adidas x Parley: 5 Years of Sustainable Fashion

Would you be interested in saving the oceans? This was the question that kickstarted the adidas x Parley partnership from an idea, to a commitment, to real impact on the world of sustainable fashion.

In 2015, a year after this question was posed, adidas stood in front of the United Nations assembly to set out its intention: to end plastic waste.

Read on to learn how the adidas x Parley partnership developed to turn marine plastic pollution into a sustainable fashion line and more importantly a revolution in the industry.

Just as adidas founder Adi Dassler started making sports shoes back in the 1920s, our foray into sustainable fashion also started with a running shoe. This trainer would be made entirely out of marine plastic waste. Within the first year of its launch, we gave away 100 pairs of adidas x Parley shoes to consumers and released football jerseys made from ocean plastic for Bayern Munich and Real Madrid.

Cyrill Gutsch is the founder of Parley for the Oceans and the person who first asked the question that led to our collaborative commitment to save our oceans from plastic pollution through the development of sustainable fashion.

When you work with issues impacting every single person on this planet, the weight of the world can feel heavy on your shoulders.

Cyrill knows this well. “When I started Parley in 2012, the forecast was that by the year 2048 the oceans will die, leading to irreversible damage to our planet. Turns out, this was too optimistic; we actually have 10 years to spin things around,” tells Cyrill, admitting it’s difficult to relax with the clock ticking.

Change comes with pain and change is usually met with resistance. But change also needs time, so Cyrill is taking action to end marine plastic pollution with sustainable fashion.

A small and agile organization at heart, Parley knew they’d need a strong leader on their side, one equally committed to cleaning up the oceans to save marine wildlife by taking plastic out of the food chain.

Cyrill explains, “adidas is both structured and flexible, but also confident to let us be demanding, annoying even. Plus, they knew they were producing plastic waste, and were determined to cut it down.”

After the adidas x Parley partnership was announced in April 2015 at the UN, the message about innovating sustainable fashion was heard throughout the fashion and sporting industries.

A branding and marketing professional himself, Cyrill believes the creative industries have more power than they realize.

Just a year after the announcement Cyrill says: “Comparing the conversations I had a year ago to the feedback I get today, the difference is huge. The major players – consumer brands and polluters – take us seriously. They have adopted our way of talking about sustainability.”

The sustainable fashion movement that the adidas x Parley collaboration is championing has replaced defensive environmentalism with innovation and design. “Let’s forget the concept of sustainability. We can’t stand still anymore. Eco-innovation is the only answer to the threat we are facing: the threat of extinction,” explains Cyrill.

Following this philosophy, Cyrill calls plastic a design failure; it’s not meant to end up in the stomachs of animals, and at the end of the food chain in humans.

Parley’s long-term solution for plastic pollution is to re-invent the material. In the short term, their A.I.R. strategy guides everyone to AVOID plastic wherever you can, INTERCEPT plastic pollution, then REDESIGN the source of the problem: the material.

According to Cyrill, major manufacturers have a tendency to act like professional consumers: they buy standard material, put it together in garments in factories they don’t own, then sell the garments.

“Consumers expect brands to act responsibly, but how can companies be responsible for their product when they don’t know how it’s essentially made?” he challenges.

This is what adidas x Parley did by first tearing open the supply chain and putting every part under the microscope. As a result, the innovative adidas x Parley shoe made from recycled ocean plastic was born.

“When we look at the yarn we used for the shoe, we can name the people who collected it. We know who shipped it. We know exactly how the material was recycled and where the yarn was spun.”

In addition to the shoe, Cyrill cites the creation of the new supply chain as a major feat in its own right. Sustainable fashion goes beyond the mere product. “Ideas lead to strategies and, by becoming a system, strategies lead to big-scale change,” he summarizes.

Since 2016 Parley Ocean Schools around the world, such as in Maldives, Seychelles, and Grenada support local communities to protect the oceans.

Sometimes Cyrill wishes his job would be simpler; the role of an intermediator trying to reconnect mankind with the oceans is stressful. But with influential brands with big platforms shaking things up and raising awareness of plastic pollution, people just might eventually let go of the thought ‘someone out there will take care of my trash’.

Eco-innovation is at the heart of developing sustainable fashion at adidas and ending marine plastic pollution. Kelli George, now Material Innovation Manager at adidas, worked on the first adidas x Parley shoe in 2016. She recalls her excitement about the innovation that goes behind creating sustainable fashion in those early years of the partnership.

This is Kelli’s story:

Having grown up in the landlocked state of Vermont, I never really had any connection with the ocean. All this changed when I joined the Parley for the Oceans project in April 2015 – just before adidas presented a prototype shoe made from ocean plastic at the United Nations in New York. There, we as a sportswear company committed to sustainable fashion, turning that concept into a consumer-ready product within a year, while I took on one of the most exciting and challenging projects of my career.

