Product and Marketing
Under the adidas brand, we have been designing, engineering, and marketing world-class sports products for more than 75 years. Through developing innovative products and telling inspiring stories across our markets, we create only the best for the athlete. By doing so, we continue to build brand equity as well as the trust of our consumers and partners, which in turn enables us to capitalize on attractive structural growth opportunities in the sporting goods industry.
The adidas brand
The adidas brand has a long history and deep-rooted connection with sport. We believe that through sport, we have the power to change lives. This is our purpose, and we live it every day by expanding the limits of human possibilities. To remain one of the most recognized and iconic brands in the world, on and off the field of play, we need to drive and maintain our credibility in sport. For us, the adidas brand, this means launching groundbreaking innovations to continuously deliver the best for the athlete, while also enabling a culture that is born from it. Being committed to inclusivity, we ensure that all athletes and consumers are considered and supported by our product assortment. SEE ESRS S4 – CONSUMERS AND END USERS
adidas is all about sports and the culture born from it
Product is at the core of everything we do. Our Performance products are built from sport and worn for sport, helping our athletes to perform at their best in a broad range of sports, represented by our famous 3‑Bar logo. We serve all athletes, in the global sports football, running, basketball, and training, as well as in many locally relevant credibility sports, including golf, motorsport, tennis, trail running, winter sports, rugby, and cricket, among many others. On the Lifestyle side, adidas Originals is motivated by the collective memory of sports and represents brand classics as well as new visionary designs. The Trefoil – adidas Originals’ iconic signifier – represents products that connect with culture, leveraging our archive and celebrating our partnerships. In addition, Sportswear is built as an expansion from the playing field to courtside. It is born from sport and worn for style. Sportswear offers our consumers everyday products that redefine comfort, versatility, and aesthetics.
With a more than 75-year history of groundbreaking innovation in sports, we have built an enormously rich archive – the collective memory of our brand. Some memorable moments include:
1949
‘Adolf Dassler adidas Sportschuhfabrik’ is registered in the small town of Herzogenaurach, Germany, and founder Adi Dassler launches a sports shoe featuring the soon-to-become-famous 3‑Stripes, marking the humble beginnings of a global success story.
1954
adidas makes its mark on the football pitch, with innovative screw-in studs on lightweight football boots helping the German national football team beat Hungary in the 1954 World Cup final.
1967
The iconic Franz Beckenbauer tracksuit celebrates its debut as the first piece of apparel from the brand. To this day, iterations of our tracksuits resonate with consumers around the globe.
1970
After unlocking footwear and apparel, we deliver the Telstar as our first official match ball for the 1970 FIFA World Cup in Mexico. This marks the beginning of a successful strategic partnership, with the brand providing innovative official match balls for every FIFA World Cup ever since.
1972
To enhance brand visibility, a new logo featuring three leaf-shaped foils is introduced: the Trefoil. In the same year, the Samba, as we know it today, launches as a fast-paced and agile football shoe, before later turning into a lifestyle icon.
1973
A tennis shoe developed in the 1960s is rebranded in honor of one of the biggest sports stars of the time: Stan Smith. The silhouette is synonymous with timeless style and has become an everyday staple of modern footwear.
1986
Initially designed for basketball, US-based hip-hop group Run-D.M.C. turn the Superstar shoe into a streetwear icon with the release of the song ‘My Adidas.’
1994
Marking the next chapter in our rich football history, the Predator boot is born. While the rippled rubber fins remain a distinctive feature, continued iterations ensure the franchise remains a go-to for the world’s top players and amateurs alike.
2001
adidas becomes the pioneer in the industry to introduce a new lifestyle segment, focusing on sports-inspired streetwear. In the years to come, new partnerships with Yohji Yamamoto (2001), Stella McCartney (2002), and Pharrell Williams (2014) are born along with exciting labels, such as Y-3 (2003).
2013
Boost hits the market and the running industry is changed forever. With the Ultraboost franchise launch in 2015, the responsive cushioning technology is brought into an elegant silhouette, dissolving the boundaries between performance and lifestyle running.
2019
Leveraging years of comprehensive research, we introduce a new sustainability concept called Futurecraft.Loop, a completely recyclable performance shoe. This marks another critical milestone in our ambition to continuously push industry-wide boundaries in terms of sustainability.
