According to reports, Beyonce and Adidas are ending their fashion collaboration due to years of declining sales for the Ivy Park athleticwear line.
The cooperation will cease after this year’s collection, according to US media reports. If it wasn’t extended, the Grammy winner’s deal with the major German sportswear company would have expired at the end of the calendar year.
Beyonce joined Adidas in 2019, aiming to build on its formerly successful (now-defunct) Yeezy partnership with Kanye West, also known as Ye. Ivy Park was previously a collaborative project between Beyonce and Topshop.
With Adidas, the unisex collection expanded to include men’s and women’s activewear, footwear, and swimwear.
In recent years, the line had been costing the business money. Ivy Park’s sales in 2022 were barely US $ 40 million (€ 36.8 million), significantly below Adidas’ internal forecasts of US $ 250 million (€ 230 million), according to papers obtained by The Wall Street Journal. Sales had decreased by 50 per cent over the previous year.
The Hollywood Reporter claims that the partners also had creative disagreements. When the agreement was initially signed, Beyonce was promised complete creative power and a fixed annual fee.
Just as the celebrity was announcing a brand-new haute couture collaboration with French fashion company Balmain that was based on her most recent album Renaissance, news of the split leaked. Each of the 16 original compositions in the collection corresponds to a different song from her album.
“Thank you Olivier Rousteing (Balmain’s Creative Director) and Balmain for bringing RENAISSANCE to life in couture,” Beyonce wrote in an Instagram post. “Designing alongside you was freeing—thank you for allowing me to celebrate the human form, to take artistic risks, to push boundaries and to freely express myself.”
Adidas, on the other hand, has an uphill battle after losing two significant collaborations in the previous six months. The German clothing firm severed relations with Ye in October after the US rapper made a number of racially and anti-Semitically charged remarks. This led to the termination of the company’s most lucrative collaboration.
As a result, the corporation now has inventory worth € 500 millionthat it cannot sell. The German sportswear giant said last month that its failure to sell the former rapper’s ‘Yeezy’ shoe line resulted in a net loss of € 513 million for 2022.
“2023 will be a year of transition to set the base to again be a growing and profitable company,” Adidas’ CEO said in a statement in February.
Part of that transition inevitably still includes celebrity partnerships, which remain a cornerstone of Adidas’ strategy. The company’s newest ambassador is Jenna Ortega, star of Netflix’s runaway hit Wednesday, who is the face of Adidas’ new athleisure line.
