The campaign extends a distribution partnership that brings branded adidas footwear into mass-market retail, using in-house creative production and two of Germany’s most recognizable sports-media personalities to reach mainstream consumers across the DACH region.
DEICHMANN and adidas have launched a co-branded spring/summer campaign for Germany and Switzerland, using two of the country’s best-known sports personalities to put adidas footwear at the center of the retailer’s seasonal marketing push. The campaign, titled Made for the Spotlight, runs from March 30 to April 26, 2026.
A retailer-brand playbook for the DACH mass market
The activation covers television, online video, point of sale, social media, e-commerce and newsletter channels, supported by accompanying PR activity. At its core sits a product selection spanning adidas comfort sneakers, court styles and Y2K-influenced lifestyle running silhouettes for both men and women – product categories that have driven significant volume across European footwear retail over the past two years as the lifestyle running trend continues to pull consumers toward archival and heritage-adjacent styles.
Former Bayern Munich footballer Thomas Müller and sports broadcaster Laura Wontorra front the campaign. The creative concept places both personalities backstage – en route to the spotlight rather than under it – in a treatment that leans on humor and self-referential comedy. A recurring gag built around Müller’s “Wusstest du…?” (“Did you know…?”) format structures the campaign film and drives product focus in an oblique, entertainment-first register. A long-form cut of 80 seconds anchors the campaign, with shorter edits of 30, 15, 10 and six seconds cut for television and digital deployment.
In-housing creative production signals the strategic shift for Deichmann
The campaign was developed and produced entirely in-house, under the creative direction of Marcel Nawrath, Head of Global Creation and Brand Management and Executive Creative Director at DEICHMANN. Direction was handled by Ivan Boljat, with photography by Lukas Korschan and production through soup Film. The in-house model reflects a broader industry shift: a number of large-format European retailers are centralizing creative output to reduce agency dependency, accelerate production cycles and maintain tighter control over visual consistency across markets.
What this tells us about the DEICHMANN-adidas relationship
The partnership reads as a renewed emphasis on wholesale-scale retail partnerships in the Bjørn Gulden era, after a multi-year period in which adidas visibly prioritized direct-to-consumer and owned retail to protect margins and control brand presentation. Since Gulden took over as CEO in early 2023, adidas has positioned the business around a more pragmatic “hybrid commerce model” that restores the importance of retail partners for volume and reach.
Rather than replacing DTC, the Deichmann activation suggests a recalibration back toward a more balanced mix: by early 2025, wholesale reportedly accounted for roughly 52% of sales, and the 2025 annual reporting indicated both DTC and wholesale grew by 5%, implying a rebuild of partner distribution alongside continued momentum in owned channels. For mass-market partners like Deichmann, this kind of co-marketing signals that adidas is again willing to use large-scale retail to maximize inventory throughput and mainstream visibility in the DACH region.
For DEICHMANN – Europe’s largest footwear retailer by store count, with approximately 4,700 locations across more than 30 countries – branded co-campaigns of this scale provide both trading momentum and consumer trust reinforcement. The DACH market, where DEICHMANN operates the flagship format in Germany and Austria alongside Dosenbach, Ochsner Shoes and Ochsner Sport in Switzerland, remains its densest and most strategically important region.
