On Wednesday, for the first time in over seven months, sneakerheads put aside their love-hate relationship with Ye, the artist formerly known as Kanye West, and resumed a love-hate relationship with his Yeezy sneaker brand—which is to say, loving to buy them and hating to miss out. As Adidas sold off some of the Yeezy shoes left over from its partnership with Ye, which ended last October, fans turned to social media for a familiar ritual of shared delight and disappointment. On Twitter, some complained about losing the raffles that determine who gets the chance to buy a pair of Yeezys. Others worried how much it might cost them to win every raffle they entered: “I’m in four different draws for some Yeezys,” @theregoesrhodes tweeted. “if I hit on all four, imma have to work four 24 hour shifts in a row smh.” Most sneakerheads seemed to view the drop as an apolitical return to business as usual, though some Ye fans clearly saw it as a kind of vindication for the embattled rap star and fashion mogul. A few even thanked those who had “canceled” Ye for making it easier to cop a pair of Yeezys.
If the odds have improved for Yeezy fans, however, it probably has less to do with supposed cancel culture than with the generous supply on offer. After dropping the first few styles and colorways around 5 am EST, Adidas continued to roll out fresh silhouettes and colorways throughout the day. The direct-to-consumer mega-drop featured no less than four different colorways for the Yeezy 350 v2, one or more each for the 380, 450, 500, 700 v1, 700 v2, plus Yeezy foam runners and slides. At least one new style has been offered through the app this morning, while others have fresh countdown clocks indicating a re-stock will be offered tomorrow.
In January, when Bjørn Gulden took over as CEO of Adidas, things were not looking good for the world’s second-largest sportswear brand. The company suspended its business in Russia soon after the start of the war in Ukraine. In a July 2022 press release, Adidas said it expected its China profits to “decline at a double digit rate” that year due to COVID-19 related restrictions that strangled ordinarily robust demand in major cities like Shanghai and Beijing. Then there was the matter of its ugly, drawn-out split from Ye, whose Yeezy products accounted for an estimated eight percent of Adidas’s total revenue and more than 40 percent of its profits, according to a Morgan Stanley analyst cited by Bloomberg in November 2022.
Ye first signed with Adidas in 2013, and their partnership ended last October after weeks of escalating provocations, continuing with Ye then expressing his admiration for Hitler on Alex Jones’s Infowars podcast. On Twitter, he famously vowed to go “death con 3 ON JEWISH PEOPLE,” prompting partners, collaborators, and friends to publicly distance themselves from Ye. Meanwhile, after Adidas launched a review of its partnership with him, a clip from his appearance on the podcast “Drink Champs” emerged: “I could say antisemitic things and Adidas can’t drop me,” Ye said on the podcast. They did drop him, but in the period Adidas spent arriving at that decision, the company went on to manufacture Yeezy products that would eventually leave it with a surplus inventory worth about $1.3 billion at retail prices.
Yesterday, after months of speculation over what would become of this inventory, some of these shoes finally went on sale. That people wanted to buy them was never in question—on StockX and other resale marketplaces, many Yeezy silhouettes command prices well above retail. Meeting this demand, though, came with potentially significant “reputational risk,” Gulden told analysts during a March investor call. “We haven’t made a decision on this because it’s a very complicated issue,” the CEO said at the time, while noting that some of the stock was still winding its way through the company’s supply chain.
Joshua Hunt
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