2022
In collaboration with Gucci, we build on the incredible legacy of the Gazelle since 1966, resulting in one of our most sought-after releases. Featuring premium materials and a kaleidoscope of colors, and merging the iconic Trefoil and Gucci emblems, these ‘Made in Italy’ Gazelles firmly reestablish the silhouette around the world and kick off the global Terrace trend.
2023
Continuing to provide only the best for the athlete, we unveil the Adizero Adios Pro Evo 1, our lightest-ever running shoe. Weighing in at 138 grams, the shoe is 40% lighter than any other shoe adidas has ever created and enables our athletes to set new personal bests and break multiple records.
2025
adidas extends the Adizero legacy with the Adizero Prime X Evo, a concept shoe redefining long-distance running performance. Setting a new benchmark, the shoe helped our athlete, Sibusiso Kubheka, break the six-hour barrier for 100 kilometers during the Chasing 100 project in Nardò, Italy.
Product franchises as lighthouses for our brand
Within our wide and deep product range, product franchises are our most iconic symbols of sport and culture as well as the lighthouses of our brand. In Performance, globally recognized footwear franchises include Predator and F50 in Football, Adizero and Supernova in Running, Dropset in Training, Agravic and Free Hiker in Outdoor, Barricade in Tennis, and AE in Basketball. In the Lifestyle category, they include perennial footwear icons such as Samba, Gazelle, Handball Spezial, Superstar, Adistar, and Stan Smith.
Footwear is key to winning consumer mindshare. With our rich archive, access to fundamental athlete insights, and technological innovation, we have been pushing and continue to push boundaries in the athletic footwear industry. This is reflected in our category mix: In 2025, footwear had the highest share of net sales by product category at 57% (2024: 59%), followed by apparel at 35% (2024: 34%), and accessories at 7% (2024: 8%). See Note 36
Net sales share by product division
We leverage the footwear-led brand heat and expand it into our apparel and accessories business. On the apparel side, we aim to build and grow differentiated apparel collections such as the Firebird, Z.N.E., and adicolor ranges. In apparel, too, our franchises represent the very best of adidas, influencing not only sports, but also the culture born from it. Through uncompromised functionality, designs, colors, materials, and unique stories, they have the potential to be iterated over time to preserve desirability.
While our global product franchises serve as lighthouses for the adidas brand, we strive for additions and adaptations that reflect local consumer preferences across our markets. This approach ensures that iconic franchises remain central to our identity while enabling locally relevant product assortments.
Global brand with locally relevant product range
Brand desirability might look and feel different in different parts of the world. As a global brand with a local mindset, we therefore ensure that our product is tailored to local tastes and trends. While product franchises and our seasonal spring/summer and fall/winter ranges are developed on a global basis, we empower our markets to adapt the assortment and go-to-market to their local needs. Through dedicated local design, development, sourcing, and marketing resources, we enable our market teams to cater to the consumers in their respective market.
Besides the global creation engine at our headquarters in Herzogenaurach, we have invested in creation capabilities in Portland and Los Angeles for North America, in Shanghai for Greater China, and in Tokyo for Japan, among others. This setup enables us to leverage our archive and the strength of a global brand, while ensuring relevance for a broad array of local consumer preferences. In addition, we run ‘creation at source’ throughout our two largest sourcing countries, Vietnam and Indonesia. SEE MARKETS AND SALES CHANNELS
Product innovation and success stories
We have a long heritage of innovation and constantly strive to provide athletes with the best by creating high-performance and competitive products. Technology platforms such as Boost, Lightstrike, and Clima are proof points of our broader approach to innovation and act as enablers to define new successful athlete stories through best-in-class product execution. We collaborate with athletes and consumers, universities, innovative companies, governments, and research organizations to further understand performance requirements. Based on these insights, we invest in manufacturing techniques and new technologies with the aim of addressing the challenges athletes experience.
