Adidas needs to rediscover its creativity after Yeezy

When Adidas split with Kanye West last year over the rapper’s antisemitic remarks, it was left with millions of unsold Yeezy shoes, and a superstar-sized hole in its identity. The German sports shoe and clothing company had become tangled in West’s volatile personality and enticing brand.

Adidas is recovering, as its results this week showed. It may lose a mere €100mn this year, rather than the €700mn it earlier feared, and is making progress. Marathon runners have been breaking records in its new $500 carbon-forked racing shoes, while old technology classics including Samba and Gazelle shoes from the 1950s and 1960s are enjoying a revival.

Years of wandering have put Adidas a long way behind its old nemesis Nike. It was a bad-tempered rivalry: “He went to work for Adidas. An intolerable betrayal. I never forgave him,” Nike’s co-founder Phil Knight recalled of one colleague in his memoir Shoe Dog. Nike can now afford to be more gracious, with twice Adidas’s sales and more than five times its market valuation.

Adidas steered towards the siren song of fashion and lifestyle, and neglected the sporting performance at the heart of its original brand. The German football team won the World Cup in 1954 in lightweight leather boots with screw-in studs designed by its founder Adi Dassler. They were not only technologically advanced, but sold for twice the price of British boots.

The problem with outsourcing its halo effect to the rapper known as Ye is not only that his fell off, but it neglected its own. That is not unique to Adidas: “Collaborations have been wildly successful for many brands but the danger is, what are you without them?” says Tom Astrella, co-founder of Footsoldiers, a sneaker design consultant that works with brands such as Hoka.

Fashion has financial value. The sneaker culture that spilled out from Nike’s launch of the Air Jordan basketball shoe with Michael Jordan in 1985 produces a lot of sales. It spread to streetwear and now to offices: sneakers with bulging soles are known as dad shoes, and I see a lot of office dads in Samba shoes and posher ones.

But the roots of Adidas and Nike lie in sport, and that is the back catalogue on which they can draw for Sambas, Gazelles, Air Jordans and the rest. It is why Nike has spent billions on basketball endorsements and tie-ups such as a clothing deal with the National Basketball Association. It is incredibly expensive, but it keeps the brand alive.

Both companies started with athletic shoes, and Nike has also kept pace better in the jogging and trail-running market, where runners are lured by technology. Hoka and On, the Swiss company part-owned by the tennis champion Roger Federer, are taking more shelf space in premium sporting goods stores in the US and Europe.

Nike’s Vaporfly marathon shoes, with their bouncy foam and carbon plates, burnished its credentials and stirred up rule-breaking controversy, on which it thrives. So Adidas’s Adizero Adios Pro Evo 1s (the longer the name, the faster they go), have arrived just in time. There is nothing better for Adidas than a renewed running rivalry.

Carbon shoes that cost $500 and only last a limited distance will not contribute much to the revenues of a company that, even in its weakened state, sold 419mn pairs of shoes last year. But technology that beats competitors and lets runners shave minutes of marathon times is worth a lot if it can be integrated into other, cheaper designs.

This is one step forward and Adidas needs to take many more under Bjørn Gulden, its new chief executive, who used to head Puma, its old crosstown rival in Herzogenaurach, Germany. Gulden declares that “we will again be the best sports brand”: he wants to push further into basketball, and is selling a lot of pink Inter Miami jerseys, thanks to its football star Lionel Messi.

Rebuilding sporting credibility is a long struggle compared with buying heat off the shelf through a deal with an unstable rapper. Gulden is also trying to respond faster to what shoppers want, as when demand surged for Samba shoes. He hopes to “identify trends early and be much more consumer friendly”, says Adam Cochrane, a Deutsche Bank Research analyst.

This means mending ties with retailers, strained when Adidas tried to pivot towards online direct-to-consumer sales. Adidas and Nike remain heavily reliant on chains such as Foot Locker in US and Sports Direct in the UK, to push shoes: more than 60 per cent of Adidas’s sales come through such retailers, making it harder to control its own destiny.

West was practised at building demand with his limited-edition drops and high-priced designs such as the Yeezy Boost range. Maybe Adidas can revive some of the lost excitement with a forthcoming collaboration with Jerry Lorenzo’s Fear of God label, but it will again be relying on a fashionable outsider for creativity.

In the end, Adidas has to be desirable itself, and the only way to do that is through sports. It cannot rest on a back catalogue: it has to design shoes that will one day have a heritage of their own.

john.gapper@ft.com