These aren’t stories about foolish founders. Each brand built something customers liked, and each was written up as a model before it was written up as a warning. The point is how much of both stories was hindsight.

Casper

Casper went public in February 2020 at $12 a share Filed. Its revenue grew from $358 million in 2018 to $439 million in 2019 and $497 million in 2020, while it lost about $90 million in each of those years Filed. In January 2022, Durational Capital Management completed its acquisition of the company for $6.90 a share in cash, and Casper left the New York Stock Exchange Filed. The losses were in the filings the whole time. The story around them changed.

Allbirds

Allbirds priced its IPO in November 2021 at $15 a share Filed. Net revenue rose from $194 million in 2019 to $298 million in 2022, then fell each year to $152 million in 2025 Filed. In 2026 the company disclosed substantial doubt about its ability to continue as a going concern, sold its footwear business’s assets, including the brand, to American Exchange Group in a sale that closed on June 9, and renamed itself Smartbird, with a new business acquiring and monetizing the GPU chips used in AI computing. Its 10-Q for the second quarter says the sale proceeds and new financing alleviated the doubt Filed. Sustainability, the wool runner and the founders’ story were once cited as the reasons it grew. They were the same things when it shrank.

Glossier

Glossier was valued at $1.8 billion in July 2021. In January 2022 it cut more than 80 corporate jobs, about a third of its corporate staff, many in technology, and in May 2022 its founder Emily Weiss stepped down as chief executive to become executive chair. In her staff email about the layoffs, she said the company had “got ahead of ourselves on hiring” and wrote, “these missteps are on me” Reported. That’s rarer than it should be: a founder’s own account, given at the time, of which decisions went wrong. It’s more useful than any case study written afterward.

Mean Business

The cautionary case is older. Al Dunlap’s Mean Business (1997) was the playbook of a celebrated turnaround artist. At Sunbeam, the SEC charged, at least $60 million of the company’s reported $189 million in 1997 earnings from continuing operations before taxes came from accounting fraud. In 2002, without admitting or denying the charges, Dunlap agreed to pay a $500,000 civil penalty and to a permanent bar from serving as an officer or director of a public company. He also paid $15 million of his own money to settle a related shareholder class action Filed. Readers who copied his methods were copying a result that, at Sunbeam, the SEC said was partly manufactured.

A case study is only as good as the numbers it was built on, and it was written after the ending was known.

What to take, and what not to

• Read the filings, not the profiles. Casper’s losses were in its filings from the start, and Allbirds reported its revenue decline year by year. Where a company is private, look for the founder’s own dated statements, like Glossier’s.
• Don’t flip the halo. “Brand-led DTC doesn’t work” is the same mistake as “brand-led DTC wins,” made later. The lesson is about judging from outcomes, not a verdict on the model.
• Ask Rosenzweig’s question in both directions. If you’d admired a practice when the brand was growing, decide whether it was a good practice before you learn how the brand is doing now.

Do this

• Pick the brand your team cites most often as a model and spend thirty minutes on its filings or its founders’ dated statements. Write down one thing the profile left out.