Adidas plans to relaunch Kanye West’s shoe designs in the wake of cutting ties with the disgraced rapper — and said it will dump the Yeezy name all the while.
The German sportswear giant said Wednesday that it plans to strip the shoes of their “Ye” branding yet keep similar designs. The move could save Adidas more than $300 million in royalty payments.
“Let me be clear, we own all the [intellectual property], we own all the designs, we own all the versions and new colorways, It’s our product,” said Adidas’ Chief Financial Officer Harm Ohlmeyer on the call. “We intend to make use of these rights as early as 2023.”
The declaration comes a little more than two weeks after Adidas dropped its collaboration with rap star West, otherwise called “Ye”, following his series of anti-Semitic tirades. Adidas and West first partnered to make the Yeezy shoe line in 2013.
The organization confronted analysis for not divorcing the former billionaire sooner, which many credited to the way that Ye-branded shoes rounded up nearly $2 billion in sales last year for Adidas, as per Morgan Stanley.
To recover those earnings, Adidas will initially need to overcome Ye loyalists, a considerable lot of whom are not happy about the organization’s decision to keep on selling the shoes.
“Adidas is dumb as f–k if you sell Yeezy w/ no Kanye, the backlash is gonna be crazy,” said one Twitter user.
“Bad business practices. I’m not buying Yeezy products without Ye.” another tweet read.
Numerous clients cautioned that the new Adidas-branded shoes would be difficult to market, as any social media posts would be riddled with hate from Kanye West fans.
Kanye West himself has reviled past attempts from Adidas to market Yeezy-like shoes without his permission.
In June, the organization released slides that looked like a Yeezy design. West referred to them as “a fake Yeezy made by Adidas themselves” and later said, “I’m not standing for this blatant copying no more.”
