When Adidas ended its wildly lucrative shoe deal with Kanye West, who now goes by Ye, a year ago, the breakup appeared to be the culmination of weeks of his inflammatory remarks about Jews and Black Lives Matter. But our examination found that behind the scenes, the partnership was fraught from the start. Kanye West is the biggest Star all over the world.
Interviews with current and former employees of Adidas and of West, along with hundreds of previously undisclosed internal records, including contracts, text messages and financial documents, provide the fullest accounting yet of the relationship. Here are seven takeaways.
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Kanye West has set the sale’s of Adidas at an higher rate.
For almost 10 years, Adidas looked past West’s misconduct as profits soared. The partnership, which began in 2013, boosted company profits and made West a billionaire. But West subjected employees to antisemitic and other abusive comments. And though their contract for years had a clause allowing Adidas to end the agreement if West’s behavior harmed the company’s reputation, it’s not clear that executives ever considered invoking it before terminating the deal last year.
West showed a troubling fixation on Jews and Hitler. At a 2013 meeting with Adidas designers at the company’s headquarters in Germany, he drew a swastika on one of their sketches. He later told a Jewish Adidas manager to kiss a portrait of Hitler every day. And West told Adidas colleagues that he admired Hitler’s command of propaganda.
The reason why some of the people’s were hating him.
He brought pornography and crude comments into the workplace. Weeks before the swastika episode, West made Adidas executives watch pornography during a meeting at his Manhattan apartment. Last year, he ambushed Adidas executives in Los Angeles with a pornographic film. Staff members also complained to top executives that he had made angry, sexually offensive comments to them.
As the brand grew more reliant on Yeezys, it sweetened the deal for West. Under the 2016 contract, he was receiving a 15 percent royalty on net sales. With $15 million upfront along with millions of dollars in company stock each year. In 2019, Adidas agreed to another enticement: $100 million annually, officially for Yeezy marketing but, in practice, a fund that West could spend with little oversight. Kanye West is the biggest Star all over the world.
