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This story has been updated to include a response from Gap.
Kanye West is moving to terminate the Yeezy Gap partnership, the Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday, marking the end of a buzzy collaboration that experts say displays the downside of fashion’s hype machine.
In a letter to employees seen by Vogue Business, Gap brand president and CEO Michael Breitbard confirmed that the partnership is ending.
“We wanted to address the headlines of today and the past several weeks related to Yeezy Gap. Simply put...while we share a vision of bringing high-quality, trend-forward, utilitarian design to all people through unique omni experiences with Yeezy Gap, how we work together to deliver this vision is not aligned. And we are deciding to wind down the partnership,” the email reads. Upcoming Yeezy Gap releases in the pipeline will go ahead as planned.
Per the WSJ, West’s lawyers at Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft LLP claimed in a letter sent on Thursday that Gap breached their agreement by not opening dedicated stores and not releasing the apparel collections as planned, including failing to offer 40 per cent of the Yeezy Gap line in retail stores in the third and fourth quarter of 2021. Gap’s shares were down more than 3 per cent as of Thursday afternoon.
The industry had been closely watching the collaboration to see if the Yeezy brand, which has an engaged following boosted by the rapper’s fanbase, could help the beleaguered retailer turn around its image, drive sales and gain new customers. But the relationship has proven strained, as West, who now goes by Ye, took to social media to call out the company as recently as two weeks ago. In an Instagram story, he said that permanent Yeezy Gap stores were meant to open per the contract and never did.
The termination could hurt Gap’s turnaround plans, said GlobalData managing director Neil Saunders in a note. The Gap brand reported a sales decline of 13 per cent in 2021 versus 2019, and Gap Inc CEO Sonia Syngal stepped down in July. “Gap had pinned its hopes on Kanye’s magic to help revitalise interest in its ailing business,” Saunders said. “The termination also removes a potentially interesting future growth vector and means that Gap will need to rely on its own skill to turn around the business.”
Yeezy Gap Engineered by Balenciaga will launch in June, bringing one of the hottest luxury names to Yeezy’s ongoing relationship with the once-beleaguered American retailer.
The partnership, which formed in 2020, was designed to make West’s Yeezy apparel line more accessible to a mass audience by selling it with an iconic American retailer. In return, Gap would benefit from the halo effect of the hype surrounding the Yeezy label and the artist-turned-designer himself, drawing in new customers and injecting the brand with buzzy newness.
“The Yeezy partnership really never lived up to its full potential. The goal was for Gap to expand and capture a new customer base with Yeezy’s reach and relevance in addition to helping to reinvigorate the Gap brand,” says equity analyst and CEO of Telsey Advisory Group Dana Telsey.
The partnership was meant to last for 10 years, giving West full creative control of the line while Gap handled manufacturing and distribution, paying West a fee based on sales. The collections to date have been dropped sporadically only online and have included items like a puffer jacket and a Yeezy Gap hoodie. In January 2022, Yeezy Gap Engineered by Balenciaga was announced, pulling in the luxury label’s creative director Demna. The first collection of that collaboration hit stores over the summer, with the clothing displayed in stores in trash bags that went viral online.
That type of buzz proved to be a distraction, analysts say. “Gap was too quick to rush headlong into a deal with Kanye because it was keen to generate headlines and stimulate interest in its brand,” Saunders said. “It succeeded in this, but by failing to work through the finer details, it got swamped by Kanye and almost guaranteed that the arrangement would fall apart.”
Trying to inject a retailer with a new image derived from a collaboration is a difficult task. TikTok fashion critic Alexandra Hildreth says the partnership appeared “mismatched” and that the two organisations had “odd brand chemistry”. But West’s fans followed him to Gap, where drops would quickly sell out.
Analysts note that Yeezy Gap was not a fix-all for Gap’s turnaround strategy and that there’s other work to be done. “This partnership was supposed to be additive and incremental to the changes that the Gap brand was implementing with its brand of rationalising the store fleet, investing in digital and enhancing the product offering,” Telsey says. “It certainly isn’t a positive, but Gap [Inc] and Gap brand are in the midst of working to stabilise the business overall and have a lot to accomplish.”
Gap is already looking ahead.
“Yeezy Gap was launched to be a disruptive, highly creative endeavor – one that’s challenged us to think and operate differently, attracted new, younger and more diverse customers, and enabled our talent to deliver incredible work with unmatched dedication, grit and creativity,” Breitbard's email to employees reads. “We are truly grateful to our Yeezy Gap team members who have given so much to build this brand, and we will take the new, hyper-entrepreneurial ways of working we learned through this process with us as we move forward. We will focus on our strategies to strengthen the brand and continually push the boundaries of what Gap can deliver.”
Additional reporting by Lucy Maguire
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