My role in the adidas x Parley for the Oceans project was pretty fundamental when it comes to this shoe: I was responsible for turning gillnets retrieved from the water into a workable material which would essentially become part of the shoe’s upper.

The challenge I had was to solve the problem of creating enough yarn for a limited edition of that iconic shoe and our first foray into sustainable fashion: no yarn = no shoe.

One of the textile suppliers involved in the adidas x Parley project was very interested to see if they could help us, since they were also interested in the concept of recycling fishing nets. At first, they weren’t sure if they’d be able to assist due to the type of nylon, but they were more than happy to see what they could do. Since this was something we’d never done ourselves, we took all the help we could get!

It was now fall 2015 and we only had a few months to secure workable yarn and the pressure was on – if the yarn failed we had almost no time to recover!

For our supplier to be able to work on the raw material, test and produce it, it needed to be clean, and they needed 150kg of it.

Manually unpacking the cords, shaking out the ocean gunk, and hand washing and drying the material took forever, believe me, so one of my colleagues suggested using a washing machine. Pretty simple idea, but we weren’t sure how it would work out, so off I went to the local laundromat with one small box of netting and it worked!

Now all we needed to do was expand the scale of this operation to 150kg of the stuff.

One thing’s for sure: I’m pretty certain none of this was in my job description!

The adidas x Parley partnership moved our sustainable fashion efforts from 1 shoe in 2015 to 1 million pairs of shoes in 2017, to 11 million by 2019. Between 2015 and the end of 2020, adidas will have made more than 30 million pairs of shoes with Parley ocean plastic.​

Our vision to innovate sustainable fashion also sparked a running movement committed to ending plastic waste – ‘Run for the Oceans’. 60 thousand people joined the first run in 2017, growing to 2.2 million runners in 2019.​

Florian Gschwandtner, co-founder of Runtastic and former adidas Running General Manager, André Maestrini tell the story:

Innovating sustainable fashion goes beyond the product itself. It includes the way we create from production to shelf but also how our consumers relate to our commitment to end plastic waste. Run for the Oceans was the first global initiative together with adidas Runtastic to harness the power of sport to raise awareness for marine plastic pollution and how to end it.

In today’s society, we measure business success by looking at KPIs. As athletes, we measure our personal best by looking at our achievements against the goals we set up. What happens when you decide to go beyond business and personal KPIs to do something for a bigger cause?

“When Runtastic joined the adidas family, it didn’t take us long to learn first-hand how passionate and committed adidas is to eco-innovation,” Florian explains. “It was clear that adidas – from Board members to the entire team – are taking the problem of marine plastic pollution and their partnership with Parley for the Oceans really seriously. This passion inspired us. We wanted to be a part of it. The idea was born to use our app to create a global movement for the oceans.”

“When Runtastic came to us with the idea to harness the power of runners around the globe and create a digital run through the app, we didn’t think twice.” Andrè goes on. “With adidas x Parley we decided to activate our global running community to raise awareness about the fragility of the oceans and their importance for mankind. World Oceans Week was the perfect platform.”

The idea to run for a cause is not new for adidas. In partnership with the AKTIV foundation, we ran against cancer, with 261 Fearless, we ran to support women’s empowerment. “And now with Run for the Oceans we can go even further, with the digital component that can help us harness the power of runners where ever they are, literally. We believe in the power of sport,” says André.

“Run for the Oceans was not a one-off activity, but the start of a long journey to make eco-innovation and sports work together to raise awareness of ocean pollution and the need for sustainable fashion,” continues André.

Together, a variety of team members across adidas and Runtastic helped to create and refine the concept together with Parley.

Running can help people to make a difference in their personal lives by being more active, boost their self-confidence by achieving personal goals and increase their sense of belonging when they are part of a running community.

If there are no oceans, there’s no air, no life and certainly no running.

Florian finishes, “Today’s most valuable resource is time and that’s why we wanted folks to take a few minutes and run for a cause that matters and impacts us all – whether we see the problem or not.”

When it comes to leading any change, awareness is a good start, but impact needs to be followed by action. In 2018, adidas raised over $1 million to fight marine plastic pollution. That year, Harm Ohlmeyer, adidas Executive Board member Finance, shared his learnings from the run and insights how anyone can start a movement that matters.

The adidas x Parley partnership has grown stronger and more impactful since launching in 2015. It’s a true eco-innovation collaboration that not only develops sustainable fashion but also supports a running movement that invites consumers across the globe to join the adidas commitment to end plastic waste.

Watch Cyrill explain how the adidas x Parley collaboration is reinventing the role plastic has in our world.

Check back for further developments in our adidas x Parley partnership as we continue to push to achieve our goal to end plastic waste through sustainable fashion.