Adidas

Adidas invented athlete endorsement with Jesse Owens in 1936

Adi and Rudy Dassler hustled their sports shoes onto non-German athletes at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, including Jesse Owens, who won four golds and beat the Germans in front of Hitler while wearing Adidas. Shaan calls it the first time an entrepreneur used sports to promote a brand, a strategy Nike later perfected.

“Jesse Owens goes on to win, I think, 4 gold medals at those Olympics. And so Jesse Owens is a Black guy who basically wins gold and beats the Germans in front of Hitler, who's promoting white supremacy at the time. And so it's a big deal for that victory at the time. And he's wearing Adidas. And this is kind of considered the first time that an entrepreneur used sports to promote their products or their businesses.”

Adidas turnaround: 'It didn't take a genius, just copy Nike and Reebok'

Robert Dreyfus bought a near-bankrupt Adidas (3% market share), moved manufacturing to Asia, cut two-thirds of jobs, and poured the savings into marketing. He took it back to the #2 brand and retired a billionaire, telling Time it was just easier for an outsider to copy what Nike and Reebok were obviously doing.

“The quote is, it didn't take a genius. You just had to look at what Nike and Reebok were doing and do that. He goes, it was just easier for somebody outside the company to see what was obvious than somebody inside the company who had all this baggage and they couldn't do it. So he turns it around, retires a billionaire in his 50s, I think.”

Steal thisCut costs ruthlessly, redirect the savings to marketing, and copy what the obvious leaders are already doing.

Yeezy did $1.3B in sales; Kanye's 11% royalty paid him $140M

Shaan breaks down the Forbes math: the Yeezy brand, owned 100% by Kanye but produced and distributed by Adidas, did $1.3 billion in sales in 2019, on which Kanye earns an 11% royalty worth $140 million.

“So 2019, he did $1.3 billion in sales on the Yeezy brand, which is kind of insane actually, uh, that a rapper was able to sort of have a Jordan-esque brand there. He gets an 11% royalty, which is $140 million on that. So every pair of Yeezys, he gets 11%. He did $140 million last year.”