The Yeezy Affect: Adidas before and after Kanye West

Posted on by JMVL

By: JMVL

In this post I want to mainly focus on Kanye West, and how he as an artist/designer created his clothing and footwear vision with good help from Adidas. The Yeezy collection is something else, at the time there was not much like it on the market. Even though there is a whole clothing line, it is primarily the footwear/sneaker part that has helped Adidas’ shareholders gain value as a result of good design.

Before Kanye West joined Adidas in 2013, the brand was on its way downwards. They had lost their nr. 2 spot of biggest sportswear brand in North America, too an upcoming brand called Under Armor. The year before Kanye dropped the Yeezy line, Adidas had an impressive revenue of 14.883 billion US dollars. And by the end of 2015, which was the year were the first Yeezy line was dropped. Adidas had hauled in 2 billion US dollars more in sales.

The Yeezy shoes made headlines every single time they dropped. They shut down servers and people have been comparing the shoes to the all time sneaker O.G. Air Jordan’s. the shoes were awarded “Shoe of the Year” price by FNAA and Yeezy with Adidas had solidified their position as a major player in the high end sneaker market.

Not only did the Yeezy shoes bring in more sales for Adidas, but they made the brand to the most popular sneaker brand on Instagram in 2015. All of these accomplishments do not only make Adidas relevant again, but they make the companies shareholders, partners and investors loads of money. After Kanye joined Adidas, their stocks have gone up like never before. And this is making the shareholders a lot of financial gain.

In the syllabus we can find that “Borja de Mozota (2006) identifies four sources of value”. One of these sources is the financial part that I already talked about and the second one is called “Differentiation”. What this means is that a brand can create value when making a new type of design for a product/service, which is exactly what Adidas has done. They didn’t invent the shoe, but they merged their quality and materials with Kanye’s vision and design and came up with a product which is so good that it was awarded, Shoe of the Year in 2015.

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On the picture above we can see Kanye West the artist/designer behind the Yeezy Boost shoes and the Yeezy boost 350 Pirate Black’s.

By making a fairly normal shoe, but sticking a world famous artist’s name and ideas on it. Adidas has once again risen to the top of the sneaker and sportswear game. And after 4 years, the numbers do not seem to be going down. One might even say that Adidas is at the top of the sneaker world at the moment, which is something I have no problem in agreeing with.

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