Go Behind the Scenes of adidas’ North America Brand Center
With 15 showrooms that can display over 20,000 sample products, find out how the NAM Brand Center is transforming the way we do business.
At adidas, we recognize how important it is to be close to our wholesale customers and consumers, because we know that works well in one country doesn’t necessarily work in another. This is why we’re empowering our market teams to make their own decisions. To listen to the market and to adjust their approach based on what they know about their consumers and wholesale partners. And to do all of this, we need to give them the best experience of our future product lines and our brand.
Until now, our teams traveled twice a year to present our product previews to our key accounts at satellite offices, where temporary showrooms were tailored to each account. Product samples often traveled as much as our teams, being shipped from Portland to New York to Los Angeles. This was labor and resource intensive and extremely inefficient.
To counter this, earlier this year we opened our new state-of-the-art Brand Center at our North America (NAM) headquarters in Portland, Oregon, similar in nature to the space at our global headquarters in Herzogenaurach, Germany. And we think it’s a pretty big deal.
ENTER THE NORTH AMERICA BRAND CENTER
This unique space features 15 showrooms and can display more than 20,000 sample products. The Brand Center supports our growth by transforming the way we do business, allowing us to showcase the true breadth of our brand, right at the very heart of our North American headquarters.
With the introduction of the NAM Brand Center, our product now lives in a single dedicated space for its six-month cycle. Now showrooms are reset only twice a year, significantly reducing labor, travel and shipping costs. With fewer logistics to manage, we’re able to focus on showing and selling our product.
TRANSFORMING THE WAY WE SELL
For our Wholesale partners who travel to Portland, the space provides flexibility, allowing them to see more of the product range at one time and the ability to make repeat visits if needed.
Our accounts have been impressed by the immersive design and were blown away by the wide range of product. They also appreciate that it supports them in making informed decisions with the ability to pinpoint the areas they want to focus on.
PUTTING THE ‘WORK’ INTO WORKPLACES
This massive project was a result of two years of careful planning and cross-functional collaboration led by Amanda Burnham and our Workplaces team, supported by teams from across Brand, Global Sales, and Tech.
As Amanda Burnham, Senior Director of Workplaces, shared, “Commercial construction is highly wasteful.” The team was surgical in their approach, repurposing existing elements into the buildout.
The team didn’t change anything they didn’t need to, leaving many spaces intact and touching up where needed or painting to match the new color palette. This permitted them to focus the budget on high impact elements such as the auditorium’s audio-visual technology and the adidas history display which greets guests at the entrance.
In alignment with the brand’s sustainability goals, the electrical and lighting was selected to meet Energy Star efficiency ratings. In the future, savings in carbon emissions created by the reduction of travel for people and product could also be calculated.
LOOKING TO THE FUTURE
With the Brand Center fully up and running, it will be a key resource for all Go-To-Market milestones, from our regular Sales Marketing Meeting which will see over 600 people join us onsite, to our seasonal sell-in meetings with our Wholesale accounts. One thing is for sure: we’ll make the absolute most of this unique space. The future is bright for the NAM Brand Center.