Five Days
It took five days. That's the number Bjørn Gulden keeps returning to — the interval between his first morning as CEO of adidas, on January 2, 2023, and the moment he overruled his own organization's production schedule for the Samba, a fifty-three-year-old indoor football shoe that was, at that precise moment, beginning to catch fire on the streets of London and Copenhagen and Brooklyn. The previous management had penciled in a production ramp for the second half of 2024. Gulden moved it up by eighteen months. "It took five days to say: 'Hey, we're scaling production,'" he later recalled, "and then to get the people that told me no to change their minds."
The decision was trivially simple and enormously revealing. Simple because demand signals were obvious — sell-through rates, social media velocity, the unmistakable sight of a silhouette moving from niche to mainstream in real time. Revealing because it laid bare the organizational paralysis that had overtaken one of the world's most storied sports brands. Adidas in January 2023 was a company that could not say yes to its own good fortune. It had just terminated the most profitable collaboration in sneaker history — the Yeezy partnership with Ye, formerly Kanye West — writing off a business that at its peak accounted for roughly 8% of total revenue. It was sitting on approximately $1.3 billion worth of unsellable Yeezy inventory. Its share price had cratered to a decade low. Four profit warnings in under a year. Russia, once its largest direct-to-consumer market, shuttered after the invasion of Ukraine. China, which before the pandemic had been the brand's fastest-growing region, was decelerating. The narrative in Herzogenaurach — the small Bavarian town of 24,000 that has served as adidas's headquarters since Adolf Dassler stitched his first track spikes there in the 1920s — was existential.
And yet the Samba was selling. The Gazelle was selling. An archive of terrace silhouettes stretching back half a century was suddenly, improbably, the hottest product category in global footwear. The turnaround story of adidas is, in one telling, a story about a CEO who arrived at exactly the right moment. But the deeper story — the one that explains why the brand had anything left to save — is about what a seventy-five-year accumulation of cultural capital looks like when it compounds, and what happens when an organization gets out of its own way long enough to let it.
By the Numbers
adidas at a Glance — FY 2024
€23.7BNet revenue (FY 2024)
~€1.3BOperating profit (FY 2024 est.)
€36B+Market capitalization (late 2024)
~59,000Employees worldwide
130%+Share price increase since Oct 2022 low
~10%Revenue growth rate (FY 2024, currency-neutral)
2,200+Own-retail stores globally
1949Year founded by Adolf 'Adi' Dassler
The Brothers' War
Every great sports brand has an origin mythology. Nike has the waffle iron. Under Armour has the sweat-soaked compression shirt. Adidas has something darker: a family torn apart by war, ideology, and the furnace heat of shared ambition.
Adolf "Adi" Dassler and his older brother Rudolf began making athletic shoes together in the 1920s in Herzogenaurach, operating out of their mother's laundry room. Both brothers joined the Nazi Party — a fact the company has never fully reckoned with — and their small shoe business survived the war years by manufacturing boots for the Wehrmacht. The fracture came during the Allied bombing of their hometown. The Dassler brothers, their wives, and their children huddled together in a bunker, and whatever happened in that confined space — the accounts vary, none are flattering — the relationship was destroyed beyond repair. As Barbara Smit documents in
Sneaker Wars, the definitive account of the feud, the bitterness became so total that it split the town itself. You were adidas or you were Puma. The butcher, the baker, the pub you drank in — everything sorted by tribal allegiance to one brother or the other.
Adi Dassler — small, meticulous, obsessive about the mechanics of athletic footwear in a way that verged on monastic — founded adidas in 1949, the name a portmanteau of his nickname and surname. Rudolf, larger and more gregarious, set up Puma on the other side of the Aurach River. The brothers reportedly never spoke again.
What Adi built was, at its core, an innovation company. The lightweight screw-in studs he designed for the West German football team that won the 1954 World Cup final — the "Miracle of Bern" — were not merely clever engineering. They were the first proof point of a thesis that would define adidas for decades: that the brand's credibility flowed from the feet of athletes at the moment of their greatest performance. The product was the marketing. The pitch was the podium.
Horst and the Invention of Sports Marketing
If Adi Dassler was the craftsman, his son Horst was the dealmaker — and arguably the single most consequential figure in the commercialization of global sport. Born in 1936, Horst grew up in the workshop, absorbing his father's obsession with product but developing an entirely different instinct: he understood that sport was becoming a media spectacle, and that whoever controlled the relationships with athletes, federations, and Olympic committees would control the economic value flowing through the system.
Operating out of a factory in Landersheim, France — far enough from Herzogenaurach to build his own power base — Horst pioneered what we now call sports sponsorship. As Harvard Business School professor Geoffrey Jones has detailed, Horst cultivated relationships not just with individual athletes but with national associations and the Olympic movement itself. He was among the first to grasp that equipping an athlete wasn't charity; it was an investment whose return was measured in global television impressions. By the 1972 Munich Olympics, adidas shoes were on the feet of athletes across dozens of countries, and Horst had become a behind-the-scenes power broker whose influence extended to FIFA and the International Olympic Committee. He helped create the template that every modern sports brand — including the one
Phil Knight was building in Oregon — would eventually follow.
By 1975, Adidas is really big. The question is: is this an innovation story or a marketing story? Which was the most important in the firm's growth?
The answer, of course, is that the question contains its own resolution. Adidas was the first company to demonstrate that in sporting goods, product innovation and marketing are not separate functions — they are a single flywheel. The innovation earns the athlete's trust. The athlete's victory earns the consumer's attention. The consumer's purchase funds the next generation of innovation. Horst Dassler didn't just build a marketing machine; he built the conceptual architecture that every competitor would spend the next fifty years trying to replicate.
But Horst died in 1987, at fifty-one, of cancer. And with him died the connective tissue — the personal relationships, the political instincts, the willingness to operate in morally ambiguous territory — that had held the entire system together. The company he left behind was, it turned out, dangerously dependent on a single irreplaceable human.
The Wilderness Years
The decade after Horst's death is a study in what happens when a founder-driven company loses its founder without building institutional capability to replace him. The Dassler family sold adidas in 1989 to the French industrialist Bernard Tapie, who was at the time a flamboyant politician and business magnate. Tapie leveraged himself into oblivion, was convicted of corruption in an unrelated football match-fixing scandal, and by 1993, adidas was losing close to $100 million a year. The brand that had once monopolized the Olympic podium was being outrun in its own backyard — by Nike in America, by rising competitors everywhere else.
Robert Louis-Dreyfus arrived as CEO in 1993 with a mandate to either fix the company or preside over its liquidation. A scion of the French commodities dynasty and a veteran of the Saatchi & Saatchi advertising wars, Louis-Dreyfus was not a product person. He was a restructuring artist. He slashed costs, refocused the brand on key categories, and — crucially — took the company public on the Paris and Frankfurt stock exchanges in 1995, giving adidas the capital structure to compete again. The turnaround was real: by 1997, revenue had more than doubled and the stock was a European darling.
Key CEO transitions and strategic reorientations
1949Adolf "Adi" Dassler founds adidas in Herzogenaurach, Germany.
1987Horst Dassler dies; family begins losing grip on the company.
1989Dassler family sells to Bernard Tapie.
1993Robert Louis-Dreyfus takes over; adidas losing ~$100M/year.
1995IPO on Paris and Frankfurt exchanges.
2001Herbert Hainer becomes CEO; 15-year tenure begins.
2016Kasper Rorsted named CEO; digital and DTC pivot accelerates.
2023Bjørn Gulden takes over amid Yeezy crisis.
But the deeper structural challenge wasn't about cost discipline. It was about North America — the single largest sportswear market on earth, the market that Nike had made its fortress. Adidas had essentially ceded the American consumer to Nike during the chaos of the late 1980s and 1990s, and no amount of European football credibility could paper over the absence. The brand that had put the shoes on Jesse Owens's feet in 1936, that had been the sneaker of choice for Run-DMC in the 1980s, had become, in the world's most important consumer market, an afterthought.
The Sneaker as Cultural Object
To understand what adidas has — and what its competitors are perpetually trying to build — you need to understand a peculiar fact about the company's archive. No other athletic brand possesses anything like it.
The Superstar debuted in 1970 as a basketball shoe — the first all-leather low-top sneaker in the sport — and was adopted by hip-hop culture in the 1980s after Run-DMC wore them unlaced onstage and then cut a deal with adidas in 1986, creating one of the first-ever athlete (or, more accurately, artist) endorsement deals in the sneaker industry. The Stan Smith, originally a tennis shoe designed for the French player Robert Haillet and later renamed for the American champion, has sold over 70 million pairs since the 1970s, making it arguably the most commercially successful single sneaker silhouette in history. The Samba, designed in 1950 for football players training on frozen indoor pitches, migrated to British football terraces in the 1970s and 1980s, where it became an emblem of casual culture — the subculture of working-class football fans who dressed in European sportswear brands as a form of tribal identity.
The Gazelle. The Campus. The SL 72. The Spezial range. These are not retro reissues of products that once served a functional purpose. They are cultural artifacts — objects whose meaning has been layered and relayered by decades of subcultural adoption, each generation recontextualizing the same silhouette for its own purposes. British terrace culture. New York hip-hop. Berlin techno. Parisian street style. Each wave deposits another stratum of authenticity that cannot be manufactured or purchased. It can only be accumulated over time.
This is adidas's deepest moat, and it is one that even Nike — with its vastly larger marketing budget and its unmatched roster of athlete endorsements — cannot replicate. Nike's cultural capital is largely aspirational and top-down, flowing from the brand through celebrity endorsements to consumers. Adidas's cultural capital is archaeological and bottom-up — it exists in the archive itself, in the accumulated decisions of millions of people who chose these silhouettes for reasons the company neither orchestrated nor controlled. The brand is a palimpsest. Every layer makes the next one possible.
The Yeezy Trap
Which makes the Yeezy era — roughly 2015 to 2022 — both the company's greatest commercial triumph and its most dangerous strategic dependency. The partnership between adidas and Kanye West, brokered in significant part by adidas executive Jon Wexler, was a response to a real problem: by the mid-2010s, adidas had regained cultural credibility in Europe through its lifestyle and terrace categories but remained a distant second to Nike in the American sneaker market, particularly in the "hype" segment driven by limited releases and celebrity collaborations.
Yeezy changed that. The Yeezy Boost 350, built on adidas's proprietary Boost cushioning technology, became one of the most coveted sneakers of the decade. At its peak, the Yeezy line was generating close to $2 billion in annual revenue for adidas, accounting for roughly 8% of the company's total sales and a significantly higher share of its profit, given the premium pricing. Adidas's stock price rose by over 250% between 2015 and its 2021 peak, and the Yeezy collaboration was the single most visible driver of that performance.
But the dependency was structural, not just financial. Yeezy had become adidas's primary connection to American sneaker culture — the heat source that kept the broader brand relevant in a market where Nike's Jordan
Brand, its Nike SB line, and its deep roster of collaborations with designers like Virgil Abloh created an almost impregnable cultural moat. Without Yeezy, what was adidas in America?
The answer arrived with brutal clarity in October 2022, when Ye's escalating pattern of antisemitic public statements forced adidas to terminate the partnership. The company's share price dropped to its lowest level in a decade. The roughly $1.3 billion in unsold Yeezy inventory sat in warehouses like a toxic asset — too valuable to destroy, too politically radioactive to sell without careful navigation. Four profit warnings followed in less than a year. CEO Kasper Rorsted, who had been hired in 2016 from Henkel to drive a digital transformation and improve profitability, announced his departure. The narrative, inside the company and out, was of a brand in freefall.
We started 2023 with lots of negative reports. People said things like 'there is no innovation'; 'there are no hot products and there is no brand heat'; 'there's no talent.' It was a difficult start.
The Norwegian Who Understood Shoes
Bjørn Gulden is not the archetype you expect at the top of a €36 billion company. A former professional footballer who played in the Norwegian top division, he carries himself with the easy physicality of someone whose first language is sport, not spreadsheets. His Instagram bio reads "Life is Good!" — and this is either disarming or alarming, depending on your tolerance for executive optimism. He wore blue-and-yellow SL 72s to his Footwear News photo shoot. In a business where CEOs increasingly speak the bloodless dialect of "digital ecosystems" and "consumer journeys," Gulden talks about shoes. He picks them up. He turns them over. He tells you what the midsole compound feels like underfoot.
He had worked at adidas before — from 1992 to 1999, including a stint as senior vice president of apparel and accessories — then spent nearly a decade running Puma, where he was widely credited with reviving the brand from near-irrelevance. Taking the top job at adidas in January 2023, at fifty-eight, he was returning to a company he knew intimately, but one that had transformed, and not entirely for the better, in his absence.
The Rorsted era had been defined by a strategic framework called "Creating the New" and later "Own the Game," which prioritized direct-to-consumer sales, e-commerce, and digital transformation. On paper, the logic was impeccable — Nike was executing a similar pivot, and the margin advantages of DTC over wholesale were well-understood. In practice, the push had alienated wholesale partners, concentrated risk in the company's own retail channels, and — critically — created an organizational culture that optimized for commercial KPIs at the expense of product intuition. The company had become, in the view of people who worked there, a machine that knew the price of everything and the cultural value of nothing.
What Bjørn brings is essentially two things: his obsession about product and his completely different approach to wholesale partners than the previous regime.
Gulden's first moves were instructive. The Samba scaling decision was the most visible, but it was part of a broader pattern: he empowered creative teams to make product decisions without running them through layers of commercial approval. He rebuilt wholesale relationships that the DTC push had damaged. He decided to sell the remaining Yeezy inventory at cost rather than destroy it, donating a portion of the proceeds to charity — a pragmatic resolution to a problem that had no clean answer. And he placed a bet on something his predecessors had undervalued: the power of athletes.
The Athlete Thesis, Redux
The terrace revival — Sambas, Gazelles, Spezials flooding the streets of every major Western city — was the near-term story. But Gulden understood that a brand built entirely on lifestyle heritage is a brand with a ceiling. Adidas's foundational identity is performance sport. If it loses that, it becomes a fashion label — subject to the brutal cyclicality of trends, with no structural moat against the next streetwear brand that captures the moment.
So alongside the terrace push, Gulden accelerated investment in athlete partnerships. The Anthony Edwards 1, a basketball sneaker built around the young Minnesota Timberwolves star, launched at $100 — a deliberately accessible price point in a category where Nike's top-tier signatures often exceed $200. The strategy was explicit: use athletes not primarily as marketing billboards but as genuine product collaborators whose on-court performance authenticates the technology.
This is, in a sense, a return to first principles — to the Adi Dassler thesis that the podium is the best advertisement. But it requires something that the Rorsted era had deprioritized: a genuine, relational investment in athletes as partners rather than as marketing inputs. Gulden, the former professional footballer, brings a credibility to these relationships that a consumer-goods CEO cannot. He speaks their language. He watches their games. He picks up the phone.
The opening of a large creation center in Los Angeles in 2024 was the organizational expression of this bet. If North America is the critical battleground — and it is — then adidas needs a local creative engine that can develop product and storytelling with an American sensibility, not just translate German engineering for the U.S. market. Nike's current struggles — a slowing innovation pipeline, a CEO change that underscores internal uncertainty — have opened a window. Whether adidas can climb through it before Nike's institutional immune system kicks in is the central strategic question of the next five years.
The Terrace Paradox
Here is the tension at the heart of the adidas comeback, the contradiction that the upbeat share price obscures: the company's resurgence is built disproportionately on a category — retro lifestyle silhouettes — that is, by its nature, cyclical.
The Samba and Gazelle are having a moment. But "moments" end. The same terrace silhouettes that are driving growth in 2023 and 2024 will, at some point, cool. Consumer taste in sneakers moves in cycles that rarely exceed three to five years, and the speed of social media has compressed those cycles further. Adidas has been here before: the Stan Smith went through a mega-cycle in 2014–2016, driven by a deliberate seeding strategy that saw adidas pull the shoe from the market entirely before relaunching it in limited quantities through fashion channels. It worked brilliantly — until it didn't, and the company needed Yeezy to fill the void.
The question is whether Gulden's adidas has learned the lesson. The early signs suggest a more disciplined approach to lifecycle management: controlling distribution tightly, limiting the number of colorways, pulling silhouettes before they saturate. But the structural incentive — quarterly earnings expectations from a publicly traded company, wholesale partners clamoring for the hot shoe — pulls relentlessly toward over-distribution. Managing this tension is not a one-time decision. It is a permanent operating discipline, and it is one that Nike, under its previous leadership, conspicuously failed to maintain, flooding its own marketplace with Air Force 1s and Dunks until both silhouettes lost their cultural premium.
Two Towns, One River
Herzogenaurach in 2024 is no longer a divided town — the Dassler feud has faded from living memory, and adidas and Puma coexist in something like professional détente. But the geographic proximity remains symbolically potent. The global sporting goods industry, worth roughly $340 billion by 2024, is effectively controlled from three nerve centers: Beaverton, Oregon (Nike); Herzogenaurach (adidas and Puma); and, increasingly, a constellation of insurgent headquarters from Shanghai to Boston to Copenhagen. Between adidas and Puma alone, annual sales exceeded $30 billion even during the catastrophic pandemic year of 2020.
Puma, under Gulden's former leadership, had staged its own comeback — posting a 3% sales increase in Q4 2020 while adidas's profits cratered, prompting Bank of America to call it "a highly under-penetrated brand" with "high growth potential" in North America and Asia-Pacific. The crosstown rivalry, once a blood feud between brothers, has become a sophisticated competitive chess match between professional managers who study each other's playbooks with clinical intensity. Gulden knows the Puma machine from the inside. His successor there knows that Gulden knows.
The broader competitive landscape is even more crowded. New Balance, privately held and playing the heritage-lifestyle game with remarkable precision, has emerged as a genuine third force. On Running and Hoka have claimed the performance running category with technology-first strategies that echo adidas's own founding ethos. Lululemon has expanded from yoga pants into shoes and menswear. The $340 billion market is growing, but so is the number of credible players dividing it.
The Plus One Effect
Adidas's 2024 Annual Report is titled around a concept the company calls "the Plus One Effect" — the idea that the brand's purpose is not merely to outfit athletes but to "highlight the influence each of us has in uplifting others in sport." It is part of the broader "You Got This" campaign, introduced in 2024, which positions adidas as "counteracting an atmosphere of pressure and stress" and "transforming self-doubt to self-belief and pressure to joy."
This is, obviously, marketing language. But it points to something real about where the brand is trying to position itself in the cultural landscape. Nike's brand identity, forged in the crucible of
Michael Jordan and Bo Jackson and "Just Do It," is fundamentally about individual greatness — the lone athlete transcending limitations through sheer will. It is an American mythology, and it has been extraordinarily powerful. Adidas, perhaps because of its European roots, perhaps because of the communal nature of football culture, has always carried a subtly different emotional register — more collective, more playful, more attuned to the social fabric that surrounds sport rather than just the individual performance at its center.
Whether this positioning creates a durable brand differentiation or is simply a rationalization of relative weakness depends on execution. The "You Got This" campaign, if it works, gives adidas a narrative that is distinctly its own — not a response to Nike, not a lesser version of the same story, but a genuinely different answer to the question of what sport means to people. If it doesn't work, it's just another tagline.
Turning around a company has three components: It's luck, it's timing and it's effort. I don't know how much of each of these things contributed at any point in time, but it was obvious to me from day one we had good things bubbling that people hadn't realised.
The Inventory in the Warehouse
There is a detail from the Yeezy aftermath that captures, in miniature, the entire operational philosophy of the Gulden era. When he arrived, adidas was sitting on approximately €1.3 billion worth of Yeezy product — shoes and apparel that bore the name of a person the company could no longer be associated with. Three options: destroy it, warehouse it indefinitely, or sell it.
Destroying it would mean a complete write-off — a staggering financial hit to a company already reporting losses. Warehousing it would mean carrying the inventory on the balance sheet indefinitely, a slow bleed of working capital. Gulden chose to sell, in tranches, at roughly cost, with a portion of proceeds going to organizations combating antisemitism. In Q1 2024 alone, adidas moved €150 million worth of Yeezy inventory. By mid-2024, approximately €200 million remained.
The decision was not heroic. It was pragmatic. But it was also fast — faster than the institutional instinct toward paralysis that had characterized the company's response to previous crises. And it freed up organizational bandwidth to focus on what was actually working: the terrace shoes, the new athlete partnerships, the rebuilding of wholesale relationships. "I wasn't at the company when the relationship was built," Gulden told Footwear News. "But we're solving the situation I inherited in the best way possible."
In October 2024, adidas raised its full-year guidance for the third time, projecting approximately 10% revenue growth and operating profit of €1.2 billion. The share price had more than doubled from its October 2022 nadir. Analysts who had been writing the company's obituary were now upgrading their targets. The narrative had flipped — from existential crisis to comeback story — with a speed that surprised even the people executing it.
The company that Adi Dassler built in a Bavarian laundry room, that his son Horst turned into a global political force, that nearly died of neglect in the 1990s, that became dependent on a single volatile celebrity in the 2010s, had found its way back to something like first principles. The product was the marketing. The archive was the moat. The athlete was the proof point.
In Herzogenaurach, the Aurach River still runs between the two sides of town. On one bank, Puma. On the other, adidas. The three stripes, stitched onto a shoe designed for frozen pitches in 1950, were on the feet of people in Lagos and Tokyo and São Paulo who had never heard of the Dassler brothers' war and didn't care. The shoe doesn't need the story. The shoe is the story.
The adidas turnaround is not a single insight but a layered system of strategic decisions — some inherited from seventy-five years of accumulated advantage, others improvised under extreme duress. What follows are the operating principles embedded in the company's trajectory, extracted not from corporate press releases but from the pattern of choices that made the difference.
Table of Contents
- 1.Let the archive compound.
- 2.The product is the marketing.
- 3.Scale what's already working — in five days, not five quarters.
- 4.Never let a single partnership become the brand.
- 5.Treat wholesale partners like distribution allies, not obstacles.
- 6.Pull the silhouette before the market tells you to.
- 7.Put a product person in the big chair.
- 8.Own the local creative engine.
- 9.Price for accessibility when your rival prices for exclusivity.
- 10.Resolve inherited crises fast and move on.
Principle 1
Let the archive compound.
Most brands think of heritage as a marketing asset — something to reference in campaigns and anniversary capsule collections. Adidas treats its archive as a compounding asset class. The Samba (1950), Stan Smith (1971), Superstar (1970), Gazelle (1966), Campus (1980s), SL 72 (1972), Spezial range — each silhouette has been adopted, recontextualized, and re-adopted by successive subcultures over decades. British terrace casuals, New York hip-hop, Berlin techno, Parisian normcore — each wave deposits another layer of cultural meaning that the company did not create and cannot control, but that accrues to the brand nonetheless.
This is fundamentally different from Nike's approach, which relies more heavily on top-down storytelling — athlete endorsements, cinematic campaigns, controlled narrative. Adidas's cultural capital is bottom-up, archaeological, built through the accumulated choices of millions of consumers who picked up a pair of Gazelles for reasons that had nothing to do with an ad. The archive doesn't just contain old shoes. It contains decades of embedded meaning.
Key silhouettes and their cultural lifespans
| Silhouette | Year | Original Purpose | Cultural Adoption |
|---|
| Samba | 1950 | Indoor football training | British terraces, 2020s streetwear |
| Superstar | 1970 | Basketball | Run-DMC / hip-hop, global lifestyle |
| Stan Smith | 1971 | Tennis | Minimalism, 70M+ pairs sold |
| Gazelle | 1966 | Training | Britpop, terrace revival |
Benefit: A compounding archive creates a moat that is literally impossible to replicate. No competitor can manufacture fifty years of subcultural adoption. It also provides a perpetual source of "new" product — each re-release is simultaneously familiar and fresh.
Tradeoff: Archive-dependent brands risk becoming backward-looking. If the majority of cultural energy is concentrated in heritage silhouettes, the performance innovation pipeline — the source of long-term athletic credibility — can atrophy. Consumers may eventually perceive the brand as retro rather than relevant.
Tactic for operators: Inventory your company's historical assets — not just products, but design languages, brand moments, cultural associations. Treat them as a portfolio with individual lifecycle management, not a monolithic "heritage" bucket. The goal is rotation, not nostalgia.
Principle 2
The product is the marketing.
Adi Dassler's original insight — that the most powerful advertisement for an athletic shoe is an athlete winning while wearing it — sounds obvious. It is anything but. The modern sports marketing industrial complex has inverted this logic: the athlete becomes a celebrity endorser whose primary function is to appear in campaigns, not to validate the technology. The product becomes secondary to the narrative.
Gulden's adidas is explicitly trying to reverse this inversion. The Anthony Edwards 1 basketball shoe was not launched with a $50 million campaign. It was launched at $100 — a price point that signaled accessibility — and marketed primarily through Edwards's on-court performance. The Samba's resurgence was not driven by a global advertising push; it was driven by the product appearing on the feet of people who were choosing it organically.
This is not anti-marketing. It is a different theory of marketing: one that trusts the product to generate its own demand when it is genuinely good and genuinely available. It requires a fundamental confidence in the product itself — which in turn requires a product-first organizational culture.
Benefit: Product-led marketing is dramatically more capital-efficient than campaign-led marketing. A shoe that goes viral on its own merits generates earned media that no advertising budget can replicate.
Tradeoff: You have to actually have great product. This approach is unforgiving of mediocrity. A product-led strategy with average product is just silence.
Tactic for operators: Before increasing your marketing spend, ask whether the product itself would generate word-of-mouth if you spent nothing. If the answer is no, the problem is the product, not the budget.
Principle 3
Scale what's already working — in five days, not five quarters.
The Samba scaling decision — overriding an eighteen-month production timeline within a week of arrival — is the purest expression of Gulden's operational philosophy. Most large organizations are designed to prevent this kind of decision. Approval chains, consensus-building, risk committees, demand-planning models — all of these exist for defensible reasons, and all of them can become mechanisms for institutional paralysis.
Gulden's argument, implicit in his actions, is that the cost of missing a demand signal is asymmetric. A production ramp that turns out to be premature can be managed — inventory can be reallocated, promotional channels can absorb excess. A demand signal that is missed entirely cannot be recovered. The cultural moment passes. The consumer moves on. The competitor fills the void.
Benefit: Speed itself becomes a competitive advantage. In categories where trends have compressed lifecycles, the ability to recognize and scale a winner fast — faster than the planning cycle — is the difference between capturing a wave and watching it crest.
Tradeoff: Fast scaling increases inventory risk. If the demand signal is misread — if the trend is shallower than it appears — the company is left with excess product that damages brand equity when discounted. Speed without judgment is just recklessness.
Tactic for operators: Design your approval architecture for the cost of missed opportunities, not just the cost of mistakes. The question is not "What if we scale and it doesn't work?" but "What do we lose if we don't scale and it does?"
Principle 4
Never let a single partnership become the brand.
The Yeezy partnership generated close to $2 billion in annual revenue at its peak, accounting for approximately 8% of adidas's total sales and a disproportionate share of its profits and cultural relevance. When it ended, in the span of a single news cycle, adidas lost its primary connection to American sneaker culture, its highest-margin product line, and its most visible source of "heat." The company was left with $1.3 billion in toxic inventory and no immediate replacement.
This is the definitive case study in concentration risk within brand partnerships. The Yeezy collaboration was structurally analogous to a single-customer dependency in a B2B business: enormously profitable in the steady state, existentially dangerous when it breaks.
Revenue concentration and the cost of termination
| Metric | Value |
|---|
| Yeezy revenue at peak | ~$2B annually |
| Share of total adidas revenue | ~8% |
| Unsold inventory after termination | ~€1.3B |
| Profit warnings issued (2022–2023) | 4 |
| Share price decline (peak to Oct 2022 low) | ~60% |
Benefit: Diversifying cultural partnerships across athletes, designers, and subcultures creates resilience. No single termination can crater the brand. The post-Yeezy adidas demonstrated that the underlying brand — the archive, the Three Stripes, the terrace heritage — was stronger than any single collaboration layered on top of it.
Tradeoff: Diversification means forgoing the outsized returns of concentration. No single partnership in adidas's current portfolio generates the cultural wattage that Yeezy did at its peak. The brand may be safer but also less electrifying.
Tactic for operators: Apply a hard cap — no more than 5–10% of revenue or cultural relevance — to any single partnership, collaborator, or channel. If you're exceeding that, you're not managing a partnership; you're managing a dependency.
Principle 5
Treat wholesale partners like distribution allies, not obstacles.
The DTC revolution in retail — championed by Nike, adopted by adidas under Rorsted, and embraced by virtually every consumer brand in the 2015–2022 era — rested on an appealing premise: own the customer relationship, capture the full margin, control the brand experience. The problem, as both Nike and adidas discovered, is that wholesale partners are not just distribution pipes. They are curators, tastemakers, and community touchpoints — especially in footwear, where the local sneaker store, the specialty retailer, and the sporting goods chain each serve distinct consumer segments that a brand's own DTC channels cannot efficiently reach.
Gulden's immediate pivot back toward wholesale — rebuilding relationships that the Rorsted era had damaged — was one of the most consequential decisions of his first year. It was also deeply unfashionable. The market narrative in 2023 still favored DTC. But Gulden understood something that the DTC maximalists missed: in a fragmented consumer landscape, the marginal cost of reaching a customer through an existing wholesale partner is almost always lower than the marginal cost of acquiring that customer through owned channels.
Benefit: A healthy wholesale network provides geographic reach, consumer segment coverage, and inventory absorption capacity that DTC alone cannot match. It also provides real-time demand signals from partners who are closer to local consumers than any centralized analytics team.
Tradeoff: Wholesale means sharing margin and ceding some control over brand presentation. It also creates channel conflict with DTC — a problem that requires constant, artful management.
Tactic for operators: If your DTC push has alienated wholesale partners, repair the relationship before the partners find a replacement supplier. The relationship is an asset, and it depreciates fast when neglected.
Principle 6
Pull the silhouette before the market tells you to.
The lifecycle management of a sneaker silhouette is one of the most underappreciated disciplines in consumer products. The pattern is predictable: a silhouette emerges, gains cultural traction, demand spikes, the brand increases production and distribution, the shoe becomes ubiquitous, the cultural vanguard moves on, and the brand is left discounting excess inventory of a shoe that was, eighteen months ago, the most coveted product in the market.
Adidas has lived through this cycle repeatedly — most memorably with the Stan Smith in the mid-2010s, when a brilliantly executed scarcity strategy gave way to overproduction as the shoe became mainstream. Nike made the same mistake with the Air Force 1 and Dunk in 2022–2024, flooding its own marketplace until both silhouettes lost their premium positioning.
Gulden's approach with the current terrace wave appears more disciplined: controlling distribution channels, limiting colorway proliferation, and — the hardest part — being willing to pull a hot shoe before sell-through rates peak. The Superstar, which Gulden has identified as the "next big focus" for the brand, is reportedly being managed with explicit lifecycle guardrails.
Benefit: Controlled scarcity sustains price premium, protects brand equity, and extends the commercial life of a silhouette. A shoe that is always slightly harder to get than demand would suggest maintains its cultural value indefinitely.
Tradeoff: Intentionally undersupplying demand means leaving money on the table — potentially a lot of money. Quarterly earnings pressure and wholesale partner demands make this discipline almost pathologically difficult to maintain.
Tactic for operators: Build a formal lifecycle framework for your highest-value products with explicit triggers for scaling back distribution — and give the product team veto power over commercial pressure to oversaturate. The CFO will hate this. Do it anyway.
Principle 7
Put a product person in the big chair.
The Rorsted era at adidas was defined by a CEO who came from consumer goods (Henkel) and brought a consumer-goods operating model — digital transformation, DTC optimization, margin expansion — to a product-and-culture business. The results were strong on paper: operating margins improved, e-commerce scaled, the stock rose. But the organizational culture shifted in ways that were invisible in the financials until the Yeezy crisis exposed them. Product intuition was subordinated to commercial planning. Creative teams lost autonomy. The company became, in the words of insiders, a "
KPI machine."
Gulden's background is the opposite: professional athlete, product executive, a person who evaluates a shoe by picking it up and turning it over. His first instinct upon arriving was to empower creative teams — to give designers and product managers the freedom to make decisions based on what they believed was right for the product, not what the commercial model predicted would optimize quarterly revenue.
This is not a universal prescription. Many great companies are run by operators, financiers, and strategists who are not product people. But in industries where the core value proposition is aesthetic, cultural, and experiential — fashion, entertainment, consumer electronics, food — the CEO's relationship with the product shapes the organization's relationship with the product.
Benefit: A product-obsessed CEO sets the cultural tone for the entire organization. Decisions flow faster because the CEO can evaluate product quality directly rather than relying on intermediaries. The organization self-selects for product talent.
Tradeoff: Product-obsessed leaders can underinvest in systems, processes, and financial discipline. The best product CEO is one who combines product intuition with operational rigor — a rare combination.
Tactic for operators: If your company's value proposition is fundamentally about the product, ensure that the person making the final call on product direction has deep domain expertise — not delegated authority through layers of management.
Principle 8
Own the local creative engine.
Adidas's 2024 decision to open a large creation center in Los Angeles was not a vanity move. It was a structural recognition that the company's most critical competitive challenge — gaining share in North America — could not be solved from Herzogenaurach. American consumers do not experience sport, style, or sneaker culture the way European consumers do. The references are different. The athlete relationships are different. The media landscape is different. A centralized European design team, no matter how talented, will always be translating rather than creating natively.
Nike's greatest structural advantage is that it was born in the American market and thinks in its idiom. Adidas's LA creation center is an attempt to develop a similar native fluency — to build an engine that can create product and storytelling with an American sensibility from the ground up.
Benefit: Local creative teams produce culturally authentic product and marketing that resonates with local consumers in ways that translated global campaigns cannot. This is especially critical in markets where the brand is underindexed.
Tradeoff: Geographic distribution of creative resources creates coordination challenges, potential brand inconsistency, and duplication of effort. It also requires significant upfront investment.
Tactic for operators: If you're trying to break into a market where your brand is weak, don't just open a sales office. Open a creative outpost with real autonomy.
Distribution without local creation is a recipe for perpetual also-ran status.
Principle 9
Price for accessibility when your rival prices for exclusivity.
The Anthony Edwards 1 basketball shoe at $100 is a deliberate counterprogramming move against Nike's strategy of pushing signature basketball shoes to $150–$200+. The logic is counterintuitive: in a category defined by aspiration and exclusivity, adidas is competing on accessibility. The bet is that a $100 shoe on the feet of a rising NBA star, backed by genuine performance technology, can capture share from consumers who are priced out of — or simply annoyed by — Nike's premium positioning.
This echoes a broader pattern in the adidas playbook: the company has historically been willing to sacrifice unit margin for volume and cultural penetration. The Samba retails for $100–$120 depending on market. The Gazelle is similarly positioned. These are not budget shoes — they carry healthy margins — but they are priced to be attainable for a wide consumer base, which in turn drives the cultural ubiquity that sustains the brand's relevance.
Benefit: Accessible pricing drives volume, which drives cultural visibility, which drives brand heat — a virtuous cycle. It also builds brand loyalty among younger consumers who may not be able to afford premium competitors.
Tradeoff: Lower price points compress margins and can, if mismanaged, position the brand as "mass" rather than "premium." The line between "accessible" and "cheap" is thin and requires constant curation.
Tactic for operators: In a market where the dominant competitor has moved upmarket, consider whether the underserved middle of the market is large enough to build a business on. Often, the incumbent's margin expansion creates an opening that is bigger than it looks.
Principle 10
Resolve inherited crises fast and move on.
The Yeezy inventory resolution — selling €1.3 billion of politically radioactive product at cost, in tranches, with charitable donations — was not elegant. It was not the optimal financial outcome. But it was fast, and "fast" was the right optimization target. Every day that the Yeezy overhang dominated the narrative was a day that the organization could not focus on the actual business. Every earnings call spent explaining the inventory drawdown was an earnings call not spent articulating the growth story.
Gulden's instinct — resolve the mess, accept the imperfect outcome, redirect organizational energy toward what's working — is a generalizable principle for any leader inheriting a crisis. The temptation is to optimize the resolution: to find the perfect disposal strategy, the ideal charitable partner, the maximum financial recovery. The cost of that optimization is time, attention, and narrative capital that the company cannot afford to spend.
Benefit: Fast resolution frees up organizational bandwidth, resets the external narrative, and signals decisiveness to investors, partners, and employees.
Tradeoff: Speed means accepting suboptimal financial outcomes. Selling Yeezy inventory at cost rather than at a premium meant leaving hundreds of millions in potential profit on the table. The market may not always reward pragmatism over optimization.
Tactic for operators: When you inherit a crisis, set a hard deadline for resolution — weeks, not quarters. The perfect solution that arrives six months late is worse than the imperfect solution that arrives next Tuesday. Every day the crisis dominates is a day your actual strategy doesn't.
Conclusion
The Compounding Machine
The adidas playbook is, at its core, a theory of compounding — not financial compounding, though that follows, but cultural compounding. Every silhouette that enters the archive adds a layer of meaning. Every athlete partnership that generates an authentic performance moment adds a layer of credibility. Every wholesale relationship maintained adds a layer of reach. Every crisis resolved quickly adds a layer of institutional confidence.
The risk is always the same: that the machine optimizes for extraction — squeezing every last dollar from the current cycle — rather than for accumulation. The Yeezy dependency was an extraction strategy. The DTC push, taken to its extreme, was an extraction strategy. Gulden's bet is that adidas's value lies not in any single product or partnership but in the compounding asset that is the brand itself — an asset that grows stronger the more patiently it is managed.
It is the kind of bet that pays off slowly and then all at once. Or doesn't pay off at all, if the discipline breaks.
Part IIIBusiness Breakdown
The Business at a Glance
Vital Signs
adidas — FY 2024
€23.7BNet revenue
~€1.3BOperating profit
~5.4%Operating margin
~10%Currency-neutral revenue growth
€36B+Market capitalization
~59,000Employees
2,200+Own-retail stores
€4B+E-commerce revenue (est.)
Adidas enters 2025 in a radically different position than it occupied two years ago. Revenue of approximately €23.7 billion in FY 2024 represents roughly 10% currency-neutral growth — a figure that seemed fantastical in early 2023, when the company was issuing profit warnings and staring at a billion-euro inventory write-down. Operating profit of approximately €1.3 billion — the company raised guidance three times during 2024 — marks a dramatic recovery from the near-breakeven result of the prior year.
The share price tells the compressed version of this story: up more than 130% from its October 2022 low, reclaiming and exceeding its pre-Yeezy-crisis valuation. Adidas now trades at roughly 25 times forward earnings, in line with or slightly above Nike — a premium that would have been inconceivable during the depth of the crisis.
What the headline numbers obscure is the ongoing structural transformation beneath them. The mix of Yeezy vs. non-Yeezy revenue, the rebalancing of DTC and wholesale, the geographic reweighting toward North America — these shifts are still in progress, and they will define whether the current recovery is a sugar high or a sustainable trajectory change.
How adidas Makes Money
Adidas operates a relatively straightforward consumer products business model with two primary brands — adidas (the vast majority of revenue) and Reebok (divested to Authentic Brands Group in 2022 for approximately €2.1 billion) — across footwear, apparel, and accessories. Post-Reebok, the company is a single-brand business, which simplifies the strategic picture considerably.
Revenue is generated through two primary channels: wholesale (sales to third-party retailers including Foot Locker, JD Sports, Dick's Sporting Goods, and thousands of independent retailers globally) and direct-to-consumer (own-retail stores, e-commerce, and the adidas app). Under Rorsted, the company aggressively pushed toward DTC, with a stated goal of €8–9 billion in e-commerce revenue by 2025 as part of the "Own the Game" strategy. Gulden has rebalanced toward wholesale, rebuilding partnerships that the DTC push had strained.
Primary revenue streams and channel mix (FY 2024 est.)
| Revenue Stream | Estimated FY 2024 | Notes |
|---|
| Wholesale | ~€13–14B | Rebuilt under Gulden; largest channel |
| DTC (own retail + e-commerce) | ~€9–10B | E-commerce €4B+; ~2,200 stores |
| Footwear | ~€14B | ~60% of revenue; lifestyle + performance |
| Apparel | ~€8B | ~33% of revenue |
| Accessories | ~€1.5B | ~7% of revenue |
Geographically, adidas generates roughly a third of revenue in Europe, its strongest market, with significant contributions from Greater China, North America, and emerging markets across Asia-Pacific, Latin America, and Africa. North America remains the most underpenetrated major market relative to Nike's dominance — and the single largest growth opportunity.
Gross margins in the mid-to-high 40s (as a percentage of revenue) are characteristic of premium athletic brands, with the DTC channel commanding significantly higher gross margins than wholesale. Operating margins, which compressed to near zero during the Yeezy crisis, recovered to approximately 5.4% in FY 2024 — still well below Nike's historical ~12–15% operating margin, and a key area where investors expect continued expansion.
Competitive Position and Moat
The global sportswear market — estimated at $340 billion+ and growing at mid-single-digit rates — is dominated by a small number of mega-brands, with a proliferating set of challengers targeting specific categories and demographics.
Major competitors and their scale (approximate, latest available data)
| Company | Revenue | Primary Strength | Threat Level |
|---|
| Nike | ~$51B | North America, basketball, running | High |
| adidas | ~€23.7B | Europe, football, lifestyle/terrace | — |
| Puma | ~€8.6B | Lifestyle, motorsport, football | Medium |
| New Balance |
Moat sources:
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Cultural archive depth. As detailed in Part I, adidas possesses a portfolio of heritage silhouettes — Samba, Superstar, Stan Smith, Gazelle, Spezial — with decades of subcultural adoption. This is the strongest moat and the hardest to replicate. No amount of capital can buy fifty years of organic cultural accumulation.
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Football (soccer) dominance. Adidas is the undisputed leader in global football — sponsor of FIFA, the World Cup, and dozens of top clubs and national teams including Real Madrid, Bayern Munich, Manchester United, and the German national team. Football is the world's most popular sport, and adidas's footprint in it is a structural advantage in every market except the U.S.
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Three Stripes trademark. One of the most recognizable trademarks in global consumer products, aggressively protected through litigation. The visual identity is immediately identifiable and carries brand equity across every product category.
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European manufacturing and design heritage. The "Made in Germany" halo and the company's deep engineering roots in athletic footwear — Boost cushioning technology, Primeknit upper construction — provide credibility in performance categories.
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Global wholesale distribution network. Relationships with retailers across 100+ countries, rebuilt under Gulden, provide reach that DTC-only challengers cannot match.
Where the moat is weak:
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North America. Nike's dominance in the U.S. — in basketball, running, and cultural relevance — remains formidable. Adidas's U.S. market share in athletic footwear has improved from ~4.8% to ~7% in recent years, but remains far below Nike's ~30%+ share.
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Performance running. On Running and Hoka have claimed the premium performance running category with innovative technology — an uncomfortable echo of adidas's own founding thesis. Adidas's Boost and 4DFWD technologies are credible but not category-leading.
