Eve Sleep. Getir. Allbirds. Three Collapses, One Operations Mistake.

Written By Farah Cohen

Three brands. Three collapses. Same era, same investor base, same business press post-mortems calling each one a "category killer that lost its way."

Eve Sleep raised over £35M, dominated UK mattress-in-a-box, entered administration in October 2022. Getir raised $500M, hit an $11.8 billion valuation, pulled out of the UK in April 2024 with 1,500 jobs gone. Allbirds peaked at a $4 billion market cap, sold itself for $39 million in April 2026, roughly 1% of what it was worth at the top.

Different industries. Different geographies. Different leadership teams. Same mistake.

The popular framing on each was different. Eve Sleep got blamed on the post-pandemic mattress slowdown. Getir got blamed on a promotional war it couldn't sustain. Allbirds got blamed on losing its cool. All three explanations are partially true and completely insufficient. They tell you what the trigger was. They don't tell you why the business was loaded.

The thing that loaded each of these businesses was operational. Specifically: in all three cases, the cost base scaled faster than operational discipline. They built businesses that couldn't tell themselves the truth about what was working, and couldn't flex when the truth showed up anyway.

Here's how it played out in each one.

Eve Sleep: when the data is wrong, every spending decision is a guess

Eve Sleep had the early signals every D2C investor wants to see. £35M+ raised. Strong brand. Genuine traction in the UK mattress market. A category that was being reinvented and a team that knew how to market.

Then the market shifted in 2022. Inflation, the cost-of-living squeeze, a slowdown in big-ticket household purchases. Conditions tightened across the sector, but Eve broke faster than its peers. Why?

CEO Cheryl Calverley said it plainly after the fact: the company's data had been "wildly inaccurate" (Marketing Week). Marketing contribution flipped from a £0.7M profit to a £1.2M loss. The cost base, inflated by nearly half a million pounds a year in public-company overheads, couldn't flex when revenue dropped 18% in the first half of the year (Retail Gazette). Eve entered administration in October 2022.

External conditions pulled the trigger. Two operational failures left the business exposed.

The first: the data wasn't reliable enough to make good decisions. When marketing contribution numbers don't reflect reality, every spending decision is a guess. You think you're investing in the channels that work. You're actually investing in the channels you can measure best, which isn't the same thing.

The second: the cost base was built for one revenue scenario. When that scenario changed, there was no operational mechanism to flex it. You can't cut your way out of an 18% revenue decline if your cost structure was sized for growth.

Both are operations problems. Neither is unique to mattresses.

Getir: when growth becomes a substitute for discipline

Getir went the other way. Where Eve was building a brand business, Getir was building an infrastructure business, rapid grocery delivery, dark stores in every major city, capital-intensive expansion at full speed. $500M raised. $11.8 billion valuation at peak. Operations across multiple geographies inside two years.

By 2023, the valuation had collapsed to $2.5B. By April 2024, Getir had pulled out of the UK entirely, 1,500 jobs gone (Startups.co.uk).

The product worked. The market existed. The problem was that Getir's operating model couldn't tell it when to scale and when to hold.

Three operational signals were screaming throughout 2022 and 2023, and the business couldn't or wouldn't read them:

Aggressive geographic expansion without proven unit economics in the markets it was already operating in. Promotional dependency that drove around 80% of orders, which means most of the customer base wasn't real demand, it was discount demand. And no operational discipline around when to consolidate versus when to keep growing. Every quarter looked like growth, because that's how the business was set up to look.

Compare it to Zapp, operating in the same market at the same time. Zapp tightened operational focus to London, doubled down on premium customers, and built the operations to serve that segment profitably (The Grocer). Same category, same conditions, opposite outcome.

The difference was operational discipline. Not strategy. Not vision. Not capital. Discipline, the ability to look at the numbers and make the call to slow down, refocus, and protect the core.

Allbirds: when expansion outpaces what the core can carry

Allbirds is the freshest of the three. The fire sale was four weeks ago. The post-mortem is still being written.

