“Kangaroos are not shoes” campaign boots Adidas into the goal

Adidas was on the losing end of a $2.8 billion penalty kick

FURTH, Germany––“Adidas’s chief executive officer Bjørn Gulden personally told me this morning that the company has permanently stopped sourcing kangaroo skins for its shoe models,”  exulted Animal Wellness Action and Center for A Humane Economy president Wayne Pacelle on May 15,  2025.

“Bjørn Gulden gave me that thrilling news at the Adidas company annual general meeting in Fürth,  Germany,  before a crowd of 250 people,”  Pacelle said.

“I flew there just to make my case before the company’s leadership,  and the company’s board and executives gave me plenty of time to make my case,”  Pacelle continued.

Witnesses

“I was accompanied by two dedicated German animal advocates,”  Milla Widmer of Munich and Vanessa Hagler of Fürth,  Pacelle mentioned,  sharing the credit.

Widmer,  representing Plant Based Treaty,  was previously noted for leading a protest against a surcharge on oat and soy milk at coffee booths at the 2023 Bonn Climate Conference,  hosted by the United Nations.

Witnesses Widmer and Hagler,  along with the general meeting audience,  served to make the Adidas policy change announcement pertaining to kangaroo leather “official,”  but that Gulden himself stated the change ensured that Adidas will keep the bargain,  unless Adidas sacks Gulden himself.

Adidas,  launching a global fad for kangaroo leather soccer shoes with a 1970 endorsement from the Brazilian soccer star Pele (1940-2022),  held a 17% share of the global market for athletic shoes before Pacelle in 2019 initiated an international “Kangaroos Are Not Shoes” campaign.

(See “Kangaroos are not shoes” campaign kicks back against ghost of Pelé.)

A tale of two CEOs

By the end of 2022 the Adidas athletic shoe market share was down to 15.4%.

In dollar terms,  that translates into a loss of about $2.8 billion per year.

Adidas booted former chief executive Kasper Rørsted and in January 2023 brought in Gulden to replace him.

Gulden,  a former professional soccer player himself,  had enjoyed a highly successful 10-year run as chief executive of Puma,  a minor rival whose 2.1% share of the global athletic shoe market is coincidentally close to the market share Adidas lost.

Puma announced that it had quit making and selling kangaroo leather athletic shoes about two months after Gulden jumped to Adidas.

Puma pounced

Gulden at Adidas must have noticed that in the two years since he left Puma,  and Puma abandoned kangaroo leather,  the Puma share of the North American athletic shoe and sneaker market more than doubled.

Adidas,  once selling 20 different kangaroo leather shoe styles,  had already discontinued all kangaroo leather products except two styles of soccer shoes when Gulden took the company entirely out of the kangaroo leather shoe business.

Valued at approximately $138.72 billion in 2024 and projected to reach $210.94 billion by 2032,  the global athletic shoe business isn’t hay.

And now an ever larger percentage of it isn’t kangaroo hide,  either.

The five top sellers

“With Adidas exiting the kangaroo skin business,”  Pacelle emailed to “Kangaroos Are Not Shoes” campaign participants,  “we have shut down the trade in kangaroo skins that had been flowing for decades to the world’s top five athletic shoe brands.

“Now they’ve all decided to use other materials for their shoes.  First Diadora.  Then Puma.  Then Nike.  Then New Balance.  And today Adidas.

(See Kangaroo leather soccer shoes get the boot from Puma & Nike and New Balance to hop out of the kangaroo leather shoe business.)

“These are the top five sellers of soccer shoes in the world.  Adidas has been the biggest outlier.  And it has been the most prominent,  important,  and stubborn supporter of the kangaroo skin trade,”  Pacelle detailed.

Pelé kicked off the kangaroo leather shoe fad

“Years ago,  Adidas worked hard to try to unwind California’s law forbidding the kangaroo parts trade in the state.  That’s how committed the company was to buying skins for its soccer shoes.”

Pacelle,  58,  was only five years old when Pelé,  whose actual name was Edson Arantes do Nascimento,  then considered the greatest soccer player of all time,  was reportedly paid $120,000 to delay the start of the 1970 World Cup quarterfinal between Brazil and Peru by bending down to tie his boots in the center circle.

Television cameras displayed Pelé’s kangaroo leather boots,  bearing the Adidas logo,  to all corners of the globe.

“From that point on,  sales of kangaroo leather shoes surged,”  a Center for A Humane Economy media release recounted.

Shoe industry accounted for 70% of kangaroo kills

Spalding had introduced kangaroo leather cleats to major league baseball before 1890,  but at $7.00 a pair,  equivalent to nearly $250 in 2025 dollars,  the baseball market remained small for the next century-plus,  though Mizuno,  Rawlings,  and other brands continue to offer kangaroo leather baseball shoes.

But worldwide,  only 65 million people play baseball and/or softball.  More than 250 million play soccer.

Pelé kicked open a global market for kangaroo leather soccer shoes that swiftly expanded what were then only occasional and relatively limited Australian kangaroo culls into a new major bloody industry,  accounting,  the Center for a Humane Economy alleges,  for about 70% of kangaroo culling in recent years.

But California said no

The one place where Adidas could not cash in on the kangaroo leather athletic shoe boom was California,  one of the biggest athletic shoe markets of all,  just a few hours’ drive south of the Adidas headquarters in Portland,  Oregon.

The California state legislature banned imports of kangaroo products and byproducts in 1971.

The U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service in 1974 followed up by listing three kangaroo species as “threatened,”  prohibiting imports of any “lookalike” kangaroo products and byproducts.

Twenty-one years of litigation and lobbying by Adidas and the Australian government later,  the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service in 1995 removed the three kangaroo species from protection.

Kangaroo leather shoes returned to the U.S. market,  but still not to California––not legally,  anyhow,  until in October 2007 then-California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger endorsed into law a bill lifting the 1971 ban.

35% drop in kangaroo culls

“When we started,”  Pacelle said,  “commercial shooters in Australia were massacring two million kangaroos every year and orphaning hundreds of thousands of joeys.  Company by company,  we are shutting down key foreign markets that have long been the lifeblood of the night-time shooting crews that slay kangaroos and orphan the young.

“Great partners like Their Turn,”  Pacelle continued,  with a nod toward Their Turn founder Donny Moss of New York City,  “have conducted dozens of protests at Adidas stores to let them know there would be no peace until the company changed its ways.

“The kangaroo kill has already dropped from two million to 1.3 million,  and as these relatively new corporate policies take full effect and dry up funding for the shooters,  that kill will decline,”  Pacelle projected,  contending that,  “The killings have always been about money.  The idea that it was done for population control has been a ruse from the get-go.

“We are not done”

“We are not done,”  Pacelle pledged.  “With this momentum,  we now redouble our efforts to secure similar pledges from Japanese companies ASICS and Mizuno to end this trade once and for all.”

Pacelle concluded by acknowledging the contributions to the “Kangaroos Are Not Shoes” campaign of “Jennifer Skiff,  director of international programs for the Center for a Humane Economy,  and before her Mitchell Fox,  Emma Hurst of Australia’s Animal Justice Party,  and many other determined advocates and mission-aligned organizations battling to raise awareness about the world’s largest mammalian slaughter of native wildlife.”

Kangaroo culls to serve the athletic shoe industry at peak “claimed as many victims as the infamous, long-running springtime commercial seal slaughter in Atlantic Canada did at its zenith some decades ago,”  Pacelle said.

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