Adidas After Yeezy
The partnership with Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, was the stuff of sneakerhead legend—and its demise has the shoe company scrambling to replace nearly half of its profits.
Millions of pairs of unsold Yeezys are sitting in purgatory, stacked in warehouses from the US to China. Sneakers—some looking like cozy turtleneck sweaters for your feet, others like they’ve grown teeth on their soles or solidified into pillowy clouds—that once would’ve sold out in limited-edition drops, often flipped for much more on StockX and Goat, now await their fate seven months after one of the biggest corporate meltdowns in history. Their owner, Adidas AG, couldn’t decide what to do with all the tarnished merchandise created by the man who was, until recently, its most prominent business partner: Kanye West, who now goes by Ye. The total value of these sneakers: about $1.3 billion.
At Adidas headquarters, overlooking the medieval town of Herzogenaurach, Germany, senior executives have spent months mulling their Yeezy inventory dilemma. They’ve considered unstitching the Yeezy logo off each sneaker, one by one, but that’s too laborious. They contemplated donating the goods to victims in disaster-struck countries such as Turkey and Syria, but that could trigger illicit trafficking. Burning them in the world’s largest hypebeast bonfire would be an environmental calamity, and chopping them into plastic bits to be reborn as turf is overly complicated and hardly satisfying. Management finally decided it would begin selling the sneakers while giving a portion of the proceeds to charities. The first of the stranded footwear will be available for purchase at the end of May.