Picture this situation. $1.3 billion in clean, desirable, unused inventory sitting in your warehouses. Your predecessor recently got fired for bad business judgment after several successful years. Your brand is in the sewer and still sinking.
There are plenty of buyers who would love the inventory because they could almost instantly sell it for a big profit, but if you sell it to them you might have a dozen lawsuits and get the ax too.
The inventory we are discussing is Adidas’s leftover Kanye West brand Yeezy shoes. Tomorrow at Adidas’s annual stockholder meeting in Germany, one of the company’s largest stockholders will make a speech demanding answers about how the company got into this predicament.
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Adidas began a formal relationship with the rapper Kanye West, now officially known as Ye, in 2013. West had an earlier shoe design deal with Nike in 2009. In 2015, Adidas Yeezy Boosts were introduced, with a long-term deal confirmed in 2016.
West had built a career in fashion design and had a highly successful musical career, but in recent years his behavior and remarks became more and more erratic. According to some accounts, people who worked with him became fearful of his violent outbursts. He is reputed to have thrown objects at folks in closed creative sessions.
He announced a presidential campaign in 2020 with a bizarre unscripted rant about abortion. He supposedly said his shoes were inspired by “skinheads and Nazis.” After 2020, Anti-Semitism became one of his trademarks. Yet Adidas kept pursuing him, and his shoes sold particularly well in North America. Forbes magazine estimated that with his Adidas deal his net worth was $2 billion .
He also endorsed Kyrie Irving, a talented NBA basketball player, notorious for his true gift for team disruption. West’s marriage with Kim Kardashian ended in divorce in 2022.
But nothing seemed to kill the Yeezy brand. Adidas stuck with West because Nike had a grip on the growing basketball shoe market with Michael Jordan and LeBron James, while Adidas had little traction other than West’s shoe.
By 2022, West had become more and more vocal in his anti-Jewish remarks with Kyrie Irving following his lead. They seemingly were trying to top each other with their nastiness. Adidas either couldn’t stop him or wouldn’t, and it finally started to affect their sales. Big retailers slowly began to abandon the brand. Sales sank slowly at first, then rapidly. Finally, after a particularly nasty outburst on Twitter, Adidas ended their deal in October of 2022. The head of Adidas was canned, as was the number one company executive in North America.
Now Adidas has a new boss, Bjørn Gulden. The company “launched an investigation” in November about what happened. It has recently been sued, and one of the largest stockholders is demanding to find out why Ye was kept for so long and why $1.3 billion in gym shoes are gathering dust even though many folks want to buy them.
Personally, I am disgusted by West and Adidas’ behavior. Key people had to know West was nutty at best. Yet they sat on their hands while the money poured in.
Now Adidas has a mess. If they sell the shoes to the highest bidders they will become valued items for resale on eBay and the street.
They can give them to poor people in Africa and watch them again rebound to the streets of LA and Chicago.
They can destroy them, absorb the loss, and be criticized for forgetting the poor refugees.
Bjørn Gulden says they will be “repurposed.” It is a “nice” word from a “nice” company.
Questions:
If you were Adidas, how would you dispose of your verboten Kanye West shoes?
When do you fire an “irreplaceable” employee?
4 Comments
A shoe is a shoe is a shoe. I’d sell them. Are people going to know or even care if their Yeezy shoes were made before or after Kanye’s stupid remarks? The shoe didn’t do anything wrong. Go after Kanye and the Adidas marketing guru that signed him to a ridiculous promotional deal. If you can’t sell them, donate them to 3rd world countries, although that didn’t work too well for pre-produced SuperBowl garb for the losing team (expecting them to be the winner). I heard that gear sent to Haiti and other poor countries soon skyrocketed in value due having ‘Superbowl Champions’ emblazoned on the losing team’s name & logo.
They are a status item are only worth 1.3 billion if not linked to a mentally unstable person. Their cost was maybe 10% of that or 130 million. Ink a smiley face on te toe or deface them in some other way and send them to poor people in third world countries so scammers can’t profit. Write off an amount high enough to cover production and distribution to the poor.
I had an alcoholic employee way too long because I liked him as a person and thought he could pull himself together. Mistake.
I had an employee who who became more and more frenetic. She stole a lot of money. Served 18 months in federal prison.
You think you know your people. You want to be a good guy. Not always the right idea.
Ye, I would have fired early on. I think.
I lost two long time SKILLED employees due to the covid nonsense. They are still alive !!!
To clarify;
Their grand-kids told them each to retire and stay home as to not catch the wuflu.
For TWO YEARS one was locked home alone in a tiny apartment and the family did the ring and run, dropping food off at the door and running. “To keep him safe”.
In prison that’s called “Solitary” isolation and confinement, the last resort and ultimate punishment for the worst of the worst in prison!
The other gentleman was left alone at home with his wife.
Both have suffered significant mental and physical decline, that, imho, would not have happened if they were using their brains and skills here at work and interacting with people.
One was already down to working 3 days a week but still active, engaged mentally and socially.
