Adidas, every mention
82 scenes · ← back to Adidas
tap a year for its mentions
every year anyone David Rosenthal 52Ben Gilbert 28Jim Weber 2
Verbatim, from the transcripts: the passages where Adidas comes up
The NFL: How small-town teams became America's most valuable sports empire (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 3:43:43 Ben Gilbert State Farm, Adidas, Oakley, Head & Shoulders, equity ownership.
Indian Premier League Cricket (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 37:55 David Rosenthal Lalit goes to the three big companies, Nike, Adidas, Reebok, and says, hey, I'm putting out for bid for auction, being the kit provider, the gear provider, kit being the British term for athletic gear.
Novo Nordisk (Ozempic) · Acquired
- ▶ 41:55 Ben Gilbert It's Adidas and Puma.
Nike (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 4:43 David Rosenthal An item among many that is not discussed in the movie is that Rob, shortly after signing Jordan, had an enormous fight with Phil Knight, left the company with Peter Moore, who was the designer behind Jordan's, and ended up joining Adidas…
- ▶ 10:26 David Rosenthal So, Bowerman actually taught himself how to be a cobbler, and would take athletic shoes, usually Adidas athletic shoes, and modify them, or even build his own, and then use his athletes as guinea pigs to any advantage that they could have,…
- ▶ 13:10 David Rosenthal One, of course, is Adidas.
- ▶ 13:12 Ben Gilbert Or Adidas, as the Germans would say.
- ▶ 14:11 David Rosenthal By this point in time, the market had migrated to leather upper shoes, of which Adidas, or Adidas, was the leading technology manufacturer of it.
- ▶ 15:07 David Rosenthal And it's worth maybe saying one word on the Adidas or Adidas story before we move back to Phil Knight and Shoe Dog here, because it's pretty crazy.
- ▶ 15:16 David Rosenthal So it's called Adidas because Adidas was founded by Adolph Dassler, or Adi for short, Adi.
- ▶ 15:55 David Rosenthal Literally beating Hitler in Berlin, in Germany, in Adidas shoes.
- ▶ 16:00 Ben Gilbert And actually that was Adi Dassler taking a big risk by sneaking a pair of Adidas shoes to someone who could get them to Jesse Owens like the night before his race.
- ▶ 17:01 David Rosenthal Adidas, Adidas, and Puma are the two brothers.
- ▶ 17:09 David Rosenthal Phil has this idea in this class in business school, this good idea but small idea to sell Japanese track shoes in the U.S. and undercut Adidas.
- ▶ 25:28 David Rosenthal He thinks, you know, these aren't quite maybe as good as Adidas, but they're good enough, and I can sell them cheaply enough that my business plan will work.
- ▶ 27:23 David Rosenthal And I know he's not always super happy with Adidas.
- ▶ 31:55 Ben Gilbert But the responses he received referred him to footwear distributors in the United States for Adidas and ignored his design offer.
- ▶ 48:25 David Rosenthal So, Bowerman and Phil want to call the shoe, they actually want to borrow from the Adidas playbook,
- ▶ 48:36 David Rosenthal Adidas has been doing this for years.
- ▶ 48:44 David Rosenthal Adidas, of course, has already beaten them to the punch.
- ▶ 1:07:46 David Rosenthal So just like Phil Knight had the crazy idea of taking on Adidas with Blue Ribbon, Crusoe and its founders, Chase and Cully, had the crazy idea a few years ago that they could take on AWS and Azure.
- ▶ 1:14:49 David Rosenthal He remembers from back in the Mexico City Olympics in 1968, I think, that there was a factory, I believe in Guadalajara, that Adidas had used to make soccer cleats for the Olympics.
- ▶ 1:15:03 David Rosenthal And he says, you know, those soccer cleats that Adidas made were pretty good.
- ▶ 1:15:55 David Rosenthal When we made them for Adidas, you know, we had the three stripes on them, the Adidas stripes.
- ▶ 1:16:20 David Rosenthal And he asks her to design something like Adidas's stripes that can go on the sides of these soccer slash football cleats.
- ▶ 1:21:44 David Rosenthal I mean, they made shoes for Adidas for the Olympics.
- ▶ 1:54:58 David Rosenthal So Nike, Adidas, you know, Reebok, they sponsor lots of sports, but running, basketball, and tennis are the only sports that matter, because those are the only shoes that normal people can wear.
- ▶ 1:58:26 David Rosenthal He's about to kick him out, and then Rudy's like, yeah, Adidas didn't want it either, and Phil's like, oh, you said the A word.
- ▶ 2:06:49 Ben Gilbert Leaving and going to Adidas.
- ▶ 2:12:21 David Rosenthal Adidas.
- ▶ 2:12:55 Ben Gilbert They've got half the running market and this dominant brand where they just steamrolled the competition to get into all these sports deals, but right at the same time as the aerobics boom is coming up, Adidas is becoming a very real…
- ▶ 2:19:35 Ben Gilbert If Converse is gonna do this, or Adidas is gonna do this, they actually do have quite a bit to lose by giving away upside.
- ▶ 2:21:53 David Rosenthal Jordan wanted Adidas.
- ▶ 2:22:02 David Rosenthal It was Adidas.
- ▶ 2:22:04 David Rosenthal Hip hop, break dancing, track suits, shell toes, that was Adidas.
- ▶ 2:22:41 David Rosenthal So, Jordan actually takes the deal and shops it to Adidas afterwards, and he's like, I really don't want to go with Nike.
