No different than Walmart prioritizing their store brand which explicitly copy the branding of other products ("woah, there's no way that isn't butter"). If you cant get your customers to seek you out directly then you don't have a brand.

As a consumer I like when store brands do this. It tells me what they're trying to impersonate more than the "compare to XXX" in teeny tiny print. But they're just a brand like anything else on the shelf -- Kroger pretzels are better than Rolled Gold, but their sandwich cookies are much worse than Oreo.

I did a search on both Amazon.com and Amazon.ca but couldn't find any Amazon Basic shoes that matched Allbirds. I also didn't listen to the podcast, so I must have missed it.