“And dying in your beds many years from now, would you be willing to trade all the days from this day to that for one chance, just one chance to come back here and tell our enemies that they may take our lives, but they’ll never take our freedom!” Braveheart
I therefore have been working many long hours and most weekends to make up for the loss of their work.
Long term institutional knowledge and skilled machinists are hard to find, and NOBODY wants to work anymore… {angry Emoji}
Was covid natural or a “PLANdemic” ? asking for a friend…
As for the “VERBOTEN” shoes, sell them to the highest bidder! This is the appeasement and permitting of cancel culture. This is what happens when you make deals with the devil.
Why do you put yourself into these positions?
We allowed and brought this upon ourselves.
Interesting how we all need to bow and submit at the altar of every fringe element and idea these days.
For many years now there has been an effort to just keep creating division in this country!
whether it is the family, politically or socially, all to destroy the greatest country and create the long sought Communist Utopia.
Karl Marx said In the Communist Manifesto of 1848, in which he called for the abolition of the family.
They quickly realized that the way to completely change society was to destroy the most important civil society institution, “the family”.
They are now trying to normalize PEDOPHILIA ! Drag Queen story time anyone?
Every week we have a new gender that needs another stripe on the flag of perversions.
How did we get here?
Among the 13 Guiding Principles of BLM we see a call for the “disruption” of the nuclear family.
Black Lives Matter’s financial controversies has the organization back in the news, and has renewed interest in Marxism in general, particularly its attacks on the family. And with good reason. Not only are the BLM Global Network Foundation—the mothership of BLM—and Marx at war with the most essential institution in society, so are most Marxists in between.
Marx said In the Communist Manifesto, in which he called for the abolition of the family. The family was already absent among the proletariat, and among the bourgeoisie, the family was a mere “money relation.”
Most importantly, Marx said that communism would ensure that children would be educated by the state and not by their parents. Communists, would “rescue education from the influence of the ruling class.” The making of the “New Man” was the priority, and the family was an obstacle.
As soon as they won their first victory, in Russia in 1917, the communists now in power put into practice these policies. “The old family, narrow and petty, where the parents quarrel and are only interested in their own offspring, is not capable of educating the ‘new person’.” Soviet schools even encouraged students to snitch on their parents.
Communists were at war with the patriarchal family, because it introduced the concept of individual private property, which Marxists hate.
We can see in these statements and beliefs the first few battles in a war we have in full power today over whether parents have a right to have a say over their children’s education.
Communists indeed tell us again and again that they are at war with the family because they know it is a handy way to destroy society. Eric Mann, an influential communist in Los Angeles, was candid in an interview in 2015 that whether the issue was race, sex, or climate, the goal is to overthrow the government of the United States.
Which brings us to BLM GNF. Eric Mann is influential partly because he recruited Patrisse Cullors, one of the founders of BLM, into his Labor-Community Strategy Center in Los Angeles at the young age of 17. He then trained her there for 10 years on how to be a Marxist organizer. So, when Cullors says of herself and Alicia Garza that they “trained Marxists,” that is what she means.
So it should hardly surprise us that among the 13 Guiding Principles of BLM we see a call for the “disruption” of the nuclear family. These ideas are now being taught to our children throughout the United States through the BLM curriculum that goes out to school districts.
BLM GNF has run into difficulties lately. Reports say it has not yet appointed an executive director since co-founder Patrisse Cullors resigned from the post, that $60 million remains unaccounted for, and that BLM GNF sent its Canada affiliate (on whose board sits Cullors’s wife) millions of dollars for the purchase of the Toronto mansion that served as the headquarters for the Communist Party of Canada.
But BLM GNF remains as ideologically committed as it has always been. It understands too, as did Marx, Lukacs, the Frankfurt School scholars and Eric Mann, that communists must destroy the family if they are to take over society.
Sorry, I tend to digress…
As for Kanye West’s comments, many were edited, taken out of context and manipulated for effect by a corrupt media. For the record, I am not condoning his statements.
Why would any major corporation look to a rapper attached to their brand?
Most all are predominantly racist, advocate violence against law enforcement and the most vile degradation and treatment of females.
If anyone actually looked at his comments, Kanye considers much of the black population lost tribes of Israel, and the “Real” Jews. White Jews are fake and only interested in making money on the backs of others, says the black billionaire. Is this antisemitic or just stupid?
He, imho, is caught up in one of the Black Liberation Ideologies from a parasitic grifting inner circle.
Again – division!
Kanye, like most celebrities, lives in echo chambers, where no one will disagree or provide balance, reason, or opposing ideas. Look how social media and the internet is manipulating each and every one of us today – as seen from the recently released twitter files, Russia collusion and Hunter’s laptop anyone? Bueller? Bueller? Bueller?
I myself will not support the new woke corporations. Go woke, go broke!
I no longer drink or support Budweiser or any Anheuser-Busch products anymore!
Coke got woke, I search out RC Cola.
“Oh you all you have is Coke & Anheuser-Busch products? I’ll have a glass of tap water.”
I gave up on Nike years ago when they canceled their Betsy Ross Flag sneakers because the US Flag is “racist”. I now go to New Balance since they are USA Made! No Chinese slave labor.
Stay Safe!