This is an article on Sportspickle (a comedic play on sports website) about the approach Adidas took to counter Nikes Pro Combat Look.
Adidas today announced a unique design approach to college football uniforms, vowing the company will seek to differentiate itself from its competitors with uniform styles that “don’t look like crap” or make fans “want to pluck out their eyes and throw them in a sewer.”
“The Nike Pro Combat series and the Under Armour Maryland uniforms have been getting a lot of attention,” said Adidas America president Patrik Nilsson. “So we held a meeting on how to counter them. After a while, one young designer raised his hand and said: ‘Oooh! I know! Why don’t we make uniforms that don’t look like shit?’”
Adidas decided to give the idea a chance and took it to several focus groups.
“Overwhelmingly, we found that people prefer uniforms that look ‘nice’, ‘cool’ and ‘classic’ over those they feel are ‘designed by Satan’, ‘appear as though a cat vomited on it’ and ‘makes you wonder if the designer went to a rival school and is playing a prank on the team that he hates’,” said Nilsson. “It was really eye-opening.”
The focus group testing unanimously favored the adidas approach, including even the support of a blind man who used his refined sense of touch and smell to determine that “something wasn’t right about the Nike and Under Armour uniforms.”
“I was also tipped off a bit because several of the sight-abled people in my group vomited when they were shown Nike uniforms,” he said.
With the research behind them, Adidas plans to continue its unique approach of designing palatable uniforms that won’t depress or enrage fans. However, the decision will halt the company’s plans to hire some new designers.
“We had been considering bringing in a drunk guy, a failed modern artist and a monkey to our design team,” said Nilsson, “but now we don’t have to. I would, however, encourage drunk artists monkey to apply at Nike and Under Armour.”
