Such a shame. The early racquets were of the best quality of seen, easily equal to yonex flagship. Some other models did look and feel much more cheaply made, so I wonder if they try to maximise profits selling lesser quality rackets. The spielers were and still are amazing though. I really hope the OEM is still going and is able to make rackets under a different brand name. Sent from my SM-A315G using Tapatalk
or just sell the desain & formula patent to other brand. Pretty sure we can live happily owning P8 under different name, let say Apacs, Hiqua, or Flypower
I definitely only bought the Uberschall 2 and 2.1 because of the guys mentioned and this forum! Considered the P7 seriously too. Adidas marketing failed from the beginning with the German range names, they have no meaning outside of Germany, would of been better in English so it would have European appeal but most importantly the Asian market. I myself was put off from the 2018 range when I first saw them in PDHSports, didn't even bother looking at them as the names were meaningless, only years later that this forum got me interested Victor and everyone else do it so much better, you know by the names which is the power, speed or control rackets. Names you can relate to and get you interested in just looking Adidas shot themselves in the foot when I had to go on the forum to find out the basics!
I'm sorry, Victor is probably the worst example there currently. The current Victor naming is nothing but chaos, built from random numbers, letters and some chinese signs. Li-Ning plays in the same league. The Adidas racket lineup on the other hand had quite a logical structure. If you like the german names for their racket families is a different story. Personally, I thought it was a nice touch - but I'm clearly biased here.
Different rackets, but judging from the stickers on the wood of the handle, some "weird" stringing pattern, and some other similarities.... maybe it's worth to have a look at Babolat.
Have to disagree here as Thruster I would associate with Power, Auraspeed obviously speed and Lightfighter their lightweight/headlight rackets. Pretty straightforward and opposite to chaotic Unless you speak German, how would anyone know Wucht was power, Uberschall was speed and Kalkul was accuracy? The forum gave me this info. Add this to being a new player trying to crack the fiercely loyal market where many have failed before and no one in Asia can relate to the names, it was a bad start already
I mean you probably familiar with the Victor range which is probably why it makes sense to you. If someone saw Thruster, would you equate this to more power or more speed? Also you missed out the DriveX series Obviously something hasn't worked, but Adidas is a pretty big global brand. If it's convinced two separate entities to give it a go, then it must've looked promising at the start. But yes, the prices for the high end Wucht were probably too high. In the UK it's not too bad and would around the same price as a lower range of other brands top tier rackets. For me, I initially went for the Kalkul and Uberschall first, because the prices were less risky. It's a shame it never worked, I've owned a few fair Adipower rackets and also went to the London Grand Prix, which was sponsored by Adidas and remember seeing a young Victor Axelsen from afar, chilling in the players area.
actually its not about the naming. Try googling word Voltric or Astrox on any dictionary, none i guest. Or maybe Voltric could be related to electrical voltage, but from my perspective lightning are fast not power. Or Nanoflare, Flare are fire which is high destructive force not speed. The main issue are how the marketing pass those information to our head. Regardless its gimmic or not but Yonex successfully pass on those information to us, make use understand it fast, & also attractive to us which put spell on us & makes us want to buy it. Victor still acceptable tho not as good as Yonex. Lining are Ok to but they just have to many lineup which end up confusing. Yet Adidas completely fail to deliver the information.
Yeah that's fair enough, I was basing it on the naming convention only. Li-Ning are ok? I thought they're equally as bad, especially given how big their budget must be. Tbh, I think most of these companies (apart from Yonex and maybe Victor) need to employ a decent digital marketer. In defence of Adidas, their catalogues are actually not too bad, but I guess it's all about accessibility of that information.
to bad they just giving up without even trying. If someone had contact with Adidas, invite the boss here & tell him to read out Adidas specific thread & then tell him to fire their marketing staff & hire @Dave1011 , @speCulatius, @Cheung instead.
