Adidas Aims to Increase Revenues with New DTC Focus

For Adidas, Impossible is Nothing—particularly when it comes to selling directly to consumers. Adidas unveiled plans this week to zero in on its DTC business, increase revenue by a third, and double online sales by 2025.

Plugging in: E-comm will help drive Adidas’s new strategy, and so will expanding its physical footprint and product offerings. By 2025, Adidas wants to...

• Invest roughly $1.2 billion into digital operations.
• Reduce its wholesale partnerships and elevate DTC to 50% of sales, compared to 30% in 2019 and 40% in 2020.

Three’s a crowd: Adidas is taking a walk in Nike and Under Armour’s shoes by rejecting wholesale.

• Nike severed ties with nine retail partners as part of its online-driven restructuring plan.
• Under Armour plans to exit between 2,000 and 3,000 wholesale partnerships over the next few years.

The takeaway: Major sports apparel brands have realized wholesale partnerships don’t maximize profits. And other segments are catching on too: Luxury retailers like Prada have pulled the wholesale escape hatch in favor of new distribution models.