This Brand Is Obsessed With Innovation. Here’s Why You Should Care.

How does someone make the impossible, possible?

What do you do when you run into a wall? When you’ve finally hit the ceiling? You can give up or keep pushing until you break through.

It wasn’t too long ago that a sub four-minute mile seemed impossible. Or running a marathon in under two hours. Even a Super Bowl three-peat has seemed inconceivable. (And, apparently, it is. Sorry, Chiefs fans.)

So what is it that gives humanity the wherewithal and drive to keep pushing when the walls are closing in? A brand with an insatiable obsession for bettering athletes is a good place to start.

Time and time again, athletes bump up against the ceiling of what’s possible. Then, with help from brands like adidas, they break through that ceiling and raise the bar even higher.

It’s no surprise that a brand whose mission is to “be the best sports brand in the world” set seven world records in 2024 and won 51 percent of the top 50 races worldwide.

But how does that same obsession with athletic performance and innovation trickle down into sports that are a little less glorified? I sat down with Marc Markowski, Senior Vice-President of Innovation at adidas, to understand more about how technological advancements in adidas’ leading categories (running, soccer, etc.) makes their way into golf.

But before it gets to that point, adidas starts with a brief. In essence, they ask themselves what they want to accomplish with a given innovation or creation of a new technology. From there, the way forward is clear and streamlined.

“If your starting point is very clear, if your starting point is to say, like, ‘We want to break that world record’, everything that we do is under the umbrella of, ‘What does it take to get there?’,” explains Markowski. “That is a very sharp brief then for the team to work on and everyone that we partner up with around it.”

What if the brief was to create the world’s fastest marathon shoe? What if that shoe cost $500 and was designed to last for one race?

“The beauty of innovation is it can start from multiple different angles,” Markowski continued. “The way of how it then trickles down is understanding those solutions that we build, how we can apply them.”

Those are the types of questions that adidas asks (and answers) to continue to push the envelope of what’s possible.

Luckily for me and you, adidas isn’t suggesting that the 26.2-mile lifespan of their adizero adios Pro Evo 1 will trickle down into your pair of TOUR360s or adizero ZG golf shoes. What they are suggesting, though, is that they’re so obsessed with bettering the athletic experience that if the way to create the fastest and lightest marathon shoe is to make it able to withstand only a single use, then they’re willing to go down that crazy path.

What does that mean for your TOUR360, your adizero ZG or your CODECHAOS golf shoes? It means that when you slip on that pair of adidas kicks, you’re wearing something that was born of innovation.

If our golf shoe testing is any indication or measure of success, I’d say adidas is doing a pretty darn good job at it. The brand has produced perennial winners for years and shows no signs of slowing down.