In the past year, we continued to serve all athletes with innovative technologies, materials, and more sustainable concepts built into our Performance products:
Adistar Jellyfish
Shoe of the Year
We also continued to create sports-inspired product stories that resonate with consumers in Lifestyle, leveraging our rich archive and roster of brand partners:
Holistic approach to marketing investments
Our marketing activities – alongside product creation, innovation, and collaborations – are an important constituent for creating brand desirability and winning the consumer. adidas is focused on generating inspirational and innovative concepts that drive consumer advocacy, build brand equity, and drive demand for our products. With partner and brand marketing activities extending through digital platforms, advertising, point-of-sale, and grassroots activations, we create one powerful narrative. The ambition is to have a fully connected marketing funnel, from grabbing consumer attention to driving consideration when consumers are in the buying phase, down to conversion at the point of sale. SEE ESRS S4 – CONSUMERS AND END USERS
We are active across five dimensions with bespoke marketing objectives:
Brand campaigns: create visibility and unaided awareness, and establish a brand point of view
Elevated franchises: drive global desire and demand for our product franchises
Category activation: strengthen sport and cultural credibility by sharpening category propositions
Horizontal brand stories: ensure visibility and engagement for brand priorities across categories
Commercial conversion: drive conversion at the point of sale, both in-store and online
Marketing plans anchored in our ‘You Got This’ brand campaign
From building brand awareness and brand heat all the way down to deliberate point-of-sale experiences, our brand marketing plans showcase a variety of activations at all levels of the marketing funnel, with our global brand campaign ‘You Got This’ being at the very center of it. You Got This was born from consumer insights. In conversations with our consumers, we repeatedly heard that pressure makes everything feel impossible and that sport stops being fun when negative pressure comes from all angles. The most vocalized point was the disconnect from sport due to the expectations of others.
In response, we crafted and adopted You Got This as our brand message to help people believe they can disarm negative pressure and engage with sport on their terms. Initially launched in 2024, the campaign evolved significantly in 2025, led by the ‘Plus One’ chapter. This chapter highlights the influence each of us has in uplifting others in sports – changing the game, tone, and outcome for someone else. It’s about transforming self‑doubt into self‑belief and pressure into joy because we all need someone to make us believe. In 2025, the campaign featured Aitana Bonmatí, Alessia Russo, Anthony Edwards, Lamine Yamal, Trinity Rodman, and Aliyah Boston alongside countless other global and local brand partners. The campaign will continue to expand with additional chapters throughout 2026, leveraging major sports events such as the Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games and the FIFA World Cup 2026.
Impactful and effective marketing initiatives
2025 provided fantastic opportunities to showcase how our athletes harness their inner self-belief and confidence to overcome pressure during high-stakes moments in their respective disciplines. Accordingly, we launched several You Got This chapters around major sports events, with stories narrated by our athletes, as a reminder to all – from amateur to elite level – of how integral self-belief is. For us, being a global brand with a local mindset also means telling such stories in a locally relevant way. Our teams therefore created market-specific iterations of our brand campaign chapters and hosted additional events within local communities.
Superstar activation: We reinforced the cultural relevance of the Superstar via several local activations throughout the year. In the US, the Hellstar x Superstar collaboration featured prominently at ComplexCon, the world’s most relevant sneaker fair. In the UK, sold-out events featuring live performances drove strong engagement. In China, SuperstarCon, an event that took over an entire street block in Shanghai’s city center, strengthened the Superstar’s position as a style icon. Globally, the ‘Superstar, The Original’ campaign celebrated the silhouette’s heritage, partnering with Samuel L. Jackson and Missy Elliott.
UEFA Women’s EURO: We amplified the success of our teams at the UEFA Women’s EURO football tournament through You Got This campaign chapters: Stars including Aitana Bonmatí and Alessia Russo demonstrated that competitiveness and support can co-exist at all levels of the sport. Simultaneously, we drove elevated brand visibility with activations such as our Three Stripe Social Club in Zurich – a curated retail space that served as a meeting point for fans and consumers to connect and experience football culture.
Credibility sport events: Multiple sport events provided platforms to showcase our commitment to locally relevant sports. In rugby, the Black Ferns continued to break barriers and inspire a new generation when they earned a podium spot at the Women’s World Cup in England. In cricket, India’s women’s team claimed the ICC Women’s T20 World Cup title for the first time while wearing adidas kits, highlighting our growing presence in one of the world’s most followed sports.
Road to Records: The fifth edition of Road to Records at our Herzogenaurach headquarters saw 120 elite athletes deliver standout performances: one world record, two under-20 world records, four continental records, and four national records. Beyond the elite races, 1,500 runners joined a public 5k race. Meanwhile, our adidas Runners community tracked more than 350,000 participants in the virtual race on the adidas Running app.
