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How Will adidas's New Creator Farm Hold its Own?

Paul Gaudio reveals the interesting business model, but the short answer is we'll have to wait and see for ourselves

By Emily Suzuki - July 19, 2017

in Design Business | Interior/Exhibition Design | Sneakers

adidas just officially announced their Brooklyn-based Creator Farm, an open source hub for, well, creativity. Boasting a start-up environment within the not-so-startup company, the adidas Creator Farm seems like a secure place to work for a small team without the major risk of going under. Oh, and there's a full MakerLab involved.

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Our immediate burning question is: How will the small Creator Farm hold its own within such an expansive company? Here's adidas Global Creative Director Paul Gaudio's response to a similar question:

"The Farm is an open source creative hub. It is a great place to bring new ideas in from the outside, or even new ideas from one part of the brand to another. One recent example is the Farm working directly with our basketball team to reimagine the basketball shoe. People from design, development and product marketing are collaborating with designers on rotation from adidas Originals, running and training – but also folks from James Harden to Lincoln High School athletes, to cut this new path across sport culture. We also work with local artists, designers, students, universities like Pratt or FIT and museums like the Brooklyn Museum."

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So by bringing things to a local level, adidas hopes to connect the dots within their massive company. The game plan seems to be a rotation of adidas design teams, designers and collaborators visiting to connect with the full-time farm employees and keep them from getting too comfortable in the NYC bubble. The farm's full-timers all have different design backgrounds within the adidas brand, which will hopefully bring things full circle. The specific job of the Creator Farm's full-time employees? Simply be creative.

This seems like a business model that could either work really well or complicate things even further for the brand—especially if more farms start popping up in other key cities as Gaudio hints at in the same interview. Either way, we're excited to see a large company allowing employees (even a small team of 19) get as creative as they want in an intimate space. We're sure it'll lead to some exciting results.