While Nike was down less than half a percent this morning after the shoe giant opted to pull a U.S.A.-themed sneaker featuring an early American flag, following advice from NFL star-turned-activist Colin Kaepernick, who admonished the company not to sell a shoe with a symbol that he and others consider offensive, Adidas is coming under fire for a social media campaign which carelessly resulted the sportswear giant tweeting out racist, anti-Semitic and abusive terms to hundreds of thousands of followers.
Nike created the Air Max 1 USA in celebration of the July Fourth holiday, and it was scheduled to go on sale this week. The heel of the shoe featured a U.S. flag with 13 white stars in a circle, a design created during the American Revolution and commonly referred to as the Betsy Ross flag, which Kaepernick believes is offensive due to its connection to slavery.
Meanwhile, rival Adidas ran a campaign on Monday aimed at promoting its new Arsenal shirt, which generated personalized images of the new merchandise bearing the Twitter usernames of people who liked a promotional tweet.
Yeah, it’s been… an interesting day. pic.twitter.com/ZNMoGuzPBj
— Zachary Jacobson (@ZachAJacobson) July 2, 2019