Why Adidas couldn’t let Kanye go

Taking Nike’s share of the sneaker market was more important than ethics

A week or so ago, the New York Times dropped a bombshell article looking behind the scenes at Adidas’s 9-year collaboration with Kanye West. It’s been an open secret in the industry for years that Kanye is a nightmare to work with, but even then, I was shocked at some of the anecdotes in the report. He was drawing swastikas on shoes and showing porn to executives as far back as 2013. He told a Jewish Adidas employee to kiss a portrait of Hitler, threw shoes around in meetings and demanded to be made CEO. The report even claims Kanye admitted to Adidas executives that he’d paid over a million dollars to settle with a former Yeezy executive because West had repeatedly praised Hitler at work. What’s most shocking of all is that Adidas had been aware of West’s behaviour since day one, and that the brand only cut him off once it was all out in the open. 

The big question after reading all these revelations is why — why did Adidas, one of the world’s biggest brands, tolerate this toxic behaviour for almost ten years?

The short and obvious answer is money, but there’s more to it than that. The Yeezy project was a complete game-changer for Adidas — it made billions for the brand, and massively boosted its image, especially in the US market. That must have been why it took them such a long time to end the relationship compared to other Kanye collaborators like Balenciaga and GAP. Business of Fashion summed it up at the time: “the company that had the most to lose was also the slowest to act”. 

Bigger than a sneaker drop

Collaborations are usually pretty straightforward. Brand X will link up with Brand Y, and together they’ll redesign some pre-existing products. The most common examples are tees and sneakers, but maybe you’ll see a pair of jeans in a new fabric or a puffer jacket with a crazy pattern on it. Whatever the outcome, it’s normally the same formula — Brand X’s product, reimagined by Brand Y. 

The bigger brand pays the smaller one a design fee, and maybe a cut of sales, but that’s not such a big issue. Most collaborations are made in really small numbers, a few hundred pieces, maybe a thousand. It’s not about the money, it’s about keeping brands’ names in the news cycle, so that the hype creates a “halo effect” around their mainline collections (there’s a whole chapter on this in my book, just btw). 

The Yeezy partnership was much more ambitious than that — it was Adidas’s attempt to replicate what Nike had with Michael Jordan. Since 1985, Nike had built an entire brand around the world’s most famous basketball player, based on new silhouettes you’d never find in the Nike mainline, like the bulbous AJ11 and the futuristic AJ10. Jordan Brand had its own iconography — the Jumpman logo instead of the Swoosh — and the project pretty much invented sneaker hype. Limited edition Air Jordans would sell for crazy prices on the resell market and cause chaos on release days — the Air Jordan 11 “Concord” famously caused riots when it was released in 2011 — but in the long term, the formula sold a shit-ton of shoes. Jordan today does around $5bn in annual revenue, making it roughly 10% of Nike’s entire business. Partnering with one of the world’s most famous athletes also cemented Nike's place as a true pop culture icon, not just a company that makes shoes. 

The Jordan line is way, way bigger than the collabs dropping every weekend at your local sneaker store. And this is what Adidas wanted — they needed their own Jordan to compete with Nike, especially in the US, where the brand was struggling. The Times reports that Adidas had just 8% of the US sneaker market when the Yeezy project started in 2013, while Nike had almost half of it. It’s not that Adidas didn’t know how to do collabs — they had some great projects with Raf Simons, Rick Owens, and Yohji Yamamoto’s Y-3 line, but they were niche and expensive, while the brand’s regular shoes felt tired and old. Adidas hadn’t perfected the art of mainstream sneaker hype like its arch-rival had.

Kanye West was the perfect partner for Adidas. He was one of the most famous men in the world, married to the world’s most famous woman, his Nike and Louis Vuitton shoes were legendary, and he had a track record of setting trends for anything from plastic shutter shades to $500 Givenchy tees. He was publicly frustrated after his Nike collaboration, because the brand hadn’t given him the creative control he wanted or a cut of sales. Adidas would give him all of that. 

It was a match made in heaven, and Adidas went full steam ahead, positioning Yeezy as the next Jordan. Rather than putting some new colours on a Stan Smith or a Superstar, Kanye was free to design whatever he liked, and was given the resources of a fully-fledged brand. He released 250 shoes over the span of the collaboration, and every one of them was based on a brand-new silhouette that you’d never find in the Adidas mainline.

The shoes were supposed to be just part of a much bigger line of ready-to-wear, also backed by Adidas. The clothing in Yeezy Season 1, which debuted in 2014, was so expensive that only a handful of Kanye fans could afford it, and so directional that even fewer would get it. There were shredded army sweaters made in the same factories used by Margiela, and mock bulletproof vests lifted from Helmut Lang — bizarre products for Adidas to be involved in. 

The aesthetic was pretty derivative, and the execution was chaotic. Yeezy Season 2 never saw the light of day, possibly because Zara released its own version of the collection quicker than Kanye could, and his Season 4 show was a fiasco — two hours late, with models collapsing from heat exhaustion. The rumour was that Adidas only backed the first season of Yeezy clothing, but there would be more sporadic releases down the line, like the more affordable “Calabasas” drops, presumably paid for by Kanye himself. But the clothing never came close to the sneakers, which took on a life of their own.

A sneakerhead blockbuster

The Yeezy sneakers were a phenomenal success, and after years of lagging behind Nike, Adidas finally nailed the sneaker hype formula. The demand for Kanye-branded sneakers was through the roof, and like the Air Jordan line before it, Adidas made sure that Yeezys were limited, but not too limited. Pretty much anyone could get a pair of Yeezys if they didn’t mind paying an extra $50 or so to a reseller, as opposed to say, the Travis Scott Dunks or Virgil Abloh’s Nikes, which were so rare that you’d have to drop thousands to get hold of them. The line’s exclusivity meant that every Yeezy drop was a guaranteed sellout, and the regular release schedule meant that there was always an Adidas product for sneakerheads to talk about.

A 2020 Forbes profile declared Yeezy to be “one of the great retail stories of the century”, and Bloomberg reported that by 2021, the line made up nearly 7% of Adidas’s annual revenue. Yeezy sales were on track to reach $1.8 billion in 2022, according to Adidas projections, and the Times reports that at its peak, the brand was releasing an estimated one million pairs of Yeezy 350s for each drop. It was lightyears away from a conventional sneaker collab. Adidas finally had its Jordan, and it made Kanye a billionaire.

And what about that “halo effect”? Another reason Yeezy was so valuable to Adidas was the knock-on effect he would have on the rest of the brand’s business. The Ultra Boost was a smash hit when it released not long after the first Yeezys — it featured the same spongy sole technology — and it wasn’t long before Adidas would be collaborating with the likes of Gucci, Balenciaga, Prada and Palace. The Samba, a design that’s almost 50 years old, was huge last year. It’s impossible to say how much of Adidas’s brand power came from the Yeezy collaboration — it’s sneaker hype, not quantum physics — but it’s hard to imagine the brand enjoying so much cultural credibility without Kanye, who was pretty much the most influential man in fashion.

What’s truly mind-blowing about Yeezy was how much money it was making. Think back to the typical sneaker drop, which would be produced in the hundreds or the thousands — Adidas were releasing an estimated million pairs of Yeezys at a time, and the line came close to being 10% of the entire company’s revenue. This is a company listed on the German stock exchange, with a presence in every major sport and facet of pop culture, from Beyonce to Manchester United — and just one man was responsible for almost 10% of its business. Of course, that same man was also mentally ill and obsessed with Hitler.