Hmm. They have been trying for quite a number of years and the person in charge is an ex international badminton singles player, has a university degree (Russell group Uni), does come to badmintonforum and also interested in the business aspect. It’s easy to point out the solution looking back but being successful moving forward is pretty hard. As written before, a lot of the local promotion depends on the company who holds the local distributor contract. If that company doesn’t have the network or the influence on that network, doesn’t sponsor local tournaments, look for players to sponsor (need attractive terms), then it’s hard for the brand. It takes many years to build up a badminton brand. At first, I thought the brand would be sponsoring players and tournaments. But in fact, the smaller tournaments are signed by the local distributor, who, probably doesn’t want to commit too much cash because sales are not that high. Chicken and egg scenario. I saw this year there were two BWF tournaments sponsored by adidas in Europe. That’s probably the way to go to support local tournaments more. Li Ning are a brand that came in relatively recently and came in big. They must have spent huge amounts at the beginning. Other brands that have come and gone are Dunlop (!), Slazenger, Prokennex, Carlton. Carlton were pretty successful in Europe but that brand is no more. Victor used to be local brand - I think they were mainly in Taiwan - they have expanded but it’s taken many, many years. They look quite astute in their strategy - team contracts in Asian countries (first Korea and then Malaysia) and specific individual contracts for others. They aren’t sponsoring Malaysian team now but put their resources on to one mens singles player. Forza have concentrated on specific European markets and still moderately successful. Apacs, Protech, Mexx concentrate on local markets. Protech are interesting because they do shuttles and Let’s face it. Badminton is a tough market. Using a global brand name raises expectations of coming in big and probably raises costs. What is a bit unclear is if badminton is an expanding market or static. Theoretically, easier to establish in an expanding market but there are many hurdles. I agree the naming of the racquets being mostly German based is a bit difficult. After all, the most widely spoken language in the world is English. It’s my impression that Adidas is more accepted and willing to be tried out in Europe compared to Asia. In SE Asia, more people will be happy with lower cost racquets of which there is plenty of choice. IMO, time is what is needed if building up a quality badminton brand from scratch. The pandemic hasn’t helped at all.
For Li Ning badminton not be very profitable but also not too much loss IMHO, stock price of parent Li Ning has grown 15x in past 5 years, so Li Ning can put some more resources into badminton. For yonex badminton May be more profitable but parent Yonex company is very wiggly over past 5 years and saw dip of -0.2x. Even though yonex sells more they may be incurring more production costs due to Japan making and material costs. Adidas didn’t saw much growth as well in past 5 years, so -ve effect due to badminton can be considerable.
Let's not overcomplicate this. It's a business decision made by a huge company that has no history and never shown a heartfelt commitment to badminton - presumably under the influence of a new management in charge. They didn't see the profit that was expected after those couple of years and that was it. To put the business side into perspective, Adidas had a global turnover of ~20 billion EUR in 2020, Yonex brought in ~473 million EUR (~62 billion JPY), Li-Ning ~2 billion EUR (14.4 billion RMB). I couldn't find any numbers from Victor since they are still privately owned and don't seem to communicate business numbers. So if adidas really went all in on it, they would have all the resources they needed. As @Cheung says, the badminton market is a though one to penetrate, especially if you're targetting a worldwide presence. Yonex has been doing a phenomal job in terms of marketing on pretty much all levels of play. They have given Li-Ning and Victor a painful blow to their massive attempts to raise their market shares over the past years. But of course, this comes at huge costs in terms of sponsoring which ultimately will lead to more expensive products. So far their stratety seems to be working out.
Adidas should have put in much more efforts in badminton because they easily can and can bring in a lot more to the table, in both racket and esp shoe areas. I believe a proper shoe maker like Nike and adidas can bring in much more to the badminton shoe table. The question is, is there enough delta gain for these massive companies ? probably not in badminton…
People keep on saying Adidas this and that, but how much influence and cash did it pour into this ventures. I thought this was basically ran as separate businesses and had little to do with Adidas themselves about from branding etc. Li-ning was well documented to be making huge losses a few years ago and went through massive restructuring. Probably the fact they no longer sponsor China is a sign they've changed their market strategy. Anyway back to the Adidas thing, I didn't understand why these weren't incorporated more into the Adidas main website. In Europe they used to have an alternative Adidas website but they stopped doing that now. Sent from my Pixel 6 using Tapatalk
This is a misunderstanding that is coming up repeatedly. The structure in their latest attempt was that only the racket (and maybe strings) development and production QC was outsourced to a separate company. Marketing, sales etc. was completely run by the actual Adidas themselves. They had even hired a dedicated sales team for badminton stuff. The shoes and clothing were and are still included in the main webshop. That they never included the rackets, strings etc. I agree was a big mistake. They have this half-baked "Specialist Sports" platform for their niche sports equipment, but this whole thing is so badly done that you can hardly even count it.
Yeah that's fair enough. I was suppose to mention their first attempt was a separate company but got lazy with typing on my phone. Did they have the clothes and shoes on their main website? I remember trying to search for their badminton range of shoes and couldn't find it on their main website? I got a good company discount on the main Adidas website so if any badminton stuff was in there, I would've jumped all over it. Unless Adidas UK was different to Europe... Sent from my Pixel 6 using Tapatalk
At least, it's on adidas.de. See https://www.adidas.de/search?q=badminton To be fair, they "borrowed" most of their badminton shoes from the handball and volleyball department.
