I remember my first meeting with the chairman when I arrived at Leicester City this summer. He sat down with me and said, “Claudio, this is a very important year for the club. It is very important for us to stay in the Premier League. We have to stay safe.” My reply was, “Okay, sure.
It was the middle of the night when the jangle of his cellphone woke Sanjay Khajuria from a deep sleep.
Early soccer balls were hand-sewn and made of leather. They were never perfectly round, and inflating them required some skill. The laces had to be undone before an interior air bladder was filled and tied with a thread; then the laces were retied.
On a late summer afternoon in Adidas Village, a complex of five Rubik’s cube–like buildings with colorful, tile façades on the east side of Portland, Oregon, a brood of young footwear designers gathered in a second-floor common area for the final presentation of an outgoing summer intern.
You’ve probably been told the “golden rule” at some point in your life, but it’s not always ideal for those times you want to ooze charisma. That’s where the “platinum rule” comes in. It may seem like some people are born likable, but everyone is capable of developing charisma.
A pair of adidas Made for London trainers sit on a powder-blue tray table the size of an A3 sheet. The shoes don't look like much - but then they wouldn't, because they haven't been made yet.
Adidas AG aims to increase its sales by 40 million pairs of sneakers annually, to more than a half-billion by 2020, largely by appealing to fashion-conscious teens and urban hipsters.
Highly addictive, horribly debilitating, unfortunately pervasive, and freaking delicious. If I had to point to ONE culprit to our country’s expanding waistlines and rapidly deteriorating health, it would be sugar.
FreeBSD is a fast, secure, modern Unix-like operating system with a fantastic community, great documentation, and powerful technologies like ZFS and LLVM. It’s my operating system of choice for everything from my i7-2600k desktop to my home router to my ARM plug computer jukebox.
BEHIND closed doors in the Bavarian town of Ansbach a new factory is taking shape. That it will use robots and novel production techniques such as additive manufacturing (known as 3D printing) is not surprising for Germany, which has maintained its manufacturing base through innovative engineering.
Data and creativity can work really well together. Don’t believe me? On February 1, 2013, a TV series called House of Cards debuted on the video streaming service Netflix. It proved an immediate hit. Two years later, it has a nine out of 10 rating from more than 275,000 reviewers.
For as long as we can remember, we’ve been reading comments such as these on the internet: ‘ Nike makes their shoes for $2 dollars.’ ‘ The Yeezy Boost costs $10 to make and adidas sells it for $350. adidas makes a $340 margin’.
Understanding the need to produce weekly content rather than just a few ad campaigns a year, ‘tactical content innovation’ is becoming Adidas’ marketing super power as it moves to measure the impact of its ‘newsrooms’ around the globe.
This story appears in ESPN The Magazine's Dec. 25 'Tis The Season Issue. Subscribe today! ON THE MORNING of Sept. 26, more than two dozen Adidas employees gathered inside a gym at the University of Louisville.
For decades it’s looked like no company could ever topple Nike, the $86 billion global sneaker juggernaut.
Back in 2012, if you asked anyone what the hottest sneaker brand in the world was and they didn’t immediately say Nike, you’d have thought they were either insane or lying. Nike's stiffest global competition, Adidas, wasn’t so much a distant second as an almost non-existent one.
Adidas is leaving behind TV advertising as it seeks to quadruple its e-commerce revenues by 2020, Chief Executive Kasper Rorsted told CNBC. Rorsted said the firm would focus primarily on digital channels to capture younger consumers, a crucial demographic for the sports clothing line.
There are few sectors of the economy that offer as wide and interesting a range of career opportunities as fashion. Role Call highlights some of the industry’s most interesting jobs and the talented people who do them.
Arthur Hoeld, Adidas's senior VP of global brand strategy, breaks down why the brand with the three stripes is the hottest sneaker brand on the planet right now. Just a few years ago, it seemed like the global battle between Nike and Adidas for sneaker dominance was all but over.
If you’ve been following Marvel’s comics lately, you’ll know that Steve Rogers hasn’t been Captain America for a while now. He’s been drained of his super-soldier serum and turned into an old man, while former Falcon Sam Wilson has taken up the mantle (much to some people’s chagrin).
At the very last second, the ball whipped inside the whitewashed wooden stanchion, pinging across the goal into the far side netting with a satisfying ripple.
Running apps and sportswear companies go together like, well, running apps and sportswear companies. Last year, Under Armour bought MyFitnessPal and Adidas bought Runtastic — now, it's the turn of Asics, which has entered into a "definitive agreement" to buy Runkeeper for an undisclosed sum.
Two years ago, German sportswear giant Adidas Group was sucking wind in America. It had just been unseated as the No. 2 apparel brand in the US by Under Armour, practically a teenager (Kevin Plank founded the upstart brand in 1996) compared to 90-year-old Adidas. In footwear, it ceded No.
