Beyonce Knowles-Carter is set to take over sportswear alongside the popular brand, Adidas. The partnership will be a relaunch of her Ivy Park athleisure line. Adidas has stated that the music icon will be a “creative partner” for the brand. The company has become a serious competitor in the fashion industry as of late, focusng more on everyday wear than athleisure. During a time when urban culture continues to be sewn into corporate strategy, Knowles-Carter is sure to make Adidas the hot new brand to wear. This is a profitable move for the brand as they are in constant competition against other brands such as Nike and Reebok.
The reason this collaboration is such big news is because as well as being an international superstar, Knowles-Carter currently has 126 million Instagram followers. Their brand will reach all of her fans and the “Bey Hive” (Her fan base) is guarenteed to buy the merchandise. This is a strong marketing move for Adidas. Valued at $1.07 billion, the influencer market is expected to more than double to $2.38 billion in 2019.
Knowles-Carter joins the ranks of Kanye West and Pharrell on the company’s roster of collaborations. It will be interesting to see if Adidas uses the same initial strategy for her line that they did with the Yeezy brand since the line has had it’s own sucess. Yeezy is now a legitament shoe line and fans anxiously anticipate its new launches. The company started out by makeing limited amounts of shoes so they appeared to be a rare find and in turn created hype around the new shoes, before starting to have more frequent releases. Adidas’ CEO, Kasper Rorsted, has often referred to Kanye West’s line as a highlight of the company’s recent performance, pointing to it as one of the driving forces behind Adidas’s 76% growth in e-commerce last quarter. The company’s experienced an increase of revenues with particularly strong support from e-commerce, where revenues grew 36% to more than $2.24 billion in 2018.
A controversy brought foward due to the Adidas/Knowles-Carter announcement is that she originally was meant to partner with Reebok. Reebok was determined to work with her and scheduled meetings with the pop star before she eventually partnered with the popular three stripes brand. Reebok seemed to be the front runner until issues regarding race came about. It has recently been reported that the reason Reebok lost out on the huge income of Knowles-Carter fans is because of a gross lack of a diversity in their pitch meeting. The singer walked away from Reebok because of this.
The Bey Hive and Adidas fans alike are now eagarly awaiting the lauch of this new clothing line. The expectations are high as there are no reports on if this will be clothing or simply a shoe launch with Adidas. Consumers will have to stay tuned.