As business continues to boom at Adidas, the company is readjusting its approach with plans to focus more on digital sales.
Adidas CEO Kasper Rorsted recently spoke with Financial Times and called adidas.com the brand's most important store in the world. "It has priority when we hire, when we allocate our resources and when we build our infrastructure," Rorsted said of Adidas' e-commerce presence.
As a result of the online success—which generated €1.6 billion ($1.97 billion USD) in 2017 alone—the brand has plans to cut back on its physical doors. Adidas currently has 2,500 stores worldwide, and although Rorsted didn't specify how many would be closed, he hinted at a quality over quantity approach. "Over time, we will have fewer stores, but they will be better," he said.
The pivot to digital is something Adidas Group, which also owns Reebok, has had in the works for awhile. In 2017, it closed 35 Reebok stores in the U.S. “It is well known that a number of large malls in the U.S. are not working the way they did in the past," Rorsted said.
