Yeezy and adidas: The Full History, How It Ended, and Where It Stands in 2026

I am going to start with an admission, because the alternative is writing three thousand words while pretending something obvious is not true.

When we describe the Luigi Sardo look internally — to a factory, to a photographer, in our own brand notes — the shorthand we reach for is brutalist, minimal, black and white and muted grey, no logos, no chrome. And the reference point sitting underneath that description, the one everybody in footwear understood immediately for about seven years, was Yeezy.

I did not put a logo on our sneakers because of Kanye West. We started in 2008, the first adidas Yeezy landed in 2015, and plain canvas plimsolls predate both of us by a century. But I would be lying if I said the decade in which Yeezy made a logo-free, colour-drained sneaker the most wanted object in the category did not make my job easier. It did. It made a plain shoe legible as a choice rather than as a cheap one.

So this is the history of that partnership, how it ended, where it stands now, and what a very small Toronto brand with two models actually shares with the biggest sneaker story of the 2010s. Including the part I find genuinely uncomfortable.

2013: the Nike divorce

The adidas deal starts with a Nike deal ending.

Ye had been with Nike, where the Air Yeezy and Air Yeezy 2 were released to enormous demand. The split, in late 2013, came down to royalties — he wanted an ownership stake in what he was designing, and Nike, whose model is built on signing athletes rather than cutting in outside designers, would not give him one.

He signed with adidas in December 2013. adidas gave him what Nike would not: royalties, creative control, and eventually his own line rather than a signature shoe inside someone else’s.

I want to flag how unusual that is, because it is easy to miss now. Sportswear companies do signature product with athletes. They do not typically hand a non-athlete a standalone brand with a manufacturing pipeline behind it. adidas itself later described the arrangement as the most significant partnership ever struck between a non-athlete and a sports brand, and that was not marketing puff — structurally, it really was.

2015: the 350, and the shoe with nothing written on it

The Yeezy Boost 750 arrived first, in February 2015 — a high-top in suede, expensive, limited, and clearly a fashion object rather than a sneaker release.

But the shoe that changed things was the Yeezy Boost 350, and specifically the “Turtle Dove” colourway that summer. It was named shoe of the year. More importantly, it established a template that the entire industry then spent five years copying.

Look at what that shoe actually is, as an object:

• A knitted upper in a single muted colour — greys, oatmeals, browns, dirty whites. Not team colours. Not seasonal brights.
• A sole unit in a contrasting but equally muted tone.
• A stripe across the lateral side that is a pattern, not a logo.
• And nothing written on the outside of the shoe. No wordmark. No three stripes. No swoosh-equivalent. Nothing.

That last point is the one I want to sit on, because in 2015 it was close to heretical. The entire economics of branded sportswear rest on the logo doing the work: it is how the shoe is identified at distance, how it signals what you paid, and how the brand gets value out of every person wearing one. Removing it is removing the billboard.

Yeezy could remove it because the silhouette itself became the identifier. People recognised a 350 from across a street with no mark on it at all. That is an extraordinarily rare thing to achieve, and when a brand achieves it, the logo becomes redundant.

It is also, exactly, the bet we make on a much smaller scale. Our shoes have no branding on the outside either. The difference is that we do not have a global cultural apparatus making our silhouette famous, so our version of that bet is quieter and slower.

What was actually going on in the tooling

The design conversation about Yeezy tends to stay on aesthetics. As someone who spends his working life on the manufacturing side, the more interesting story is the tooling, because it explains why nobody could copy these properly.

Boost. The midsole foam was adidas’ own — thermoplastic polyurethane blown into fused pellets rather than conventional EVA. It is more resilient, keeps its properties over a wider temperature range, and does not pack out as fast. Crucially, it was adidas’ proprietary material. A competitor could copy the shape of a 350 in an afternoon; they could not put Boost under it.

Primeknit. The upper was knitted rather than cut and stitched. That matters more than it sounds. A traditional upper is panels of material cut from a roll and sewn together — every seam is labour, and every seam is a potential failure. A knitted upper is produced as a single piece on a machine, with density and structure varied within the knit itself. It removes seams, removes labour, and lets you put stretch exactly where you want it.

The Foam Runner. Then, in 2020, the most genuinely radical thing in the whole line: a shoe injection-moulded as a single piece of EVA-based foam, partly algae-derived, with no upper, no sole unit, no laces, no stitching and no assembly. One mould, one material, one part.

