Adidas owns rights to Yeezy designs, CFO says; will sell products with different name after Kanye West fallout
Kanye West at Milk Studios on June 28, 2016 in Hollywood, California. (Photo by Jonathan Leibson/Getty Images for ADIDAS)
Adidas says it plans to sell its Yeezy collection of sneakers — just with a different name.
The German retail giant announced in late October that it had terminated its partnership with rapper Kanye West, now known as Ye, following his recent antisemitic comments.
But in a Wednesday quarterly earnings call, the company's CFO stressed that they still intend to sell the existing inventory of products from the Yeezy collection without using the name.
"Let me be clear, we own all the IP, we own all the designs, we own all the versions and new colorways. It's our product," CFO Harm Ohlmeyer said, according to a report from the Wall Street Journal. "We do not own the Yeezy name."
Ohlmeyer added that Adidas may have a release as early as next year.
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He told reporters that the profitability of the Yeezy business had been overstated because its costs only included expenses directly related to the products and not central overhead costs borne by the company.
Ohlmeyer said Adidas would "save around 300 million euros related to royalties and marketing fees" that they no longer have to pay the rapper.
Ye was frustrated with the company most recently for releasing a slide that looked similar to his Yeezy Slide, and he fought with management publicly.
"I’m not standing for this blatant copying no more," he wrote in June on Instagram.
Then at the beginning of October, he wore a "White Lives Matter" T-shirt during a Paris fashion show while calling the Black Lives Matter movement a "scam" on social media.
On an Oct. 16 episode of the "Drink Champs" podcast, which has since been taken down," Ye said, "I can say antisemitic things, and Adidas can’t drop me. Now what? Now what?"
Adidas did, in fact, drop him just over a week later.
And it isn’t the only retail brand to end its partnership with Ye. Gap and Balenciaga have also dropped him.
Fox Business and the Associated Press contributed to this report.