HUNTING AND GATHERING FOR ADIDAS BASKETBALL
Adidas basketball was a brand with deep heritage and real innovation — but almost no one knew it. The internal team described themselves as "the cool kid that no one knows about" and "the Honda Accord of basketball." The challenge wasn't product. It was identity, fire, and cultural connection.
As Creative Director, I was part of the team that set out to close that gap — not from a boardroom, but from the street. We designed and led a multi-city ethnographic research initiative, traveling from Los Angeles to New York to sit with, play ball with, and listen to sneakerheads, streetball players, and young urban athletes in their own environments. We developed a proprietary interview protocol that went beyond traditional focus groups, walking through closets, gym bags, courts, and shoe stores to uncover how players actually lived with the game — their rituals, their frustrations, their loyalties, and the emotional architecture that made them choose one shoe over another.
The work was codenamed "Project Hyena" — named for the animal that hunts in packs, strikes strategically, and thrives on scrappy intelligence. That spirit defined the entire engagement. We conducted internal audits with the adidas basketball team, surfacing the honest tensions between how they saw themselves and how the market experienced them. We mapped trend territories spanning hip-hop culture, prosumer design, avatar identity, future fabrics, and the alpha athlete mindset to frame where basketball was heading over the next decade.
The insights carried directly into product innovation. When adidas developed its Articulate sole technology — a segmented, multi-section outsole designed to flex with the natural movement of the foot — we returned to the court, interviewing 22 players to pressure-test their understanding of and response to the technology. The findings shaped the language, positioning, and consumer story for the product launch.
This case study presents the full arc of that work: from street-level ethnography and internal brand audits to trend mapping, interview protocol design, and innovation translation — all in service of helping adidas basketball find its voice and chart a ten-year path forward.
