Adidas's Bjorn Gulden turnaround: how a Puma poached CEO sold off the post-Yeezy inventory and restored brand momentum

The Yeezy crisis and the inherited inventory problem

The Adidas-Yeezy partnership had been one of the most commercially successful sneaker collaborations in modern history. Launched in 2015, the partnership had grown to represent approximately 8-10% of Adidas's revenue and a disproportionately high share of profit (estimates suggested ~$1.5B in revenue and ~$500-700M in operating profit annually). Yeezy product launched in tight allocations and resold at multiples of retail; the partnership was a brand-equity flywheel for Adidas with athletes, creators, and fashion-aligned consumers.

Kanye West's October 2022 antisemitic comments forced Adidas to end the partnership on October 25, 2022. The decision was widely supported but operationally severe: approximately $1.3 billion of completed Yeezy product was sitting in Adidas warehouses with no immediate path to market. The board, which had already been losing confidence in Kasper Rorsted on other strategic issues (China underperformance, weak run-up performance, slow product innovation), accelerated his exit. Adidas announced in November 2022 that Bjorn Gulden would join as CEO effective January 1, 2023.

Why Bjorn Gulden

Gulden had been CEO of Puma since 2013, where he was credited with turning around what had been a declining brand. Puma's revenue had roughly tripled during his tenure (from approximately €3B to €8B+), the brand had regained cultural relevance in lifestyle and basketball, and the company had returned to consistent profitability. His Puma playbook had several elements: product-design discipline, athlete and creator partnerships at appropriate scale (not blockbuster), authentic communication, and patient brand-building.

The Puma board reportedly tried to retain Gulden when Adidas approached; Puma subsequently sued Adidas over non-compete arrangements that were eventually settled. The Adidas board's calculation was that Gulden's combination of athletic-footwear category experience and turnaround credentials matched the specific situation Adidas faced. The Yeezy crisis required someone who could resist the temptation to rush the recovery; the broader brand challenges required someone who understood athletic-footwear specifically.

The Yeezy inventory plan and the broader strategic moves

Gulden's first major operational decision was the Yeezy inventory plan, announced in May 2023:

• Phased sell-off through Adidas channels, not destroyed and not given away. Phased to avoid market flooding that would have destroyed Yeezy price equity.
• Significant profits donated to organizations addressing antisemitism, including ADL and various Jewish community organizations. Specific amounts not disclosed but reportedly hundreds of millions of euros.
• No further Yeezy product development: the partnership was terminated and not replaced with similar Kanye-led product.
• Multiple drops through 2023 and into 2024, allowing inventory to clear without sudden discounting.
• Operational discipline avoiding inventory writeoffs: the patient sell-off mostly avoided the major writedowns analysts had initially expected.

The Samba and Gazelle revival and the lifestyle pivot

Alongside the Yeezy management, Gulden focused on reviving Adidas's classic Three Stripes franchises. The Samba (originally a 1950s indoor-soccer shoe) and the Gazelle (1968 athletic shoe) had both been periodic lifestyle hits in earlier decades. Gulden's team pushed them aggressively through 2023-2024:

• Samba's resurgence was substantial: the model became one of the most-Googled sneakers globally through 2023, with celebrity endorsements (Bella Hadid, Kendall Jenner, multiple others) driving the trend.
• Gazelle followed similar trajectory as a parallel franchise with slightly different colorway and demographic focus.
• Both franchises were structurally inventory-efficient: long-running products with established production infrastructure could scale quickly to meet demand.
• Adidas Originals revenue grew sharply in 2023 and into 2024 on the back of these and adjacent lifestyle products.
• Performance running and basketball remained weak: while lifestyle/retro was the recovery story, Adidas's running and basketball positioning continued to lose ground to Nike, On, Hoka, and others. The recovery was real but unevenly distributed across categories.

How RGM thinks about measured-recovery CEO execution

The Gulden Adidas turnaround is the worked example of measured-recovery execution: avoiding the impulse to compress recovery timing, allowing inventory to clear at appropriate price, and focusing brand investment on franchises where the recovery momentum is real. The Yeezy inventory plan particularly shows discipline: a less patient CEO would have either destroyed the inventory (eating the writedown but signaling moral clarity) or aggressively discounted it (recovering cash but destroying brand equity). Gulden's phased sell-off with donated profits captured most of the inventory value while addressing the moral dimension and protecting brand pricing.

Our framework for clients facing similar inherited-crisis situations: the temptation to make a single dramatic move (full inventory destruction, complete brand reboot, mass restructuring) is usually wrong. Measured execution allowing time for market and consumer behavior to absorb each change usually produces better long-term outcomes. The Adidas-Gulden situation also illustrates the value of cross-industry executive poaching: hiring directly from a credible competitor with demonstrated playbook is structurally more reliable than hiring a generalist 'great operator' without category-specific experience.

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