Birkenstock is now an $8 billion company

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It’s official: Birkenstock will be making its debut on the New York Stock Exchange tomorrow under the ticker symbol BIRK.

The beloved cork-soled shoemaker priced its initial public offering tonight at $46 a share, making Birkenstock an $8.6 billion company. That’s according to multiple reports Tuesday evening citing people familiar with the matter.

The backstory

As Nightcap recently wrote about, Birkenstocks are having something along the lines of a Crocs moment. Both shoe brands experienced a surge of popularity but lost their luster and were demoted to fads. Then decades after their peaks, they made miraculous comebacks.

Now even supermodels wear them.

OK but is Birkenstock really worth $8.6 billion?!

Just like beauty is in the eye of the beholder, how much publicly traded companies are worth is ultimately a function of how much traders think they’re worth.

And yes, it’s pretty wacky when traders rushed to buy a stock like Bed Bath and Beyond when it was hanging by a thread.

But that’s a story for another time… (Spoiler alert: It didn’t last very long.)

For right now, Birkenstock is essentially saying it thinks it is an $8.6 billion company.

But after Birkenstock makes its debut tomorrow regular people like you and me can get in on the action. When people think the price it’s trading at is low relative to what they think the company is worth, they tend to hit the buy button in their brokerage accounts. Or if they think it’s too high relative to what they think it’s worth, they short it.

As masses of traders make those judgment calls in real-time tomorrow, you can expect to see lots of volatility in the stock’s price throughout the day.

But just for funsies…Here’s how Birkenstock stacks up to other publicly traded shoemakers: