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.
