… & the launch of www.adidasdesignstudios.com
Back in 2007, when I started at our adidas North America headquarters in Portland, Oregon, designers outside the organization knew very little about our design teams. One of my first projects after joining adidas America was to help us attract and hire top designers. Portland, Oregon happens to be a designer magnet but we weren’t seeing our fair share of great design talent. And the competition was stiff with other footwear and apparel brands just across the river as well as a plethora of small- and medium-sized advertising and design agencies in the neighborhood. But come on, what designer wouldn’t want the opportunity to work for one of the most iconic footwear and apparel brands in the industry? What was the problem?
adidas designers are all in
Just as I was starting my new role in the organization I was lucky enough to run into a designer at my gym. My gym happened to be just across the street from a large design school in Portland. The designer had been in the industry for quite a while and was teaching at the school so he had a lot of great insight. I started asking him about the industry and getting his take as an outsider on the problem we were having attracting top designers. One of the first things he told me is that the team was a bit elusive. Nobody on the outside knew much about them. He said that there just wasn’t a lot of information on the type of work they did, who they were and what the team culture was like. As I started to hear this same sentiment with others it became clear to me what the solution was. We needed to open the doors to our design studios and let outsiders in. But how? After all, we were a company headquartered in Germany and we had a strong culture around building things very well but not bragging about them. But it was clearly time to start some bragging. In fact the team earned it with record breaking year after year and new innovative designs making it to the forefront of retailers’ shelves.
Opening the kimono of a Design Studio
So what’s the first thing to do when you are trying to open the kimono of a Design Studio? You need to get inside yourself. Find out more about who they are. Learn about how their team works. I got in and was instantly blown away by the character of the teams, the vibrant personalities, the fun they had, their quirkiness and ultimately their intense passion for great design work. This led me to James Carnes who leads design for our adidas Sport Performance category. James is a visionary and he agreed that we needed to do something.
We came together and decided we needed a place for outside designers to learn about what was happening inside. This is when the first concept of an adidas Design Studios site was born. The original concept was to build a micro career site that would lead the candidate to our design team profiles and ultimately blogs where the designers would tell their stories. We would also make the site very visually appealing to target this audience and give them easy tools to submit their portfolio for review. We had a world-class photographer shoot pictures of our designers both inside and outside the company doing the things they loved.
A screenshot from the original design microsite
On the original site the design teams and individual designers could tell their own stories about who they were and what their teams represented. The site was as much about creating an open culture as it was a conduit to communicating this to the outside world, and ultimately enabling us to attract top designers. Our theory was that if we open up our world for designers to see, then they can better self-select if the culture was right for them and vice versa. And the more designers our teams interact with, the better idea they have about the right fit for their teams. The site worked great for this purpose and we started to see strong portfolios and received a lot of positive feedback from designers in the community. But this was just the starting point. The original design micro career site concept was very US centric and only focused on our Sport Performance division.
In 2010, I was offered a role to work out of the adidas Group’s global headquarters, the World of Sports, in Herzogenaurach, Germany. It was the perfect opportunity to take the adidas Design Studios concept to the next level.
The adidas Design Studios 2.0
The new website is a place for outside designers to learn about what is happening inside
A lot had changed with internet technology even since 2007 so instead of just updating the concept we decided to completely rebuild it. For one, we had originally focused on only our Sport Performance division. Two, as I mentioned, it was very US centric while in fact we have Design Studios in Germany, Boston, Portland, Shanghai and Tokyo.
Our brand had also evolved quite a bit. Our fast fashion side of the business was heating up, our “all in” campaign had launched and we were bringing in designers with new talents all over the world. We also looked at it as an opportunity to create awareness of our Design Academy for design graduates. It was time to mature our adidas Design Studios site as a whole.
adidas designers share in videos their point of view and experience.
Our adidas Brand Human Resources team, Corporate Identity & Brand Design team and one of our top design partners came together to build the new site. The new site is all new, all mobile optimized and all media rich! Instead of blogs, this time we did live video shoots with our designers. We did the shoots at our headquarters in documentary style with an opening video showing the adidas Group’s World of Sports headquarters.
The new site is live this week and can be visited here. While the adidas Design Studios micro career site is targeted towards designers there is information there for all candidates interested in adidas.
