Adidas had to catch up. Luckily, the Shanghai Creative Centre is close to manufacturing hubs like Shenzhen and Guangzhou, meaning the speed to market is much faster than in other territories, Ng says. Other territories may need to speak with Southeast Asian or Chinese suppliers anyway, but with the time difference, plus language and cultural barriers, it’s much more challenging and time consuming to reach the desired outcome. The show collection presented last week featured highly technical designs and fabrics, which were then explained in further depth at the fashion hub.
Twists on classics to stoke local desire
The aim of the Shanghai Creation Centre is to differentiate Adidas products, while retaining important Adidas brand codes like the three stripes or logo. “Our job is really to leverage our superpower and the brand’s 75-year history, but understand the context and what they like,” Ng says.
That doesn’t mean behaving like a Chinese brand. “Over all these years, whenever we had success, it is because we don’t pretend we’re Chinese. Chinese consumers are smart and understand you are not a Chinese brand — you don’t have to pretend to be Chinese,” Ng says. “I think it’s about paying true respect to the culture. When I mean culture, I don’t mean ‘Chinese culture’, it’s how people in China are living, we have to and bring that consumer insight into the hearts of the product creation.”
I point to Audrey Li, Adidas head of press in China, who is wearing some wide-leg Adidas trousers I’ve never seen before, covered in small bows, with a thicker three stripes that wrap slightly around the leg. “That’s part of our dance collection,” Ng says. “We wanted to really accentuate the beauty of the movement, so we took the three stripes and put it on a slanted execution, to elongate your legs. Since we launched this product last year, it’s become a phenomenon. We’ve continuously replenished. This is the third iteration of the product, not changing the design too much.” To promote the product, the brand held a pop up with KOLs (key opinion leaders), allowing them to customise their trousers, so she’d done the bows herself.
Adidas also worked with a Shanghai college dancing crew to promote the trousers, to demonstrate they are function as well as fashion. In the showroom, where I meet Li and Ng, there’s rails of China-exclusive product, with unique colourways or slightly altered silhouettes of iconic Adidas sneakers like the Gazelle or chunky knitwear in earthy tones, complete with the three stripes, which is a far cry from Adidas’s brightly coloured streetwear offering in the West.
Demonstrating creativity and finding talent
While the show is a major marketing push, Adidas wanted to prolong the experience and allow local consumers to get closer to the clothes. They transformed the show venue into a fashion hub from 17 to 19 October, with exhibition ‘A 20-Year Journey of Chinese Street Culture’ in collaboration with Hypebeast, alongside archive displays, product previews, displays of various collaborations and interactive experiences. “We want to make sure that this doesn’t just sit there as a video,” Ng says. “You can tell the story through just a 20-minute show. We want our consumers to understand the full value.”