Tuesday Shoe Day: Adidas

          Adidas AG is a German multinational corporation that designs and manufactures sports shoes, clothing and accessories. The company is based in Herzogenaurach, Bavaria, Germany. It is the holding company for the Adidas Group, which consists of the Reebok sportswear company, TaylorMade-Adidas golf company (including Ashworth), Rockport, and 9.1% of FC Bayern Munich. Besides sports footwear, Adidas also produces other products such as bags, shirts, watches, eyewear and other sports and clothing-related goods. Adidas is the largest sportswear manufacturer in Europe and the second biggest in the world, after Nike.

            Adidas was founded in 1949 by Adolf Dassler, following a family feud at the Gebrüder Dassler Schuhfabrik company between him and his older brother Rudolf. Rudolf had earlier established Puma, which quickly became the business rival of Adidas. Both the Adidas and Puma companies still remain based in Herzogenaurach, Germany to this day. The company’s clothing and shoe designs typically feature three parallel bars, and the same motif is incorporated into Adidas‘s current official logo. The company revenue for 2012 was listed at €14.88 billion.

           Adidas, like other sports brands, is believed to engender high consumer brand loyalty. Brand loyalty towards Adidas, Nike Inc., Puma AG and several other sportswear brands was examined in a recent study. The study found consumers did not exhibit unduly high loyalty towards such brands.

          During the mid to late 1990s, Adidas divided the brand into three main groups with each a separate focus: Adidas Performance was designed to maintain their devotion to the athlete; Adidas Originals was designed to focus on the brand’s earlier designs which remained a popular life-style icon; and Style Essentials, which dealt with the fashion market; the main group within this being Y-3 (which is a collaboration between Adidas and renowned Japanese fashion designer Yohji Yamamoto – the Y representing Yamamoto and the 3 representing the three stripes of Adidas).

          “Adidas is all in“ is the current global marketing strategy slogan for Adidas. The slogan aims to tie all brands and labels together, presenting a unified image to consumers interested in sports, fashion, street, music and pop culture. There appears to be connection with the phrase “all-in” meaning “exhausted” in some English speaking nations.

          Celebrities wearing Adidas

Gerard Butler

Lana Del Rey

David Beckham

To know more about Adidas, just go here: http://www.adidas-group.com/en/

Man Crush Monday: Ansel Elgort

          He is Ansel Elgort. He is an American actor, music producer, and DJ under the name “Ansølo“. As a film actor, he is known for playing Tommy Ross in Carrie (2013), Caleb Prior in Divergent (2014), and Augustus Waters in The Fault in Our Stars (2014).

           Elgort was born in New York City. His parents are Arthur Elgort, a photographer who has worked for Vogue, and Grethe Barrett Holby, an opera director. His father is of Russian Jewish descent, and his mother is of English, German, and Norwegian ancestry. His maternal grandmother, Aase-Grethe, was in the Norwegian resistance during World War II, and saved Norwegian Jewish children by moving them into neutral Sweden; because of these activities, she was imprisoned in a concentration camp.

           Elgort has two older siblings, Warren, a film editor, and Sophie, a photographer. At the age of nine, his mother took him to try out for School of American Ballet. He attended The Professional Performing Arts School, Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School and Stagedoor Manor summer camp. Elgort started taking acting classes at the age of twelve and starred in his high school’s productions of Guys and Dolls and Hairspray.

           Elgort‘s acting career began through professional stage acting, in Regrets, by Matt Charman. His on-screen debut was a secondary role in the 2013 remake of Carrie. His first highly publicized role was in Divergent as Caleb, the brother of the protagonist, Tris, played by Shailene Woodley. The film, based on a popular young adult novel by Veronica Roth, was released on March 21, 2014.

          In May 2013, immediately after the filming of Divergent was completed, it was announced that Elgort would play Augustus Waters in the film adaptation of John Green‘s novel The Fault in Our Stars, opposite Woodley who would play Hazel Grace Lancaster. The film followed the story of Hazel, a teenage cancer patient, who is forced by her parents to attend a support group, where she subsequently meets and falls in love with Waters, an ex-basketball player and amputee. The film, directed by Josh Boone, was released on June 6, 2014.

            Elgort co-stars in the comedy film Men, Women & Children, directed by Jason Reitman and due to be released in October, 2014. On June 23, 2014, Deadline announced that Elgort had been cast in the titular role in Van Cliburn. Based on the biography by Howard Reich, the film will depict Van Cliburn‘s rise to fame in 1958 when, in the midst of the Cold War, Cliburn won the first International Tchaikovsky Competition in piano – an extraordinary event, since Cliburn was from the USA. The adaptation will be produced by Wyck Godfrey and Marty Bowen, who also produced The Fault in our Stars.

         Elgort will reprise his role as Caleb Prior in Insurgent, the second film of the book series Divergent. Filming began on May 27, 2014, with a scheduled release date of March 20, 2015.

           Elgort is repped by CAA and Brookside Artist Management’s Emily Gerson Saines.

          Under the name “Ansølo“, Elgort created a SoundCloud account to publish electronic dance music, and he has remixed songs such as “Born to Die” by Lana del Rey. In a livestream in February 2014 he stated he had signed a record deal with Tom Staar‘s new label Staar Traxx.

           His first record “Unite” was released on April 21, 2014, and May 5, 2014 on iTunes. His second record, “Totem“, was released July 21 on Beatport and iTunes.

To know more about Ansel Elgort, just go here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ansel_Elgort