Earlier this year, after splitting up with Kanye West in 2022 due to his antisemitic remarks, Adidas decided to sell a portion of the remaining stock of clothes and shoes from West’s now-defunct brand Yeezy. Now, months after their May sale, the German-bred company has announced the major rise in profits the Yeezys were able to bring in.
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“We are happy with the way the second quarter developed,” Adidas CEO Bjørn Gulden said during their Q2 fiscal report. “The core Adidas business was slightly better than we expected. Although we still have too much slow-moving inventory in the market, sell-through has been improving. We also saw gross margin in our core business improving strongly compared to the first quarter. The operating profit of [$194] million was substantially higher than our initial plans. The sale of the first part of the Yeezy inventory did of course help both our top and bottom line in the quarter… The sale of the Yeezy product positively impacted Adidas’ operating profit by an incremental amount of around [$165] million in Q2.”
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When they first announced the decision to sell Yeezys, Adidas and Bjorn announced that West would be able to receive a percentage of the profits, which Reuters reported to be 15%, but it’s unclear how much he has made from the merchandise that has already been sold. Additionally, Adidas plans to donate an unspecified amount of money they make from Yeezy “to the organizations that are helping us and that were also hurt by Kanye’s statements,” Gulden said in early May.
Upon West and Adidas’ initial breakup, Adidas announced that they had nearly $1.3 billion worth of Yeezy stock at their disposal. Before deciding to sell this mass of product, Adidas shareholders filed a class action lawsuit against the company, alleging that they did not issue any proper warning to regarding West’s problematic behavior, leaving them unprepared for West and Yeezy’s departure. It’s currently unclear how the case has played out.
At the start of August, Adidas began another Yeezy sale on their site, as they have listed out multiple dates throughout the month they plan to offload their stock for different designs of sneakers.
Photo by Rachpoot/Bauer-Griffin/GC Images
