This is one of those situations where it feels like every single thing you do makes the last thing you did worse.
Adidas terminated the partnership with Ye, aka Kanye West, almost two years ago at this point and since then, the way they’ve handled the Yeezy brand is questionable.
Adidas apparently holds the patents and trademarks for everything Yeezy-related apart from the name and the Slide design (below).
This means they could, in the future at some point, relaunch every Yeezy design they have apart from the Slide, and sell those shoes as long as they don’t include the name ‘Yeezy’.
But the problem is, when the partnership ended, Adidas was left with a lot of stock and didn’t know what to do with it.
Firstly, and this is not a secondary issue, I feel like it doesn’t take a genius to understand that Kanye may have been a ticking bomb waiting to go off.
The partnership was terminated after Kanye wrote some pretty nonsensical Tweets about Jewish people, but surely Adidas must’ve known who they were dealing with.
Surely they must’ve taken into consideration the fact that at any point, Kanye could do or say something that could tarnish their brand image.
I’m getting sick and tired of these companies virtue-signalling and apologising for everything but that’s a different conversation.
So anyway, you’re Adidas, you’ve terminated your partnership with Kanye, you throw him under the bus for that and you’re left with unsold stock.
People still want Yeezy, so you can do it one of two ways.
You can either take the high road or go with the ‘we’re sticking to the contract’ strategy.
If you take the high road, that’s option 1, what you can do is sell everything you have at cost, as a way to say:
“look we didn’t like what he said, we don’t want any association with him or the brand, so here, we’re selling everything we have at cost, fast, so we can just get it over with and move on”.
Option 2 is you simply stick to the contract, and keep selling what you have at the price you’d have sold it at, simply because you’re allowed to, and it doesn’t change the past or the future.
They did neither.
First they said they were going to sell at normal price but donate proceeds to charity, then they said they were considering scrapping everything, which is a stupid thing to say because everyone knows Adidas would never do that.
And then they backtracked citing the inevitable ‘environmental costs’, which is even more stupid because everyone knows that’s not the reason, and also because people are tired of this bull***t.
Then they kept going at it, business as usual, with launches on the Confirmed app, which was Phase 1.
Except they realised some of the things they had weren’t selling, so they started discounting everything, which was Phase 2.
Cool.
Except only a few weeks elapsed between Phase 1 and Phase 2, which means some customers bought stuff at full price only to find the same item 50 percent off two weeks later.
We should also point out that you can’t return items in the US, which is a policy they are allowed to go with by law, so that means people just had to suck it up and take it.
Then they discounted the items some more, now 70 percent off.
But this time only in the US, because of said policy. Because in the UE and UK you must, by law, allow returns.
It was all done very stupidly.
I expect corporations to be greedy and evil, that’s pretty bad, but when they’re greedy and evil and stupid, somehow that’s even worse.
bitcoinea 
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