I have enormous professional respect for the Foam Runner regardless of what I think of anything else. It is the most serious attempt anyone has made at asking whether a shoe needs to be assembled at all. Our Low Cut has roughly forty separate operations in it. The Foam Runner has one moulding cycle and a trim.

The peak, and 25 October 2022

By 2021 Yeezy was reportedly generating well over a billion dollars a year and was doing it at margins the rest of the business could not match. It had gone from a limited fashion drop to a genuine pillar of adidas’ finances.

On 25 October 2022, adidas terminated the partnership immediately, following a series of antisemitic public statements by Ye. adidas said his comments were unacceptable, hateful and dangerous, and that they violated the company’s values.

I am not going to reproduce what was said. The relevant facts for this piece are that the statements were antisemitic, that they were the direct cause of the termination, and that adidas ended a partnership responsible for a very large share of its profit rather than continue it. Given what walking away cost them — and it cost them a great deal — it is worth being clear that this was not a small commercial disagreement.

The aftermath, by the numbers

What followed is one of the more instructive corporate messes in the industry’s recent history, and the numbers are worth laying out because they show how hard it is to unwind a business like this.

adidas was left holding a warehouse full of product it had contracted, paid for, and could no longer sell — reported at over a billion euros of Yeezy inventory. In 2023 the company posted its first annual loss in around three decades.

The company’s initial position was that it might have to write the stock off entirely. It then took a different route: sell it, and direct a significant share of the proceeds to organisations fighting discrimination and hate. Two releases went out in May and July 2023. In January 2024 adidas confirmed it would not write off most of the remaining inventory, and would sell it through the year at least at cost.

By the end of 2024, Yeezy stock had generated roughly €650 million in revenue and around €200 million in profit for that year, with about €260 million earmarked for charitable causes. In the third quarter of 2024 adidas and Ye settled their legal dispute, with neither side paying the other. By early 2025 the company was able to say there was not one Yeezy shoe left in its inventory.

Since then, adidas’ recovery has been built on something almost comically unglamorous by comparison: the Samba, the Gazelle, the Spezial. Flat, thin, decades-old terrace shoes with a logo on the side. Analysts spent 2025 and 2026 debating whether that momentum has already peaked.

Where Yeezy stands in 2026

adidas and Ye have no remaining commercial relationship. The adidas Yeezy line is finished; nothing new is coming, and what exists is a resale market.

Ye continues to release footwear independently under YZY, sold direct rather than through a partner. The most substantial recent release is the Yeezy 800, a retro runner drawing openly on the 700 lineage — mesh with nubuck and ballistic nylon overlays, debuting in all black.

What is gone is the manufacturing apparatus. The reason the 350 was hard to copy was Boost, Primeknit and adidas’ factory access — proprietary materials and industrial capacity that came with the partner, not with the designer. An independent brand can commission a good-looking retro runner from a contract factory. It cannot commission Boost.

What Luigi Sardo and Yeezy actually have in common

Now the part I set out to write, and the reason I think this is worth a Journal post rather than a news roundup.

Genuinely shared:

• No branding on the outside. The 350 has nothing written on it. Neither does our Low Cut. Both treat the absence of a logo as the design decision rather than an omission.
• Colour discipline. Yeezy’s palette was earth tones, greys, bones and blacks. Ours is black, white and muted grey. Neither brand does seasonal brights, and both are effectively refusing an easy sales lever.
• The shoe as a plain object. No contrast piping, no gratuitous overlays, no material theatre to signal expense.

Not shared at all:

• Scarcity. Yeezy ran on limited drops, raffles and resale. Every one of our colourways is in stock, all the time, at the same price. We would rather you bought the shoe than flipped it.
• Construction. Boost and injection-moulded foam versus vulcanized rubber and cotton canvas. Different centuries of technology, honestly.
• Where the value sits. This is the big one, and it deserves its own section.

The comparison, with the prices as they were

adidas no longer sells any of these, so the table carries two prices: the original adidas retail, and what the specific pair pictured above was listed at on Stadium Goods when I checked on 3 August 2026. Resale moves constantly and varies hugely by colourway and size, so treat the second figure as a snapshot of four specific listings rather than a market rate. Converted at US$1 = C$1.40.

