Adidas has announced that it will suffer huge losses due to the breakdown of relations with rapper and designer Kanye West: it does not yet know what to do with the 1.2 billion euros of West sneakers that it has left. Meanwhile, at least one US retail chain says Yeezy sneakers are selling out fast and at a higher price: People are buying them as collectibles.
German sportswear giant Adidas pulled out of West’s contract last October due to his anti-Semitic statements on social media. The boss of the American chain of stores Impossible Kicks, John Mokadlo, assures that this does not bother his customers: sales of Yeezy sneakers have increased by a third.
“People are looking for this item as a collector’s item,” John Mokadlo told BBC Radio 4.
At the same time, for example, Yeezy 350 “Zebra” sneakers, which cost $260 last fall, now cost $340-360.
“Yeezy” is a derivative of Ye, the stage name Kanye West has been referring to since 2021.
New Adidas boss Bjorn Gulden announced on Wednesday that the split with West has left the company in the red for the first time in 30 years. Sales of Adidas products in the final months of last year fell by 600 million euros, resulting in a total net loss for the year of 513 million euros.
At the same time, the company also predicts a loss of 500 million euros for this year – if it does not find a way to sell Ye’s remaining sneakers.
Just donating sneaker deposits by unloading warehouses isn’t easy either. It has been proposed, for example, to donate them to the victims of the earthquake in Turkey or Syria, but, as Bjorn Gulden said, in this case they would come back to the market very quickly, because they are very expensive.
Adidas has partnered with Kanye West since 2013, but the successful billion-dollar collaboration came to an end last fall. West made outrageous anti-Semitic statements – and German society severed relations with him, despite the huge impending losses.
Due to these statements, West’s accounts were blocked by Instagram and Twitter.
Besides Adidas, business ties with West have been severed by JP Morgan, clothing company Gap, fashion house Balenciaga and film and television company MRC.
Impossible Kicks CEO John Mokadlo, however, sees no ethical problem with him, a retailer, still selling West’s shoes.
“We’re against everything he says, we’re just selling them because they’re collectables and they’re rare at the moment,” Mokadlo told the BBC.
Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, also lost money: Forbes magazine calculated in October that the value of his assets had risen from $1.5 billion to $400 million.
Source: delfi
