Sneaker Freaker

So Dean, tell us a bit about yourself and adidas?
I’ve been with adidas for eleven years, I’ve been in the sports industry for almost 24 years and sold a lot of product that people collect still today and that’s where my background comes from.

In previous years adidas has had a couple of very big projects in the Superstar 35 (SS35) and adicolor yet you didn’t do one this year... why was that?
We took a conscious decision we would take a break from doing a concept of that scope this year. On one side it clearly was a tremendous success and people felt incredibly positive about the concepts. Yet a part of the audience was saying “come on, you can’t keep doing this, come up with something more underground, more subtle!” So a lot of focus was put into our normal collections and improving quality.

It didn’t seem sustainable to keep having one massive project every year... Is the new Consortium series a response to take it back to a smaller scale?
What we wanted to do was reconnect with the community at the top of our business. When we did SS35 and adicolor we associated with certain partners, it’s really meant to be a community of like-minded people with the same goals. Going forward, the idea of Consortium is different, it’s about a collection of products only sold in those stores. Between fifty and a hundred stores will have access to these products. This concept is not predictable, so it will keep on rolling and won’t have the same formula every season.