Biography | Bjørn Gulden — The January Morning He Crossed the Aurach to Adidas

People treat an Adidas succession as a story that begins in Portland or Shanghai.

The board vote was taken in Herzogenaurach.

On 8 November 2022 the supervisory board of adidas AG appointed Gulden a member of the executive board and chief executive, effective 1 January 2023.

He would succeed Kasper Rørsted.

Harm Ohlmeyer, the finance chief, ran the company in the interim through 31 December 2022.

The headquarters is the World of Sports campus at Adi-Dassler-Strasse 1.

Gulden already knew the postcode.

He had worked at Adidas in this town from 1992 to 1999, last as senior vice president of apparel and accessories, before Helly Hansen, Deichmann, Pandora and Puma.

The 2023 brief was narrower and heavier.

Adidas had ended the Yeezy partnership weeks earlier.

He was hired to fill a hole in the product book and to repair the company's standing with independent European retailers.

Official biographies issued by the company still list the same two degrees behind the appointment: a bachelor of business administration from the University of Rogaland, later folded into the University of Stavanger, and an MBA from Babson College's F.W. Olin Graduate School of Business in Wellesley, Massachusetts.

The campus on this pin is public at the edges and closed at the offices.

The date that matters is the first morning he held the Adidas chair, a few hundred metres across the old airfield from the Puma gate he had just left.

Photo: Steffen Prößdorf, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons