Introducing The Blueprint, a weekly newsletter curated exclusively for the media detailing the best and latest from adidas Originals & adidas Basketball.
Each week we’ll be featuring brand highlights, collaborators, athletes and product stories, signaling a new era of originality and infinite possibilities from the brand.
If you’re on the mailing list for adidas drops, odds are you’ve got an e-mail this week you may have overlooked. It’s possibly more important than you realize as this logo appears at the end of the e-mail:
Why is this logo important? The wordmark is an archive logo from the 70s. The wordmark was recently featured on a Fear of God x adidas sweater in a curated show for Innersect in 2021. While most companies have resorted to a subsite on their site for news, adidas does have a news site, not many have defaulted to a weekly newsletter. Jordan Brand had the subsite air.jordan.com but they forwarded that domain to the Jordan brand site and stopped pushing content through that channel. This makes sense for Jordan Brand considering sneaker media functions as a funnel for Jordan Brand making air.jordan.com somewhat redundant especially when SNKRS is the draw that drives the Nike machine. For other brands the secret sauce hasn’t been discovered. Sneaker media isn’t quick to share drops on their sites. Take a quick second to visit your favorite sneaker site. Count the number of posts on the first page and chances are the content is 90% Jordan and Nike. The rest revolved around limited release content for Yeezy and maybe a New Balance thrown in.
The newsletter is the root of the growth of Substack. Long form content is still a viable source of information, although most brands have become heavily reliant on Instagram and TikTok. Video and pictures are both leaders in content, but long form content builds community and allows for a deeper dive into what a brand is working on. The Blueprint (pulling from adidas’ Blue Originals box) doesn’t quite push the reader to exclusive landing pages just yet, but I’m sure the data will provide the company with more insight to develop smarter tools. Consider this, the weekly drop will allow adidas to highlight their athlete roster, like Anthony Edwards in the pic above during the NBA Playoffs, or showcase the Coachella information on the collection for the event, which currently pings to the IG of adidasLA, and The Blueprint could become a functional part of the marketing strategy for adidas. It will take some work and an improved customer experience, but it’s definitely noteworthy.
Note and Update: This post was asked to be removed as adidas ended the Blueprint as quickly as it was implemented. There is now a new newsletter “Out of the Box” which is performing the same task as Blueprint initially did.