Brand partner portfolio rooted in sport
2025 was another fantastic year for sport. Many athletes were able to further improve their outstanding performances and inspire spectators all over the world. For others, it was the year in which they were able to shine on the big stage for the first time. As a sports brand, we are grateful for the trust these athletes place in us, and we will support them unconditionally throughout all stages of their journey.
We constantly strive to further extend our sizable roster of athletes and partners. The latest signings include, the Audi F1 Team, Liverpool FC, Eintracht Frankfurt, Club América, Fenerbahçe Istanbul, Penn State, the University of Tennessee, the German Basketball Federation (DBB), the South African Football Association, Ilona Maher, and Franz and Moritz Wagner, among others. In addition, we were able to extend our partnerships with the Argentine Football Federation, Walt Disney, Major League Soccer, ATHX Events, Patrick Mahomes, Anthony Edwards, Antoine Dupont, Alexander Zverev, David Beckham, Grace Wales Bonner, Edison Chen, and Olivia Dean, among others.
With this, we will continue to bring our products to the biggest stages in the world through partners such as:
Major teams, federations, leagues, and events: National football teams of Algeria, Argentina, Belgium, Colombia, Costa Rica, Germany, Italy, Jamaica, Japan, Mexico, Peru, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Spain, and Sweden. Top football clubs, such as Arsenal FC, A.S. Roma, Bayern Munich FC, Juventus Turin, Liverpool FC, Manchester United, and Real Madrid, as well as all the Major League Soccer (MLS) teams. Basketball and US sports: US-American universities such as the University of Kansas, Penn State, the University of Tennessee, Indiana University, and Texas Tech. Running: Ethiopian Athletics Federation (EAF) and French Athletics Federation (FFA), as well as the Berlin marathon and Boston marathon. Other sports: Mercedes-AMG PETRONAS F1 team, Audi F1 team, Indian cricket team, German Olympic Committee (Team D), British Olympic Association (Team GB), Dutch field hockey team, New Zealand All Blacks and Black Ferns, and China’s national volleyball team.
High-profile athletes and individuals: Football stars: Aitana Bonmatí, Alessia Russo, Florian Wirtz, Gianluigi Donnarumma, Jude Bellingham, Jule Brand, Kim Little, Lamine Yamal, Linda Caicedo, Lionel Messi, Mo Salah, Nick Woltemade, Ousmane Dembélé, Pedri, Selma Bacha, Son HeungMin, Trent Alexander-Arnold, Trinity Rodman, and Vicky López; Football legends such as Zinedine Zidane, David Beckham, Toni Kroos, and Jürgen Klopp. Track and field athletes: Anna Hall, Emmanuel Wanyonyi, Ethan Katzberg, Gina Lückenkemper, Gout Gout, Grant Holloway, Noah Lyles, Oblique Seville, and Shaunae Miller-Uibo. Marathon runners: Hawi Feysa, Sabastian Sawe, and Tigist Assefa; ultra marathon runner Ruth Croft as well as triathlete Patrick Lange. Basketball stars: Aliyah Boston, Anthony Edwards, Candace Parker, Chelsea Gray, Damian Lillard, Donovan Mitchell, Franz and Moritz Wagner, Jalen Williams, James Harden, Kaleena Smith, Satou Sabally, and Sophie Cunningham. American football players: Patrick Mahomes, Travis Hunter, Garrett Wilson, and Micah Parsons. Rugby players: Ilona Maher, Siya Kolisi, Malcolm Marx, and Antoine Dupont. Tennis players: Alexander Zverev, Elina Svitolina-Monfils, Félix Auger-Aliassime, Ivan Ivanov, Jeline Vandromme, and Jessica Pegula. Alpine skier Mikaela Shiffrin, Alice Robinson, and snowboarder Su Yiming. Golfers: Ludvig Åberg, Linn Grant, Collin Morikawa, Nick Dunlap, and Rose Zhang.
Cultural marketing partners: Oasis, Bad Bunny, Bizarrap, Edison Chen, Grace Wales Bonner, Hellstar, Pharrell Williams, Willy Chavarria, Hoyeon Jung, Tate McRae, Pusha T, Caroline Daur, Samuel L. Jackson, and Missy Elliott.