Last winter, the sportswear giant Adidas opened a pop-up store inside a Berlin shopping mall. The boutique was part of a corporate experiment called Storefactory—a name as flatly self-explanatory as it is consistent with the convention of German compound nouns.
About 12 years ago, I co-founded a startup called Basecamp: A simple project collaboration tool that helps people make progress together, sold on a monthly subscription. It took a part of some people’s work life and made it a little better.
There’s a scene in Stanley Kubrick’s comic masterpiece Dr. Strangelove in which Jack D.
Everybody wants what feels good.
I was in graduate school when I first heard the term “millennial.” It was at a conference. The session was about how to serve millennial students, because they have different characteristics than the Generation X students that went before them.
HERZOGENAURACH, Germany — Founded in 1949, Adidas has grown from a small family run sports-shoemaker into one of the most recognisable brands on the planet.
During her 14 years at Netflix, Patty McCord kept a head-down approach, isolating herself within Netflix’s walls, to eventually come up with the brilliant 124-page document called “Netflix Culture: Freedom & Responsibility.
We’ve been tracking our steps, runs, sleep and more on apps for a while now. The Nike Plus iPod was announced in 2006. Its app launched in 2010. Fitbit was founded in 2007.
Update: I’m co-authoring a book about the mental models from this post. Get notified when the book comes out here.
More comfortable online than out partying, post-Millennials are safer, physically, than adolescents have ever been. But they’re on the brink of a mental-health crisis. One day last summer, around noon, I called Athena, a 13-year-old who lives in Houston, Texas.
Chief marketing officer Eric Liedtke, a 20-plus-year veteran of the company, teamed up with the then-newly promoted global creative director Paul Gaudio in mid-2014 to lead a migration of the creative team from Adidas’s headquarters in the Bavarian town of Herzogenaurach, Germany, to Portland, Ore
A visit with Cupertino’s chief chipmaker, Johny Srouji. By Brad Stone, Adam Satariano, and Gwen Ackerman | February 18, 2016 Photographs by Justin Kaneps for Bloomberg Businessweek From A little over a year ago, Apple had a problem: The iPad Pro was behind schedule.
The island of Hilton Head in South Carolina is shaped like a sneaker, and Stan Smith lives on the laces, right off the river.
MARKETS frequently froth and bubble, but the boom in bitcoin, a digital currency, is extraordinary. Although its price is down from an all-time high of $2,420 on May 24th, it has more than doubled in just two months.
HERZOGENAURACH, Germany/NEW YORK Adidas launched a new sneaker on Friday with a 3D-printed sole that it plans to mass-produce next year, part of a broader push by the German sportswear firm to react faster to changing fashions and create more customized products.
Industry Confessions: A recurring, open-letter series where insiders spill their guts, divulging the real but often unspoken side of a career in fashion, told from an industry perspective. Today we hear from an anonymous, veteran sneakerhead with decades of experience in the industry.
In my life, I have given a fuck about many people and many things. I have also not given a fuck about many people and many things. And those fucks I have not given have made all the difference. People often say the key to confidence and success in life is to simply “not give a fuck.
Want to work at Slack — in NYC? We are hiring talented engineers, product managers, and designers. Visit slack.com/jobs to find out more, or email me directly at nweiss @ slack-corp . com.
For years, I kept hearing how awesome Evernote was: how it could store everything you possibly needed, make it available everywhere, and how scores of people couldn’t live without it. I tried it multiple times, and never saw the appeal until now. Here’s what I was missing. [jump]
Adidas sold 1 million shoes made out of ocean plastic last year, CEO Kasper Rorsted told CNBC on Wednesday. The German sportswear giant launched last year three new versions of its UltraBoost shoe made out of plastic found in the ocean.
Chief among them: the company wasn't giving the American market the attention it deserves, according to the company's North American president, Mark King. "I think the biggest mistake — and honestly it was a big mistake — was that we didn't make North America the No.
Adidas’ latest running shoe is subtle and soft-looking, with stitching that evokes the sea. It’s also made almost entirely from plastic recovered from the ocean.
“I hate networking.” We hear this all the time from executives, other professionals, and MBA students. They tell us that networking makes them feel uncomfortable and phony—even dirty.
Keith Chen (TED Talk: Could your language affect your ability to save money?) might be an economist, but he wants to talk about language. For instance, he points out, in Chinese, saying “this is my uncle” is not as straightforward as you might think.
Below is an excerpt from Radical Technologies, by Adam Greenfield. This story is recommended by Longreads contributing editor Dana Snitzky. The smartphone is the signature artifact of our age.
