Kanye West's now been under the adidas label for a little over a year, but how exactly did adidas land one of the biggest names in pop culture today? Complex interviewed adidas Global Director of Entertainment and Influencer Marketing Jon Wexler, who broke down the details of luring Kanye from Nike to the Three Stripes.
"We’d been in conversation for a while. Someone in his camp reached out to somebody at Reebok, who gave him my number, and we started talking. From early in our conversations it was clear that he wanted a platform to create," Wexler told Complex. "If you were to take what he says [during his tour speeches] and home in on those bullet points about creativity, you could tell why he had real potential at adidas. We’re going to invest in that creativity instead of limit it."
According to Wex, the partnership really started to pick up steam during New York Fashion Week last September, when adidas was launching the Jeremy Scott x A$AP Rocky collaboration.
The adidas exec said:
"I texted Kanye, 'I just landed in New York. By chance are you here?' He hit me back: 'Yo, just landed. What are you doing here?' We made small talk, and at the time our CMO Hermann Deininger [who passed away in May 2014] and creative director Dirk Schonberger were in town for the Y-3 show and I said, 'Hey, we’re all here. Maybe we should connect.' We met up while he was doing rehearsal for Jimmy Fallon and started to put it together. Things progressed and I remember him hitting me with a text that said, 'The world changes now.' That was in November. A minute later, the signed contract came through, and we were sitting on the best-kept secret from that point on, until he mentioned it on the radio show. We issued a statement and have been in business ever since."
