Millions of unsold pairs of Yeezys sit in purgatory, piled up in warehouses from the US to China. Sneakers—some look like cozy turtleneck sweaters open to your feet, others like they’ve grown teeth on their soles or hardened into pillowy clouds—that would once be sold in limited editions, often returned for a lot rather in StockX and Goat now await their fate seven months after one of the largest corporate mergers in history. their owner, Adidas AG couldn’t decide what to do with all the tarnished merchandise created by the man who was, until recently, its most prominent business partner: Kanye West, who now goes by Ye. The total value of these sneakers: about 1.3 billion dollars.
At Adidas headquarters, overlooking the medieval town of Herzogenaurach, Germany, senior executives have spent months mulling over their Yeezy inventory dilemma. They’ve considered removing the Yeezy logo from each sneaker, one by one, but that’s too much of a pain. They considered donating the goods to victims in disaster-stricken countries such as Turkey and Syria, but this could encourage illegal trafficking. Burning them in the world’s largest large animal wildfire would be an environmental disaster, and shredding them into plastic pieces to be reborn as turf is incredibly complicated and hardly satisfactory. Management finally decided it would start selling sneakers while giving a portion of the proceeds to charity. The first block shoes will be available for purchase at the end of May.