Whichever company’s vision wins out will shape the future of the economy. While lots of attention is directed toward identifying the next great start-up, the defining tech-industry story of the last decade has been the rise of Apple and Google. In terms of wealth creation, there is no comparison.
In this exclusive excerpt from Sneakers, a new extensive book about sneaker culture, Adidas's Marc Dolce explains what goes down at Adidas's future-focused Brooklyn offices. As the sneaker industry has grown into a monolith, the publishing industry has tried to keep pace.
You don't need more motivation. You don't need to be inspired to action. You don't need to read any more lists and posts about how you're not doing enough.
In Silicon Valley, millions of dollars change hands every day as investors hunt the next big thing – the ‘unicorn’, or billion-dollar tech firm.
On the Internet, search queries are used to target vulnerable consumers. Google knows the questions that people wouldn’t dare ask aloud, and it silently offers reams of answers. But it is a mistake to think of a search engine as an oracle for anonymous queries. It isn’t. Not even close.
In the military, a poorly formatted email may be the difference between mission accomplished and mission failure. During my active duty service, I learned how to structure emails to maximize a mission’s chances for success.
Toward the tail end of 2015, Kevin Systrom, the CEO of Instagram, came to a realization: The photo-sharing app he had founded five years earlier was straying too far from its roots.
The future will be owned by those who get there first. Nike and Adidas, the two biggest global sportswear companies in the world, have a new focus on speed.
Kim Scott, co-founder of Candor, Inc., has built her career around a simple goal: Creating bullshit-free zones where people love their work and working together. She first tried it at her own software startup.
Wearables are only as good as the apps they're compatible with. And companies making health-focused products, like smartwatches, fitness bands and even hybrids of these two, are starting to realize that.
In April 2014, adidas CEO Herbert Hainer asked Mark King to be the new head of adidas America. King knew the job involved big challenges and big expectations. The US market accounts for more than a third of the global athletic footwear and apparel market.
As the world population grows, we have a pressing need to eat better and farm better, and those of us trying to figure out how to do those things have pointed at lots of different foods as problematic. Almonds, for their water use. Corn, for the monoculture. Beef, for its greenhouse gases.
The Echo, Amazon’s voice-controlled speaker, was a big hit this holiday season. Amazon is keeping specific sales figures under wraps, but the company says it sold nine times as many Echo devices during the holidays as it did a year earlier.
Vinod Khosla did not show up at TechCrunch Disrupt to be harangued by some smartass, know-nothing journalist.
After sending out hundreds of copies of my résumé to dozens of companies over the last year, I realized that I was getting nowhere because my approach was wrong. What I had failed to do was ask myself some of the tough and honest questions early on.
HERZOGENAURACH, Germany — When Kanye West took the stage at the 2015 Billboard Music Awards in Las Vegas, he was a shadowy silhouette in a fiery haze.
As of March, the German sportswear maker had nearly doubled its market share in the US, from around 6% to 11%, according to data from NPD Group. Its sales in the US grew 31% in the first quarter of this year.
The acquisition of Runtastic gave Adidas a major boost in its fitness tech efforts, and it didn't hurt that the $238 million purchase included Runtastic's 100-million-plus user base.
When the major sporting apparel brands look ahead to the next few years, women are consistently one of the key groups they want to reach to improve sales. Historically, many activewear manufacturers have paid more attention to men.
In the last year, Adidas has pulled off a massive turnaround and seen its share price go up 250 percent. Much of that success, said the company, is due to an internal reorganization of the brand that directly affected sales. Adidas was losing market share to Nike and Under Armour.
The company has reimagined its signature air cushioning technology for the $190 VaporMax. Will going foam-free help it fend off Adidas? We are in Steve Prefontaine Hall, a glass-roofed exhibition space at Nike’s headquarters in Beaverton, Ore., on a rainy morning in February.
Most of us slow down as we age. We’re similar to conventional machines, like old cars or hairdryers that run less efficiently as they get on in years. But digital gadgets, particularly smartphones? We expect them to operate quickly. Forever!
The cab driver wanted to make sure I hadn't misspoken. "Adidas?" he asked, in a voice that said, Are you sure? The implied alternative being Puma, the other international sportswear company headquartered in the Bavarian village of Herzogenaurach, population about 24,000.
He told CNBC: "It's clear that the younger consumer engages with us predominantly over the mobile device. Digital engagement is key for us — you don't see any TV advertising any more." Rorsted's comments shouldn't be taken too literally, however.
With his company DeepMind, Londoner Demis Hassabis is leading Google’s project to build software more powerful than the human brain. But what will this mean for the future of humankind?
At a recent all-hands meeting with employees, Kevin Systrom, a founder and chief executive of Instagram, showed off one of his favorite charts: Days to Reach the Next 100 Million Users. “It’s the only graph in the company that we celebrate when it declines,” Mr.