Adidas raked in roughly $437 million from the first sale of leftover Yeezy brand stock, with a portion of those profits benefitting charities like the Anti-Defamation League and a non-profit founded by George Floyd’s brother.
With another batch of Kanye West’s namesake sneakers hitting the market Wednesday, the shoe company announced the yield from its late-May sale, which unloaded nearly a quarter of the remaining Yeezys in stock, worth an estimated $1.2 billion euros, the Associated Press reported.
In May, Adidas told shareholders that Adidas would begin offloading the leftover Yeezys and “donate money to the organizations that help us and were harmed by what Ye said.
The company announced two of those organizations, both of which represent those who were deeply impacted by West’s words: The Anti-Defamation League — West’s history of antisemitic language and beliefs is well-documented — and the Philonise & Keeta Floyd Institute for Social Change, which was founded by George Floyd’s brother Philonise. (In Oct. 2022, West told Drink Champs that fentanyl, and not being suffocated by a police officer’s knee, caused Floyd’s death; later, in a rare moment of lucidity, West apologized.)
Since that announcement, Robert Kraft’s Foundation to Combat Antisemitism has also been added to tthe beneficiaries of the Yeezy sell-off. “This is much better than destroying and writing off the inventory and allows us to make substantial donations,” CEO Bjørn Gulden said Wednesday.
The company declined to say if the sale of the Yeezys — the last vestige of West’s since-terminated partnership with Adidas — will deliver royalties to the disgraced rapper, citing only contractual obligations. Adidas said the donated portion of the sale was not a fixed percentage but a previously discussed “appropriate amount” between the parties.
Last year, not long after the Yeezy/Adidas partnership ended, Rolling Stone reported extensively on the toxic workplace culture inside the shoe company. One employee reported hearing West say that “skinheads and Nazis were his greatest inspiration,” while a former senior Adidas exec added that they’d heard such comments from West before.
In April, some Adidas shareholders filed a class action lawsuit against the company, alleging that Adidas failed to minimize the fallout from the West split that ultimately sent the stock tumbling.