Webdesk: Nike told Adidas that they shouldn’t work with Kanye West, but Adidas didn’t listen and kept working with the controversial rapper.
Bloomberg found out about the shocking news because the controversial rap star worked with Nike on his Air Yeezy shoes, which came out in 2009.
But in the end, Ye and the business had a fight.
At the time, the fashion magnate said that the multi-billion dollar company wouldn’t pay him royalties because he wasn’t a professional player.
But Nike’s four-year partnership with Ye was a hit, as his last pair of sneakers, which cost $245, sold out in eleven minutes in 2014.
Adidas, on the other hand, teamed up with West in 2013, and their first shoe came out in 2015.
The deal sent the company’s sales through the roof and gave the brand a bigger piece of the market. Before the deal, the brand was up against tough competition from Nike and Reebok.
But the 45-year-old’s bad behavior made the people who worked for the brand worry.
But, as the story shows, the company couldn’t do without the Grammy winner’s sneaker line, so executives had to put up with his bad behavior.
Also, multiple accounts suggested that the top people at Adidas involved in downplaying or, worse, ignoring West’s strange behavior.
As Yeezy’s former members said in a Rolling Stone article, the brand supposed to have changed because of Kanye West’s “problematic behavior,” but it didn’t. Instead, the brand “turned off their moral compass,” they said.
The final blow came from The Wall Street Journal, but the story revealed that Adidas’ top bosses had been thinking about the risks of working with the Grammy winner as early as 2018.