The row that interests me most is the Slide, and it is interesting twice. At adidas retail it was US$70 — about C$98, effectively the same money as our Mid Cut at C$95. At the listing I checked it is C$76, which puts it within a couple of dollars of our Low Cut instead. Line it up either way and you get two shoes at the same price with nothing written on them: one made in a single moulding cycle, one assembled from cut panels over a vulcanized sole. Same money, completely different manufacturing philosophy. If you want a snapshot of where footwear was going in 2020, it is those two rows next to each other.

The 350 V2 is the more quotable comparison — C$309 at adidas retail against our Low Cut at C$75, a bit over four times — but it is also the less honest one, because Boost and Primeknit genuinely cost more than canvas and rubber. Not four times more. But more. And it is worth noticing where that pair sits today: C$199, well under its own retail price.

The lesson I actually take from this

Here is what I think the Yeezy story teaches anyone who makes product, and it is not a comfortable lesson for a brand like mine.

In October 2022, the shoes did not change. Not one thing about the Boost 350 V2 was different on 26 October than on 24 October — same last, same foam, same knit, same factories, same people who had bought and loved them. The object was identical.

And the brand was gone. Not diminished. Gone, in a day.

Which tells you exactly where the value had been sitting the whole time. Not in the tooling, not in the materials, not in the silhouette — in the name attached to it. Yeezy spent seven years demonstrating that a sneaker with no logo on it could be the most desirable object in the category, and then demonstrated, faster than anyone expected, that the invisible logo had been the entire product.

I find that genuinely sobering, because it undercuts the thing I say about our shoes. I tell people we put no branding on our sneakers so the product has to stand on construction and proportion. Yeezy had no branding on the outside either — and it turned out to be one of the most brand-dependent products ever made. Removing the logo from the shoe is not the same as removing the name from the transaction.

The only real defence, as far as I can tell, is to make something whose worth does not depend on who is attached to it. A vulcanized canvas low-top at C$75 does not need me to be famous, admired, or even alive. It needs to be well made, fit properly and cost what it says. That is a much smaller ambition than Yeezy’s. It is also considerably harder to destroy.

Frequently asked questions

Why did adidas end the Yeezy partnership?

adidas terminated it on 25 October 2022 following a series of antisemitic public statements by Ye, which the company described as unacceptable, hateful and dangerous. It ended the partnership despite Yeezy accounting for a substantial share of its profits.

Can you still buy adidas Yeezy shoes?

Not from adidas. The company sold the last of its Yeezy inventory by the end of 2024 and confirmed in early 2025 that none remained. Anything you find now is resale.

What happened to the money from the final Yeezy sales?

adidas sold the remaining stock rather than destroying it and earmarked roughly €260 million for charitable causes, with proceeds directed to organisations working against discrimination and hate.

Is Yeezy still making shoes?

Ye releases footwear independently under YZY, sold direct rather than through a partner — most recently the Yeezy 800, a retro runner in the 700 lineage. It has no connection to adidas.

What made Yeezy sneakers different from a design standpoint?

Muted single-tone palettes, distinctive silhouettes and no external branding, on proprietary adidas technology — Boost foam and Primeknit uppers — that competitors could not replicate. The Foam Runner went further still: one injection-moulded piece with no assembly at all.

What is a cheaper alternative to Yeezy?

If what you want is the unbranded, muted, deliberately plain part rather than the technology or the name, that is most of what we make. Our Low Cut is C$75 and the Mid Cut is C$95 — canvas and vulcanized rubber rather than Boost, nothing written on the outside, and in stock rather than raffled.

Sources

adidas no longer sells Yeezy, so the photographs above are the listing images from Stadium Goods, credited and linked under each one — that is where these shoes actually are now, so it is also the useful place to point you. Every price in the resale column is the asking price on that specific listing on 3 August 2026.

The history and the financial figures come from adidas’ own reporting and contemporaneous trade coverage — principally adidas’ own full-year results release on the decision not to write off the remaining inventory, CNBC on the sell-at-cost decision, Retail Dive on the final inventory and the settlement with Ye, WWD and Sneaker Freaker for the partnership timeline.

— Markus Lacaria, founder and designer, Luigi Sardo

Prices shown are original adidas retail, converted at the rates in effect 31 July 2026. Financial and timeline figures are as reported by adidas and contemporaneous trade coverage. We have never had any commercial relationship with adidas or Yeezy.