MIAMI – All of a sudden, after a single summer, the pink jersey is everywhere.
It has become almost impossible to acquire, yet there it is, paradoxically, on the backs of thousands of fans thronging American stadiums, and hanging from market stalls in Bangkok, Thailand, and Buenos Aires, Argentina.
That the jersey has become the hottest piece of sports merchandise on the planet is a simple, capitalist equation – the result of an irresistible combination of one of the most beloved athletes of his generation and the ruthless efficiency of textile factories in South-east Asia.
Somehow, though, few people saw it coming. Tor Southard was better placed than most, but even he was caught unawares.
As Adidas’ senior director for football in North America, he had been receiving e-mails from colleagues for nearly a year asking if the company’s biggest star, Lionel Messi, would be joining Inter Miami, also a client of Adidas.
As far as he knew, it was just a rumour. Like the rest of the planet, Southard learnt it was true only on June 7, the day Messi announced his intentions in an interview with two Spanish news outlets.
For many, the immediate question was why was Messi leaving Europe’s elite clubs to join a team that ranked among the worst in the comparative backwater of America’s top league, Major League Soccer?
For Southard, and for Adidas, there was a rather more pressing matter. Within a couple of days of Messi’s announcement, the company had received almost 500,000 requests from stores and suppliers for jerseys in Miami’s soft, electric pink. It is a specific fabric and a specific shade: Pantone 1895C.
“It’s not like it was white, and we had inventory we could repurpose,” Southard said.
Even if they could not foresee quite what a phenomenon the jersey would become, and quite how many people would clamour to get their hands on one.
Adidas was going to need more of that fabric. A lot more.
On the day Messi announced he would sign for Miami, the shirts in the US sold out so quickly that Southard said it seemed the inventory simply “evaporated”.
In ordinary circumstances, major sportswear brands, like Adidas and Nike, generally prefer to produce large batches of team gear, rather than manufacturing to meet demand, as fast fashion chains tend to do.
Given the number of what the industry terms “chase buys” – a sudden influx of orders in unanticipated volumes – for Messi’s Miami jersey, Adidas knew its usual playbook would not work.
Getting pink jerseys bearing Messi’s name and No. 10 into the market, Southard said, immediately became Adidas’ “No. 1 priority, globally”.
To streamline the process, the company sourced the pink, recycled polyester fabric for the jerseys as close as possible to the factories in South-east Asia that would make them.
Orders for other details like logos and crests were expedited at other facilities, sometimes leapfrogging the production of apparel for other Adidas teams. To cut down on shipping times, the first batches of the Messi jerseys were sent out in small shipments, almost as soon as they came off the production line.
The frantic production effort worked. Initially, Adidas had told its retailers to begin selling jerseys with a promise of delivery by Oct 15. But the first editions arrived in the United States by July 18. They were sent straight to Miami, where demand was highest.
They sold out almost instantly.
Despite all of Adidas’ attempts to get its official Messi jerseys into stores as quickly as possible, the clamour for them – any version of them – has proved so great that counterfeits have flooded the global market to meet the shortfall.
In Buenos Aires, where Messi’s status as a national treasure was sealed by victory in the World Cup, there are pink jerseys for sale in store after store and kiosk after kiosk. At some vendors, the fakes go for about US$50 (S$68.35).
In Europe, where tribal affiliations to local clubs run deep, Miami jerseys are suddenly commonplace. At a training session for elementary school children in Manchester, the usual concentration of Manchester United, City and Liverpool gear was flecked with a half dozen pink Messi jerseys.
Official sales have surpassed every benchmark Adidas could have imagined, Southard said.
Miami is now the bestselling Adidas jersey in North America, ahead of all five of the storied European clubs it traditionally regards as the crown jewels of its portfolio: United, Real Madrid, Juventus, Bayern Munich and Arsenal.
“I’ve been with the brand for a long time, and I’ve never seen our brand mobilise around a project across so many functions to bring product to market so quickly,” Southard previously said.
That, is the power of the man in pink. NYTIMES
