Adidas

Birgit Kretschmer appointed as Chief Financial Officer, replacing Harm Ohlmeyer whose contract expires end of year

Leadership read: A change at the top rarely stays at the top. Adidas's move reshapes the layer beneath it in the sector as a new leader sets priorities and the team re-forms. Watch the first two or three appointments that follow; they signal direction more reliably than any statement.

curated · 2026-07-30 · context →

Adidas is expanding India sourcing by increasing capacity at Evervan Kothari's Karur plant, consolidating India as a larger part of its global footwear supply chain.

Leadership read: Adidas deepening its sourcing relationship with Evervan Kothari at Karur is not a pilot or a hedge — it is a structural commitment to India as a manufacturing corridor. Adding capacity at an existing partner plant rather than opening a new supplier relationship signals that the decision has moved past due-diligence and into operational scaling: procurement frameworks are set, quality standards are embedded, and the cost case has cleared internal hurdle rates. What the company has now taken on is a larger share of global footwear volume dependent on Indian logistics infrastructure, port reliability, and compliance continuity — all of which require active management rather than periodic review. This is one of twelve geographic-expansion signals we have tracked across sectors in the last 90 days. The related set is diverse — Hyundai doubling down on Brazil, Ahead Health entering Germany and the Netherlands, VIDIVICI saturating China retail — but the common thread is companies moving from market testing to operational commitment in a named geography. In manufacturing specifically, the India corridor is absorbing supply-chain reallocation pressure that has been building since 2022, and Adidas is not alone in treating India as a scaled-production destination rather than a swing-capacity buffer. Companies executing this kind of supply-chain deepening consistently face rising demand for leadership in supplier operations, quality and compliance assurance, and in-country logistics coordination. The functional gap that tends to surface is not procurement — terms are already set — but the cross-functional operations layer that sits between contract and delivery at scale.

curated · 2026-07-06 · context →

Adidas partnered with Dick's Sporting Goods on major 'Where It All Kicks Off' World Cup campaign following strong Q1 2026 performance (14% sales growth), expanding retail and marketing presence in North America.

Leadership read: The Adidas-Dick's campaign commits both brands to a retail-as-media architecture that neither has operated at this scale before. Running 25-plus activations, in-store digital signage, a roving customization van, and a multi-athlete hero film simultaneously is not a marketing campaign with a retail component — it is a distributed retail experience with a film as its anchor. That distinction matters operationally: it requires real-time inventory alignment, localized event execution, and a co-branded customer journey that has to hold across hundreds of store environments, not just a broadcast window. Adidas North America has also effectively made Dick's the stage for its World Cup product depth, which raises the stakes for in-store commercial performance well beyond what a co-op media buy would. This is one of twelve partnership signals we have tracked across comparable categories in the last 90 days. The directly relevant comparables are thin on consumer-retail specifics — most tracked signals sit in fintech, defense, and energy corridors — but the Adidas esports-foundation partnership is a parallel data point: both moves use major sporting moments to build distribution infrastructure rather than pure brand awareness. The broader pattern is brands treating partnership activations as channel-building exercises with measurable sell-through expectations attached. Companies operating at this intersection of major-event marketing and physical retail distribution face rising demand for commercial leadership that can manage co-brand P&L accountability, integrated retail-media operations, and multi-market event execution — functional areas that sit awkwardly between traditional brand marketing and retail account management and rarely report cleanly into either.

curated · 2026-06-09 · context →