After the rapper Kanye West, Adidas separates from another of his luxury testimonials, the American pop star Beyoncé. The partnership between the singer and the German group, which together had launched the Adidas X Ivy Park line, would have reached the end credits by now, according to reports from the Wall Street Journal.
The anti-Semitic statements that had prompted Adidas to close with Ye (West’s new name) in spite of a lucrative partnership for the production of Yeezy sneakers have nothing to do with it. On the contrary: with Beyoncé it would only be a question of business, linked to the disappointing sales of the line of the pop star, serial Grammy collector.
The collaboration, which will close by the end of the year, dates back to 2019 when the Texan singer and the sportswear giant decided to launch a line of products connected to the Ivy Park brand owned by the former Destiny Child, with the goal of repeating the success of sneakers with Kayne West or the line designed by Puma for Fenty, Rhianna’s brand.
However, the experiment didn’t work: after the launch of the first collection, marred by the outbreak of the Covid pandemic, things didn’t go as planned and in 2022 sales dropped to 40 million dollars, less than an eighth of the 250 million budgeted by Adidas. Which therefore has decided to interrupt an expensive but unprofitable, albeit prestigious, collaboration.
On the other hand, Bjorn Gulden, CEO of Adidas since the beginning of January, has quite narrow margins of maneuver if he wants to be able to relaunch a brand which, also thanks to the withdrawal from the Yeezy sneaker market, is not experiencing one of its best moments : 2022 closed with a profit that fell by 83% to 254 million while forecasts for 2023 are for an operating loss of 700 million.