hit the different vendors,” Micah explains. “I have access to such a bigger network now. Not that I’m necessarily using it today, but it definitely helps me sleep at night.”
For a company that restructured its international operations once and might do so again as strategy evolves, this operational flexibility is strategic insurance.
“I could launch a new warehouse in three weeks with you guys. That’s a comfort that makes me know that no matter what I’m gonna face, I’ll have a partner on the other side who can match the urgency.”
Micah Nelson, Director of Product Management, Allbirds
Just as Allbirds didn’t try to own sheep farms or eucalyptus forests to guarantee good quality materials for their products, they didn’t need to custom build an order management system in house in order to be in control of their operations. They needed to partner with companies who could deliver that infrastructure at the same level of excellence Allbirds brings to sustainable innovation.
Allbirds’ competitive advantage lives in sustainable materials innovation, supply chain efficiency, and customer experience. Those are the problems engineering resources should be focused on solving. OMS is foundational, but not what makes the brand unique. So the decision to find a partner that shared their values and vision was clearly the right one.
The Journey to Commerce Fulfillment Optimization
When Allbirds finally had to make a decision about their ecommerce expansion, the answer found in Pipe17 aligned with everything the brand stands for: partner with companies who share your values, focus resources on what makes you unique, and build infrastructure that enables sustainable scale.
“I really trusted your leadership, really trusted your software, and the product itself in terms of having the right architecture. Cloud native. Segregation of duties. Just how you built the product.”
Micah Nelson, Director of Product Management, Allbirds
About Allbirds
Allbirds is a global modern lifestyle footwear brand, founded in 2015 with a commitment to make better things in a better way. That commitment inspired the company’s third product, the now iconic Wool Runner; and today, inspires a growing assortment of products known for superior comfort. Allbirds designs its products to be materially different by turning away from convention toward nature’s inspiration with materials like Merino wool, tree fiber and sugarcane. For more information, please visit www.allbirds.com.
About Pipe17
Pipe17 is the AI-Native Order Operations Platform that unifies orders, inventory, products and fulfillments across commerce channels, marketplaces, ERPs and fulfillment partners. Backed by GLP Capital, LFX Ventures, and Blumberg Capital, Pipe17 helps innovative brands like Allbirds, Wyze and MaryRut, and leading 3PLs like FedEx, Radial, and Ryder eliminate operational chaos, accelerate time-to-market and scale profitably.