Adidas Still Doesn't Have a Plan for All Those Yeezy Shoes

Adidas | Kanye West | Partnership: Adidas still doesn't know what it will do with the $1.3 billion in unsold Yeezy stock it grabbed after breaking up with Kanye West last year due to his antisemitic outbursts.

According to The Associated Press, the new Adidas CEO Bjorn Gulden addressed the matter in a conference call on Friday, May 5, saying that the "options are narrowing" and that we are "getting closer and closer to making a decision." 

But many of the alternatives Adidas is considering are flawed. As Gulden previously stated, giving the shoes free would probably result in a significant amount of resales on secondary markets. Additionally, selling the shoes outright would require paying royalties to West. They also don't want to sell the sneakers with any Yeezy branding still on them because doing so would be dishonest. Of course, there is always the possibility of simply destroying everything. Gulden did not declare that option was off the table, but he did emphasise that Adidas was "trying to avoid that." 

Additionally, it's unsure how many pairs of Yeezy shoes Adidas still possesses. Gulden refused to give a specific figure "because then the consumer would know how many we have and that could have an impact on demand."

Both Adidas and West have suffered financially as a result of the Yeezy split, which Gulden said in a statement is "of course hurting us." Since severing the collaboration, Adidas has claimed hundreds of millions in lost sales, and if the business doesn't sell the shoes, the separation may reduce earnings by around $549 million in 2023.

After the relationship ended, it was predicted that West, who was most recently seen seeing yet another fringe far-right personality, may lose around $1.5 billion in net worth, therefore destroying his cherished "billionaire" label. 

The poisonous office culture at the shoe brand was extensively covered by Rolling Stone last year, shortly after the Yeezy/Adidas alliance came to an end. One colleague claimed to have overheard West claiming that "skinheads and Nazis were his greatest inspiration," while a former top Adidas executive added that they had previously overheard West make similar claims. 

Adidas is currently being sued in a class action by shareholders who claim the company did not do enough to mitigate the effects of the broken alliance. According to the lawsuit, which was filed in Oregon last Friday, Adidas was aware that Kanye West's infamous "slavery sounds like a choice" remark in 2018 could have a negative effect on the stock price of the company. Despite this, the lawsuit claims that Adidas continued to collaborate with the rapper until West's antisemitic outbursts made that relationship unworkable. 

Additionally, according to the lawsuit, Adidas "ignored the risks of oversupply of Yeezy branded shoes in the event that the Partnership were to suddenly end, and in particular, if demand for the shoes were to fall due to any controversy surrounding West." 

Adidas' statement in response to the case read, "We outright reject these unfounded claims."