Cultural partnerships with Oasis, Bad Bunny and Grace Wales Bonner put adidas at No. 1 in Fast Company’s Advertising & Marketing category and No. 7 globally, as 2025 operating profit climbed 54 percent.
Adidas has been ranked No. 7 among the world’s 50 most innovative companies by Fast Company, claiming the top position in the publication’s Advertising & Marketing category. Notably, adidas is the sole sports brand to appear in the global top 50 for 2026.
The ranking, published by Fast Company on March 24, attributes the recognition to a partnership-led recovery strategy that Bjørn Gulden has implemented since taking over as chief executive officer in January 2023, following the brand’s decision at the close of 2022 to end its Yeezy collaboration.
Oasis, Bad Bunny and Wales Bonner turn heritage into hard commercial results
The clearest case for the Advertising & Marketing ranking is the Original Forever collection, developed for Oasis’s Live ’25 reunion world tour, which adidas sponsored. Released online at the start of the run, the collection generated one transaction per second at launch. Multiple items sold out immediately and subsequently appeared on resale platforms including StockX at double or triple their original retail prices.
The brand’s work with Bad Bunny followed a similar pattern. Following several custom Samba colorways, the brand launched the BadBo 1.0 – his first original shoe silhouette – on Feb. 9, coinciding with his Super Bowl LX halftime performance. A follow-up “Rise” colorway in beige and black is scheduled for global release on March 28.
Designer Grace Wales Bonner – newly appointed Hermès menswear creative director and the first Black woman to lead a major luxury fashion house – extended her multi-year adidas collaboration with the October 2025 debut of an original silhouette, the Karintha Lo. Her Fall/Winter ’25 collection added apparel to the partnership: soccer jerseys in glossy-striped red and purple, velour track jackets, and knit track tops.
The brand selects partners by affinity, not by reach
Alasdhair Willis, adidas’s Global Chief Creative Officer, describes the company’s partnership criteria as rooted in authentic brand connection rather than commercial scale alone. Willis says: “The more the company engages its DNA as a sports brand, the more its streetwear can build on that legacy.” In the Fast Company feature, he adds that when partners have a genuine interest in the brand, “the authenticity and relevance come through.”
The approach marks a deliberate shift from the Yeezy era, when the single partnership generated substantial revenue but also concentrated strategic and reputational risk in one relationship.
A 54% operating profit increase provides the commercial case for cultural investment
The Fast Company ranking arrives against a backdrop of materially improved financial performance. For the full 2025 fiscal year, adidas reported operating profit of €2.056 billion (approximately $2.23 billion) – a 54 percent increase on 2024, which was the last year to include remaining Yeezy inventory sales. The trajectory positions adidas’s cultural partnership model as a commercially tested strategy heading into a 2026 FIFA World Cup year, when sports brands compete intensively for consumer visibility.
