Adidas’s Greatest Design Resource? Its Own History.

On the ground floor of a vast, building in Adidas’s Herzogenaurach, Germany, headquarters sits a sneakerhead’s dream: the brand’s archive of over 80,000 shoes, garments, accessories, videos, and technical drawings. Inside the temperature- and climate-controlled space, gray corridors are lined with white boxes, meticulously cataloged, and stored with contents to be handled only by white-gloved fingers. Run and organized by a team of specialists with museum backgrounds, the space is home to items like founder Adi Dassler’s earliest cleats, Muhammad Ali’s signed boxing shoes, and the company’s very first bag design.

For the Adidas Originals design team and its collaborators (yes, Kanye and Pharrell have been here), this isn’t a museum, it’s a resource. “I have to remind my team that it’s a reference,” says Nic Galway, global senior vice president of design for Adidas Originals and Style. “We shouldn’t be afraid to go in and explore, because a look at the archive is better than the internet. Everything in there is innovative, challenging, and, I believe, industry-leading.” Considering the sheer amount of product in Adidas’s history, much of what the Originals team focuses on is timing. “We must never forget timeliness. Knowing just the right moment to bring something back is key.” And it’s something they continue to master.

For the Deerupt, an Adidas Originals sneaker being unveiled next week, trips to the archive provided the design team with one recurring element that felt quite of-the-moment: the grid. The net-like motif was originally used as an innovative stabilizer for long distance running shoes, and has also been applied distinctively to basketball and street shoes. “When something’s ready to come back,” Galway says, “it’s also then ready to be taken somewhere else.”

During a recent tour of the Adidas archives, Surface got an exclusive look at the archival pieces—ranging from the 1960s to the 2000s—that informed latest innovation of Adidas Originals (which we will be sharing next week). Here, a brief behind-the-scenes look, captured by Surface contributing photographer Ogata.