- ▶ 2:22:54 David Rosenthal And Adidas is like,
- ▶ 2:35:20 David Rosenthal Well, Sports Incorporated takes on as one of their major clients, Adidas.
- ▶ 2:35:28 David Rosenthal And then eventually Adidas buys the company,
- ▶ 2:36:09 David Rosenthal He's asked in the book Just Do It about Rob becoming CEO of Adidas, and he says, I know they, Adidas, aren't what they once were, but Adidas people were the Huns.
- ▶ 2:36:19 David Rosenthal I would starve to death before I would work for Adidas.
- ▶ 2:36:49 Ben Gilbert For Adidas, it was a brand revival.
- ▶ 2:37:04 Ben Gilbert It might have been okay if he had just quit, but he went to work for Adidas.
- ▶ 2:37:16 David Rosenthal Adidas' American headquarters are still in Portland, Oregon.
- ▶ 2:37:21 Ben Gilbert And they poach a lot of Nike people.
- ▶ 2:37:36 David Rosenthal Strasser leaves, starts this new company, starts working for Adidas, becomes the CEO of Adidas.
- ▶ 2:37:44 David Rosenthal Jordan's gonna go to Adidas.
- ▶ 2:38:00 David Rosenthal The wheels are in motion at Adidas.
- ▶ 2:38:03 David Rosenthal Adidas with Strasser, not yet at the helm, but whispering in the ear, is gonna be willing to do a Jordan-type deal for Jordan.
- ▶ 2:38:11 David Rosenthal Michael always wanted Adidas anyway.
- ▶ 2:38:14 David Rosenthal He's gonna break the deal with Nike and go with them.
- ▶ 2:49:22 David Rosenthal An interesting thing from that front, losing Kobe to Adidas.
- ▶ 2:49:30 Ben Gilbert People forget that Kobe was an Adidas athlete first.
- ▶ 2:49:44 David Rosenthal But then interestingly, Kobe was so unhappy at Adidas and wanted what Nike could give him that he bought Adidas out of his deal to move over to Nike.
- ▶ 2:49:56 Ben Gilbert So Kobe was with Adidas from 96 to 2002,
- ▶ 2:56:16 David Rosenthal For context, today, Nike is, what, more than twice the size of Adidas?
- ▶ 2:56:21 David Rosenthal Who is more than three times, I think, the size of the number three player?
- ▶ 3:06:46 Ben Gilbert Adidas has just been nothing but mistakes over there the last few years.
- ▶ 3:08:33 David Rosenthal There's Nike, there's Adidas that's half their size, and then the third place player is well less than half of Adidas' size.
- ▶ 3:10:38 David Rosenthal Kobe was with Adidas.
- ▶ 3:10:44 David Rosenthal I think the issue was what Nike could do for Kobe, and thus what Kobe could participate in, was exponentially higher than even what Adidas could do.
- ▶ 3:13:24 Ben Gilbert Maybe off of something purely unbranded, but off of Adidas, people are more likely to buy the Dunk Low SB than whatever the Adidas equivalent is, but the prices are pretty equivalent.
- ▶ 3:14:00 Ben Gilbert The Nike running shoes that I buy that are, what are, 161 180 dollars, the equivalent Adidas pair is 161 180 dollars.
- ▶ 3:16:02 Ben Gilbert I'm literally looking at Adidas gross profit margins are on average higher than Nike's.
- ▶ 3:16:12 Ben Gilbert Adidas is 46%, and Adidas every single quarter for the last 10 years has had a higher gross margin.
- ▶ 3:18:26 David Rosenthal And I don't think that's the case for Adidas.
- ▶ 3:28:06 David Rosenthal Nike replaced Adidas a few years back as the official jersey maker of the NBA.
- ▶ 3:45:57 David Rosenthal On the other hand, it's also a really convenient story, or the Kobe story of, ah, Kobe's, you know, Adidas shoes sucked.
- ▶ 3:46:29 Ben Gilbert Adidas has had this strategy that seems to be like celebrate eyeballs, where they'll sponsor anyone with attention.
- ▶ 3:47:39 Ben Gilbert And for anyone who hasn't been paying attention, he blew up Adidas' year.
- ▶ 3:47:45 Ben Gilbert Adidas' net income has basically evaporated and gone to zero.
- ▶ 3:47:48 Ben Gilbert They used to make over two billion dollars a year in profit, and the last four quarters on a rolling basis, they've made less than a hundred million.
- ▶ 3:47:59 Ben Gilbert And they claim around five hundred million dollars of this is the Yeezy write-down
- ▶ 3:48:04 Ben Gilbert They posted an actual net loss last quarter.
- ▶ 3:48:07 Ben Gilbert It is a pretty disastrous situation over there, and there's a full-out slide in their deck where they admit, we think we're better than this and we're not.
- ▶ 3:48:18 David Rosenthal For Adidas.
- ▶ 3:48:19 Ben Gilbert They're in a complete reset year.
- ▶ 3:53:03 Ben Gilbert Nike, fortunately, their big competitors, like Adidas, have just been out to lunch.
- ▶ 3:57:27 Ben Gilbert I mean, you listen to these Tegas calls with Adidas people, and they're like, our issue is how to figure out how to make the brand cool again, and that does not show up in any way, shape, or form in the Nike interviews.
Arena Show Part II: Brooks Running (with CEO Jim Weber) · Acquired
Platforms and Power (with Hamilton Helmer and Chenyi Shi) · Acquired
- ▶ 1:00 David Rosenthal What they went from under Jim, they went from like de minimis small number of millions of revenue to over a billion in revenue a year competing with Nike and Adidas.