Back in stockPhoto: Scott Olson (Getty Images)
Adidas has announced the release of a second drop of its Yeezy stock, products developed as part of its now-defunct collaboration with Ye, the rapper formerly known as Kanye West. The release, scheduled for August 2, will look different from the previous one in May in a number of ways.
3 considerations before your company takes a stance
While the last Yeezy drop was limited to Adidas’s members-only platform, this next release will also be available on a number of other retailers, but only via their websites. The decision to expand the range of selling platforms is likely due to the success of the previous drop, which led Adidas to improve its full-year outlook, cutting its expected loss from the inventory by 20%.
Adidas halted Yeezy sales after ending its partnership with Ye in October after the musician made anti-semitic remarks and allegations of inappropriate behavior against the musician during his time working with the German sportswear brand. Next of Adidas’s agenda was figuring out what to do with the unsold Yeezy inventory. Doing nothing would have cost the company more than $770 million. But selling the shoes as if nothing had happened would be considered hypocritical, removing the logo from the shoes would be deceitful, and destroying them wasteful. Adidas also worried that giving the shoes away for charity might have simply fueled a black market.
Bjorn Gulden, the former Puma chief who became Adidas’s CEO after the Ye fiasco, presented a solution in May: selling Yeezy while ensuring that parts of the proceeds would go towards non-profit organizations working towards ending racial hatred and anti-semitism. The Financial Times reported earlier this week that Adidas picked five organizations in the US and China as its charity partners, and that the donations amounted to €8.5 million ($9.3 million). Adidas has publicly identified the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and the Philonise & Keeta Floyd Institute for Social Change as recipients but did not specify the donation’s amount, simply referring to it as “significant.”
With this latest release, Adidas added Robert Kraft’s Foundation to Combat Antisemitism (FCAS) to its list of charity partners. To support the organization’s work, the company said that a limited number of Yeezy products sold directly by Adidas in North America would feature the organization’s blue pins, released as part of its #StandUpToJewishHate campaign. The company is also inviting submissions from other organizations seeking to propose projects aimed at fighting discrimination and hatred in sports.