The key to Adidas’s recent revival? Getting rid of all the “no-sayers,” CEO Bjørn Gulden told an audience at the Fast Company Innovation Festival in New York. He credits this strategy for turning the brand around after a tumultuous period.
When Gulden took the reins at Adidas in January 2023, the sporting goods and apparel giant was dealing with the fallout from its Yeezy partnership with Kanye West. The once-lucrative alliance had recently crashed and burned after the rapper made a series of offensive and antisemitic remarks, leaving the footwear company with $1.2 billion in unsold inventory.
Sales in China had also plummeted after Adidas raised concerns over alleged forced labor in the Xinjiang region, allowing local competitors to capture significant market share. Meanwhile, upstart brands like Hoka and On were starting to make serious inroads into the sportswear market.
Less than four years later, Adidas is firmly back on track with growing sales, strong profits, and renewed brand visibility across many categories. In March, Adidas’s board extended Gulden’s contract through 2030, citing “tremendous operational and financial progress in a challenging environment.”
Gulden believes the most important element of the turnaround was eliminating the “no-sayers”—the naysayers who throw wrenches into the works of innovation.
“When a company’s in trouble—a big company with a lot of resources—you need to get the no-sayers out of the way,” he said. “We had too many layers of people that said no to everything.
“If you have seven, eight, nine layers in a decision process, you only need one person to say no, and then it stops,” he added.
In January 2025, reports emerged that Adidas would cut up to 500 jobs at its headquarters in Bavaria, Germany. For Gulden, to get Adidas’s innovation engine back up and running, he had to “let the good people breathe, and let the second, third, and fourth layer of the company get to the top.”
Gulden believes decisions should be made by the people that “show the most energy and most innovation.”
“Get the spreadsheets out of the discussion for a while, and let the designers and the creatives actually do what they want,” he said.
He is especially proud of one recent achievement. In April, Kenyan runner Sabastian Sawe ran a sub-two-hour marathon while wearing Adidas Adizero Adios Pro Evo 3 shoes, finishing the London Marathon in 1 hour, 59 minutes, and 30 seconds.
Gulden credits a culture of “just getting things done and not having a procedure for everything when it gets to the product.”
“Regardless of what technologies you are using, it still [comes] back to having the best people.”