Eric Liedtke: Three Stripes, Yeezy, and Plants Over Plastic (Re-Release)
Most people build a billion-dollar business. Eric Liedtke walked away from one to build something that disappears.
On this episode of Unglossy, Mickey Factz, Jeffrey Sledge, and Tom Frank sit down with the man who spent 26 years at Adidas, rose to the executive board, and helped turn what insiders called a "sleeping dinosaur" into a brand that grew $8 billion in six years. Eric takes us from Detroit advertising and Sunday-night dread, to becoming "the good American in Germany," to the franchise-management playbook behind the Superstar, the Stan Smith, and the Samba. He breaks down the stories most people never hear: the Calabasas sample lab Adidas built for Kanye, 25 people strong and next door to his music studio, so Ye could bounce between beats and shoe samples in the same afternoon. How Run-DMC made the Superstar their own before anyone at Adidas lit the fuse. Why Vans overexposed its way from cool to gas-station clearance. The birth of Y-3 with Yohji Yamamoto, and the master tailor's craft that pulled him in.
Then the pivot. After Parley for the Oceans opened his eyes to fashion's plastic problem, Eric left it all to launch UNLESS, a regenerative brand where the buttons, the labels, and The Degenerate sneaker are entirely plant-based and built to return to the soil. Named, fittingly, after a line from Dr. Seuss's The Lorax. This one runs from the sneaker culture to the science of what your clothes are doing to your lungs. You'll want the whole thing.
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