Adidas and the Yeezy Dilemma
Footwear News
Keeping you up to date on top news in the footwear industry, groundbreaking fashion trends and the who's who in shoes.
Welcome back to FN Daily, where we break down the biggest stories happening in footwear and retail.
Adidas?reports a weak Q4 and discusses its Yeezy problem, Birkenstock gets closer to completing its factory and we hear about how an indigenous woman created a community of Native women runners.
Let's get into it.
Adidas’ CEO Bj?rn Gulden is making no efforts to hide his predicament: He’s sitting on?$1.3 billion worth of Yeezy product with no clear solution for how to get rid of it.
In Q4, the German sportswear company’s revenues fell 1% in currency neutral terms to 5.2 billion euros, reflecting a negative impact of around 600 million euro related to the loss of the Yeezy business. But there is no simple solution to manage the losses.
“If you can’t sell [the shoes] and you can’t destroy, what’s your option?” said Bj?rn Gulden. “That’s why we haven’t made a decision on it, because it’s a very complicated issue.”
Birkenstock is getting close to completing its factory under construction in Pasewalk, Germany.
领英推荐
In August, the?footwear company?broke ground on the 120-million-euro ($127 million) project at the Berlin-Szczecin Industrial Park, located about an hour north of Berlin. As of today, Birkenstock said that the shell construction of the 36,000-square-meter, approximately 387,500-square-feet, building complex is nearly complete. Birkenstock plans to open the facility for production in the third quarter of 2023.
Zoom out: This is the latest milestone for the popular footwear brand, which has continued to invest in retail stores in the U.S. in recent years.
For a sport that by nature should be accessible to all, running has long struggled with issues around inclusion.
“I didn’t see myself in running,” explained Verna Volker from the Navajo Nation, who launched Native Women Running in 2018, at first as an Instagram account. “The stories of Native runners were very far and few. I simply just wanted to give everyone a platform and just share stories,” said the former teacher.
Since then, Native Women Running has grown into a community of more than 30,000 on social media, with the mission to increase visibility in the running world for historically excluded runners.
Need more shoe news?