Adidas drops 12.000 products, opens virtual showrooms

Fewer products, more efficiency

CEO Herbert Hainer told the newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
that “20% of our products make up 80% of our turnover”. Including its
Reebok and TaylorMade-AdidasGolf brands, the Germans offered almost
47.000 items in their autumn/winter collection. “Simply too many”, says
Hainer.

“In the future, we want one, worldwide catalogue that is the same for
each country. Large scale production should lead to higher efficiency”,
said Hainer in the interview looking forward to a summer full of sports –
with the London Olympics and the European football championship in
Poland and the Ukraine.

Virtual showrooms

Another efficiency improvement should come from virtual showrooms:
Adidas has hired Intel to “virtualise the selling process”: most of the
products would only be shown in stores in their digital, 3D form. “This
way, we only need to have a small fraction of our products present in
their real, physical form.” 

This virtual showroom has been tested in France since last year, but by
the end of 2013 Adidas wants to have 150 virtual showrooms all over the
world. 60% of all sales should happen through these virtual showrooms.

The new aim joins the list of targets Hainer had already set: lifting
turnover to 17 billion euro by 2015 (compared to 13.3 billion last
year), raising the operational margin from 7.6 to 11%… and, most
important of all: replacing Nike as the world’s leading sports
retailer.