Did Adidas learn nothing from its Kanye race row? Clearly not…

To anyone who has taken even a glancing interest in trainer brand Adidas, the furore around the now-withdrawn promotional campaign featuring Bella Hadid and a retro sneaker inspired by the 1972 Munich Olympics should come as little surprise.

For the German multinational has committed so many regrettable missteps around racial issues that it is hard not to conclude that the pattern of corporate misbehaviour is down not simply to ill luck, but something more malign within the company.

Taken in isolation, the Hadid situation presents a comedy of errors, beginning with the decision to commission the SL72, originally designed as a podium shoe for medal winners at an event now mostly remembered for the massacre of 11 Israeli athletes and support staff – and then to scapegoat Hadid apparently for her associations with the Palestine cause.

Such is the political tangle in which Adidas has become enmeshed that it has now apologised both to the offended Jewish groups, and to Hadid for any personal damage that ensued – which suggests Adidas regrets both launching and withdrawing the campaign.

Clearly, this is partly just a corporate enterprise clumsily trying not to offend both sides of a deeply complex dispute, but such glaring errors of judgment appear far from atypical for the sportswear company. Witness the range of trainers it almost launched in 2012, with plastic ankle shackles attached. The designer Jeremy Scott claimed to have taken inspiration from a children’s toy, but everyone from Rev Jesse Jackson to the head of the NBA identified more insidious associations that had somehow escaped Adidas.

A controversy pointing to a more endemic problem arose when the Wall Street Journal reported Adidas’s global head of human resources, Karen Parkin, had told staff during a meeting that she considered racism to be “noise” discussed only in the United States, prompting 80 employees to call for an investigation into her conduct. On announcing her subsequent resignation, Parkin said she had always stood against racism and Adidas supported her in its statements.

Yet Parkin, it seemed, was not alone among the company’s executives in her misunderstanding of what could be deemed politically inappropriate.

As recently as 2022, its chief sales officer Roland Auschel received a “final warning" following complaints from employees relating to a string of reportedly offensive comments he had made around diversity. These included him describing the promotion of a Black manager as Adidas’s “contribution to diversity”. Neither Auschel, among the company’s highest-paid employees, nor the company commented on the compliance investigation.

Far more consequential for the firm was the turmoil that its relationship with Kanye West – or Ye, as he is now known – had engendered. In 2022, Adidas followed other brands such as Gap and Balenciaga in cutting ties with the rapper and fashion designer over a succession of antisemitic comments he made. The problem for Adidas was it then emerged that, as far back as 2018, staff had expressed discomfort at working with West because of his claim that slavery should be blamed on the enslaved. At the time, Adidas simply noted that it did not support the comments and continued with a relationship that, shortly before its Yeezy ranges were discontinued, generated a sizeable chunk of its profits.

So, why does Adidas keep committing such misjudgments? Clearly, the trolls are unfair to point to the founders’ membership of the Nazi Party as proof of some endemic prejudice – but such a history should at least make the company especially sensitive to issues around race.

In its defence, Adidas has endeavoured to make improvements, setting a target of recruiting 30 per cent of staff from ethnic minorities – a figure from which it fell only seven per cent short in the most recent figures. Adidas has also sought to broaden the ethnic make-up of its leadership but, as Black employees told Fortune magazine, they are not encouraged to join the boardroom when it is headquartered in Herzogenaurach. The rural Bavarian town is so lacking in diversity that colleagues assumed a group of visiting Black staff were rappers.

Perhaps Adidas’s intervention into the Black Lives Matter debates encapsulates its problem. On the one hand, it acted commendably by putting aside corporate rivalry to retweet a Nike post advancing anti-racism, an unprecedented step. It then, however, sued BLM in the belief that its logo infringed on its famous three-stripe logo. The court case was rescinded, but only following the inevitable backlash, Adidas presumably realising the bottom line would suffer more from the reputational damage.

It needs to start thinking more subtly than that – and be less flat-footed.