NFT
Many brands rushed to the NFT space in 2021 as tokenized digital assets drove billions of dollars in monthly sales but none did as well as apparel giant Adidas which partnered with Web3-native brands and personalities on a high-profile collaboration.
In December of that year, Adidas launched Into the Metaverse alongside the popular campaign Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT project, Punks Comic (a derivative cryptopunks project) and pseudonym NFT influencer gmoney. The Bored Apes had only been minted months before and the whole NFT space was still very new and volatile.
For Erika Wykes-Sneyd, then the global VP of marketing for Adidas Originals and now the global VP and GM of Adidas /// Studios (aka Three Stripes Studios), the collaborative approach felt right, but signing a deal with pseudonymous makers in a burgeoning space was still risky.
“It really started with our values, and it felt right at the time, even though there were a lot of late nights where I thought, I could get fired for this,” she continued Decrypt‘s gm podcast.
She pointed out that Adidas signed a deal with the Bored Ape Yacht Club when co-founders Greg “Gargamel” Solano and Wylie “Gordon Goner” Aronow were still completely pseudonymous. That “made me nervous,” she recalled, as did a publicly traded company like Adidas making a purchase of Ethereum (ETH).
Wykes-Sneyd previously told Decrypt at the NFT Paris event in February that the trial took the better part of a year, and included many Web3 business leadership training courses at what is now a 73-year-old apparel brand. But in the end, the entire company was behind this bet on emerging culture in a decentralized space.
“We took everyone from the brand on the journey and really made sure it was clear why we were doing it,” Wykes-Sneyd told GM co-hosts Stacy Elliott and Andrew Hayward, noting that the legal and treasury departments of the brand were all in the mix. “[They] were right with us so it was a really rewarding experience.
Into the Metaverse was a quick success, selling its primary NFT drop and raise $23 million in the process — and that excludes Adidas’ share of royalties on secondary market sales. The NFTs can be exchanged for exclusive physical clothing with the branding of all employees.
Adidas has continued to incorporate Web3, including with the recent launch of ALTENhave owners of Into the Metaverse “burn” (or permanently destroy) the original NFT in exchange for a new Adidas profile picture (PFP) NFT connected with a narrative campaign. The ALTS NFTs may include exclusive access to future events and merchandise drops.
And since the introduction of Into the Metaverse, the brands and makers Adidas have collaborated with have only grown. Bored Ape Yacht Club creator Yuga Labs Raised $450 million with a valuation of $4 billion and now overseeing several NFT projects, Punks Comic is building several IP and gmoney launched his own tokenized clothing brand called 9dcc.
Wykes-Sneyd pointed to Adidas’ long history of highlighting cultural movements that hadn’t yet reached the mainstream or achieved widespread recognition, such as hip-hop and the brand’s collaboration with genre pioneers Run-DMC in the 1980s. Elevating Web3 makers fit into that same theme, she said.
“What we do best is take emerging creators to the next level, emerging cultures that don’t necessarily have the legitimacy yet or aren’t recognized by popular culture,” she said, “and we’re giving them a bigger stage.”