Allbirds peaked at a $4 billion market cap. In April 2026, it sold itself for $39 million, about 1% of peak. Two weeks later, the buyer announced an "AI pivot" that briefly added $127 million in market cap to the parent (CNBC). Whatever happens next, the original Allbirds is over.

The official narrative is that Allbirds lost its cool, that the sustainable-shoe niche stopped being a moment, and the brand couldn't adapt. That's true at the surface. Underneath, the same operating-model failure is visible.

The numbers tell the story. Allbirds peaked at $297.8M in revenue (Babson Thought & Action), a fraction of comparable footwear scale (On, Hoka, Brooks were all multiples larger). And it burned $471M getting there. The business was being run as if mass-market scale was inevitable, while the operating reality said it was a niche product in a small slice of the US market.

That mismatch played out in three operational decisions, each of which compounded the next. Marketing kept doubling down on sustainability virtues even as analysts pointed out, year after year, that customers didn't buy shoes for the carbon story, they bought them because they were comfortable. The brand was selling one thing while the customer was buying another. SKU expansion went sideways before the core product was healthy: leggings made of merino wool that turned see-through when wet, performance-oriented running shoes, puffer jackets, all launched while the core shoe was getting dismissed by reviewers as "passé." And the cost structure assumed scale that wasn't coming, which meant every quarter of slower-than-planned growth widened the gap between what the business cost to run and what it actually generated.

By the time the company tried to course-correct, the moment was gone. The April 2026 AI pivot, done by the buyer, not the original team, was less a strategy than an admission that the operating story had failed.

The one mistake

Three brands. Three categories. Three different leadership teams. One pattern.

In all three cases, the business scaled its cost base before it scaled its operational discipline. And in all three cases, the operating model couldn't tell the leadership team what was actually true: which channels were working, which products were carrying the brand, which markets were profitable, which spending was discretionary versus structural.

That's the through-line. Not strategy. Not product. Not market timing. Operational truth-telling.

When the operating model is healthy, the business has reliable answers to the questions that matter: where the margin is, what's working, what to cut, when to scale, when to hold. When it's not, the business runs on narrative, and narrative is what eventually kills high-growth companies.

Eve Sleep ran on the narrative that its marketing was working, until the data came back and said it wasn't. Getir ran on the narrative that growth was the proof of the business model, until the cash ran out. Allbirds ran on the narrative that the brand was bigger than its addressable market, until the addressable market said otherwise.

In each case, the operational infrastructure could have surfaced the truth earlier. In each case, it didn't.

What this looks like at your stage

You're not running a $4 billion brand. The Allbirds and Getir collapses look distant from a £10M D2C operation or a £20M B2B SaaS business. They shouldn't.

The same pattern shows up at smaller scale, with smaller numbers, every week:

The £8M brand whose marketing dashboard says one thing and whose finance close says another. The £15M business that keeps adding SKUs because growth has flattened, instead of fixing why it flattened. The Series B founding team who can't tell you the unit economics of the most recent geographic expansion because the data is in three different systems and no one has reconciled it. The leadership team running on conviction because the data is too noisy to argue with conviction.

They're operational problems, not strategy. And they compound, slowly, quietly, often invisibly, until something external triggers the collapse and everyone calls it bad luck.

The fix is unglamorous. It's the work that doesn't get talked about at conferences. It's reliable financial close, weekly. It's a cost structure that's mapped to revenue scenarios, including the scenarios where revenue drops. It's a single source of truth on unit economics, by channel and by SKU. It's an operating rhythm where leadership looks at the same numbers, draws the same conclusions, and makes decisions the same way week to week.

It's the operational backbone. The thing that lets a business tell itself the truth.

Where to start

If any of this feels familiar, the dashboards that don't reconcile, the cost base that can't flex, the strategy meeting that runs on conviction because the data is too messy to settle the argument, that's the signal.

The Ops Diagnostic takes 10 minutes, it's free, and it surfaces where the operational truth-telling is breaking down.

→ Take the Ops Diagnostic

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At The Engine Room, we unpack what operational excellence really looks like, because growth isn't magic, it's method. If you're scaling and the cracks are starting to show, get in touch.

Farah Cohen
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Operations Break Three Times. Here's When.