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Innovation narrative. While the terrace revival has dominated the lifestyle category, adidas lacks a single performance innovation story as compelling as Nike's Air or Vaporfly. The "no innovation" critique that haunted the pre-Gulden era has been partially addressed but not fully retired.
The Flywheel
The adidas business model operates on a reinforcing cycle that, when functioning correctly, compounds brand equity, cultural relevance, and commercial performance simultaneously.
How cultural capital converts to commercial performance
Step 1Performance innovation creates credible products worn by elite athletes in football, basketball, running, and other sports.
Step 2Athletic credibility authenticates the broader brand, allowing heritage silhouettes (Samba, Superstar, Gazelle) to carry cultural weight beyond their original sporting context.
Step 3Heritage silhouettes are adopted by subcultures and lifestyle consumers, driving massive volume at premium margins.
Step 4Lifestyle volume funds R&D, athlete partnerships, and marketing investment that sustains performance credibility.
Step 5Controlled lifecycle management (pulling silhouettes before saturation) preserves the cultural premium that makes Step 3 possible.
The flywheel's vulnerability is at Step 5. When lifecycle discipline breaks — as it did with Boost/Ultraboost overproduction in 2018–2019 and with Nike's Air Force 1 flooding in 2023 — the cultural premium collapses, volumes decline, and the entire cycle degrades. Gulden's primary operational challenge is maintaining this discipline against the relentless institutional pressure to extract more from what's working now.
Growth Drivers and Strategic Outlook
Five specific growth vectors define adidas's strategic outlook for 2025–2028:
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North American share gains. The single largest opportunity. Nike's stumble — slowing innovation, CEO transition, DTC overreach — has opened a window that may not stay open indefinitely. The LA creation center, the Anthony Edwards partnership, and rebuilt wholesale relationships with U.S. retailers are all oriented toward this market. TAM for athletic footwear in North America alone exceeds $50 billion.
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Terrace/lifestyle category expansion. The Superstar is positioned as the next major silhouette to receive the Samba treatment. The Spezial range and other archive silhouettes represent an essentially unlimited pipeline of culturally loaded product waiting to be activated. The key is lifecycle rotation — growing the category without burning individual silhouettes.
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Greater China recovery. Adidas's Chinese business was a growth engine before the pandemic and the broader geopolitical cooling of Western brands in the Chinese market. Recovery here is real but gradual, with local competition from Anta and Li-Ning increasingly formidable.
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E-commerce and digital margin. Despite the wholesale rebalancing, DTC — and e-commerce in particular — remains a high-margin channel with significant growth potential. The company's "Own the Game" target of €8–9 billion in e-commerce revenue by 2025 was ambitious; actual performance will likely fall short, but the directional growth is clear.
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Performance running and basketball re-entry. The Anthony Edwards 1 in basketball and continued Boost/4DFWD development in running represent bets on reclaiming performance credibility in two categories where adidas has ceded ground. Success here is essential to the long-term health of the flywheel — without performance authenticity, the lifestyle business eventually loses its foundation.
Key Risks and Debates
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Terrace cycle exhaustion. The Samba-Gazelle-Spezial wave is the primary engine of the current recovery. If consumer interest shifts — as it inevitably will — before adidas has built durable growth in performance categories and North America, the company faces another painful transition. The Stan Smith cycle of 2014–2017 is the cautionary precedent. Severity: high. The timing is uncertain but the cyclicality is structural.
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Nike's counter-punch. Nike is a $51 billion company with the deepest talent pool, the largest marketing budget, and the most extensive athlete roster in the industry. Its current stumble is real, but Nike has recovered from worse. The appointment of Elliott Hill as CEO in October 2024 — a thirty-two-year Nike veteran with deep product and commercial experience — signals an intent to return to fundamentals. If Nike executes, adidas's North American window may close faster than investors expect.
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China deceleration and geopolitical risk. Western brands in China face a structural headwind: rising nationalist sentiment, aggressive local competitors (Anta surpassed adidas in Chinese market share in 2022), and the ever-present risk of geopolitical escalation. Adidas's China business, once its fastest-growing region, is growing again but at a fraction of its pre-2020 rate.
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Operating margin gap. Adidas's ~5.4% operating margin in FY 2024 is dramatically below Nike's historical ~12–15% range and below the company's own ~10% level of 2016–2019. Investors expect margin expansion, but the path to it — which requires both revenue growth and cost discipline — creates tension with the investment required to capture the North American opportunity.
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Overreliance on heritage vs. innovation. The most uncomfortable question for the adidas bull case: is the company's resurgence a product-innovation story or a fashion-cycle story? If it's primarily the latter, the moat is shallower than the share price implies. On Running and Hoka are winning performance converts with technology-first narratives that recall adidas's own founding DNA. If adidas cannot answer them in performance running and basketball, the cultural archive becomes a depreciating asset rather than a compounding one.
Why adidas Matters
The adidas story matters to operators and investors for three reasons that extend beyond the specifics of the sportswear industry.
First, it is the clearest contemporary case study of cultural capital as a compounding asset — an intangible that accrues over decades through organic adoption, resists imitation by competitors with larger budgets, and can sustain a brand through existential crises if it is managed with the discipline of a financial portfolio. The terrace archive saved adidas from the Yeezy collapse. But it will save the company only as long as the management team treats it as a renewable resource rather than a strip mine.
Second, it demonstrates the asymmetric value of speed in organizations. Gulden's five-day Samba decision is trivially simple in isolation and enormously instructive in context. The previous management saw the same demand signals and chose to wait. The difference was not information; it was organizational culture — a willingness to act on incomplete data, to overrule the planning cycle, to accept the risk of being wrong in exchange for the possibility of being fast. In industries with compressed trend cycles, speed is not a nice-to-have. It is the moat.
Third, and most broadly, adidas is a seventy-five-year experiment in the relationship between performance authenticity and lifestyle commerce. The company was founded on the proposition that a shoe's credibility flows from the athlete's performance. Every strategic era since — Horst's Olympic dealmaking, the Run-DMC collaboration, the Yeezy partnership, the terrace revival — has tested some version of this proposition. The answer, repeatedly confirmed, is that the lifestyle business is a derivative of the performance business. Cut the roots, and the tree eventually dies — no matter how lush it looks in the current season. The archive is the canopy. The athletes are the roots. The tension between the two is the company.
