The four-year fashion brand partnership between Beyoncé and Adidas is coming to an end. Poor sales of the singer’s Ivy Park fashion line are reportedly to blame. The partnership will dissolve after Adidas finishes out the rest of the Ivy Park collections planned for release throughout this year.
The contract between Beyoncé and Adidas was set to lapse at the end of the year anyway, and renegotiations have evidently led to a parting of the ways. 2022 was a tough year sales-wise for the Ivy Park brand, with a 50% drop in sales and Adidas’s own internal sales projections not being reached. Internal documents cited by a recent Wall Street Journal report say that the partnership has been a losing one for Adidas, especially given the fact that Adidas has been paying Beyoncé an annual fee of $20 million. While the end of the Beyoncé x Adidas partnership has not been officially confirmed, the singer has recently announced another fashion partnership, this one a collection inspired by her own 2022 album “Renaissance” with Balmain.
Adidas joined forces with Ivy Park in 2019, three years after the latter brand was established by Beyoncé. The singer was reportedly given a sweetheart deal with not just $20 million in annual paydays but total creative control of the Ivy Park brand. It was clearly a gambit by Adidas to try to replicate the success of Kanye West’s Yeezy brand, but it didn’t translate to the sales that would have been necessary for that plan to be considered fruitful.
The Yeezy partnership is also on the outs, due to West’s own erratic behavior and public statements, and producer Pharrell Williams, who has had a deal with Adidas going back almost ten years, recently signed on as creative director for the menswear arm of Louis Vuitton.
