When Bloomberg declares your debut on Wall Street as a publicly-traded company the worst opening for a listing of $1 billion or more in New York in over two years, you may have a problem.

That’s the news that confronted Birkenstock Holding on the NYSE on Wednesday as the footwear company’s much anticipated Initial Public Offering priced at $46 per BIRK share, slightly below the mid-range of earlier expectations. But when the market opened on Wednesday, the shares did not start trading until mid-day, and when they did it was at $41 a share, roughly 11 percent lower than the IPO price.

The company was looking for a market value of $8.8 billion but had to settle at approximately $8 billion when it started trading and was calculated by Yahoo Finance at $7.55 billion at the end of the first day and $7.05 billion at the end of the second day.

Bloomberg went on to report that based on their research, they said that out of more than 300 U.S. IPOs of the size of the BIRK debut in the past century, only nine have fared worse.

Birkenstock sold 10.8 million of the roughly 32 million shares available in the IPO, while L Catterton, the investment firm associated with LVMH and Bernard Arnault, offered 21.5 million shares. The investment company and its affiliates will reportedly still own about 83 percent of the stock and control the company, according to filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

In an interview with Yahoo Finance on Wednesday, former LVMH Chairman of North America Pauline Brown said her personal view was that, “They were too greedy at coming out at $46 a share… I think it was too aggressive and a bit reckless.”

Brown appeared to take issue with the brand’s apparent shift away from functionality and doubling down as a fashion brand, which she feels is “a much harder audience to sustain or to build on than the original audience of orthopedic and hippies who were living with it for a good generation,” she suggested to Yahoo Finance.

Investors Business Daily (IBD) said the Birkenstock IPO raised about $1.5 billion, giving the company an initial valuation of just under $9 billion.

Still, at $1.5 billion, the Birkenstock IPO is still the largest from the consumer discretionary sector since EV maker Rivian (RIVN) in 2021, according to the IPO experts at Renaissance Capital, as reported by IBD.

BIRK shares closed down 12.6 percent on Wednesday at $40.20, and declined another 6.6 percent on the second day of trading to $37.55 a share.

The offering was led by Goldman Sachs Group Inc., JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Morgan Stanley. Birkenstock shares are trading on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol BIRK.

Photo courtesy Birkenstock