The first batch of Yeezy shoes released since Adidas severed its partnership with the rapper formerly known as Kanye West was a win for the company, bringing in about $565 million in sales. The Financial Times reported.
Ye, as West is currently known, partnered with Adidas in 2015 with Yeezys It generates an estimated $2 billion annually, which equates to about 10 percent of Adidas’ annual revenue.
But Adidas broke ties with Ye in October after he made a series of anti-Semitic statements, including a tweet that threatened he would go “3 death to the Jewish people” and comments made in an unaired portion of an interview with Fox News that advanced several anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.
However, consumers now seem content to focus on the shoe itself, reports the Financial Times, making recent purchases of the company’s unsold inventory so common that Adidas has been inundated with orders.
Online sales of around 4 million pairs of sneakers beat “the company’s most optimistic forecasts,” meaning Adidas could not meet strong order demand, according to the Financial Times.
The influx of orders has reduced the risk of Adidas suffering a massive writedown on its unsold Yeezy inventory, the paper said, potentially undermining the company’s fears that Ye’s string of anti-Semitic comments last year would make the Yeezy brand “deeply toxic” in the eyes of consumers.
Adidas was quick to distance itself from Yi’s comments last year.
“Ye’s recent comments and actions are unacceptable, hateful, and dangerous, and violate the company’s values of diversity, inclusion, mutual respect, and fairness,” the company said in an October statement that has since been removed from its website.
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