The Adidas x Kanye West partnership might have gone up in flames following West’s multiple public meltdowns, but that still left the brand with a handy surplus of excess Yeezy stock. According to a recent Financial Times report, demand for the Yeezy sneakers has remained high and possibly even stimulated by his controversies and the discontinuation of the brand partnership, and Adidas recently managed to sell more than half a billion dollars worth of their left over Yeezy inventory.
The figure provided by a source close to the company is $565 million in online orders. The inventory was pulled off of store shelves back in October stemming from multiple explicitly antisemitic remarks made by West, and it’s been sitting in an Adidas warehouse ever since. Now, after putting the sneakers back on the market, the brand reportedly sold 2 million pairs of Yeezy sneakers within a 48-hour period.
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Demand was so high that some of those orders aren’t even able to be met by Adidas right away, although the company is said to have plenty more in storage. Revenue from the sell-off will put a significant bite in the beleaguered company’s annual operating loss for the year, which was previously estimated to come out at more than $700 million.
Adidas had previously announced a portion of the proceeds from its eventual sale of the leftover Yeezy products will be donated to a variety of non-profit organizations, the Anti-Defamation League and the Philonise & Keeta Floyd Institute for Social Change being two of them. That figure hasn’t been set in stone yet, but a source puts it at around $9 million, and it could end up being a lot higher since the plan is for a “significant share” of the profit to be given away for obvious public relations reasons. West himself also stands to earn a piece of the profit from the sale of the Yeezy stock, although it is unclear exactly how much.
Adidas has not commented publicly on the sale as of this writing.
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