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Remember when Adidas was stressed about making up for the losses from its defunct Yeezy partnership? Yeah, well, things have changed.
The sportswear retailer recently said it expects to hit $542 million in operating profits this year, less than half the average analyst estimate. Adidas blamed “unfavorable currency movements” for the lukewarm number, but added that it hopes to make up for some of that by selling items from its remaining Yeezy inventory, Bloomberg reported.
In fact, the brand expects to generate 250 million euros from Yeezy products that it’ll sell at cost, rather than writing them off.
This won't come as a surprise to those who’ve been following the Adidas-Yeezy saga, which started with Adidas severing ties with Ye (formerly known as Kanye West) and his label, Yeezy, after the singer’s antisemitic comments in 2022.
Since then, the retailer had been grappling with just what to do with all the unsold inventory—worth a whopping $1.3 billion—from its very public breakup with Ye. There was even some speculation that the brand would “burn” the items. But eventually Adidas decided to sell some of the stock while donating some of the proceeds.
Things turned around last summer when “it took orders for 4 million pairs of Yeezy shoes worth $565 million,” Retail Brew previously reported. The two Yeezy drops positively impacted net sales in an amount of around 750 million euros in 2023.
From the looks of it, Yeezy fans are still enthused about the shoes.