We've seen some ridiculous limited-edition sports shoe drops and collaborations in recent years, but Adidas appears to have taken then concept to its logical extreme. According to the Adidas CONFIRMED app, where it posts new on drops, its latest limited-edition release takes the chunky trainer trend and gaudy in-your-face branding to absurdist levels by turning the packaging itself into footwear.
The Adidas Box Shoe is basically a cardboard shoe box with laces sporting one of the best sports logos. “Blurring the lines between product and packaging, these Adidas shoes are truly out of the box,” the brand says. Just don't wear them out in the rain. Or try to run in them.
Adidas thinks inside the box (Image credit: Adidas)
I think I actually designed a pair of these when I was 8 years old, and wore them around the house until they fell apart. I'm happy to see now that I was ahead of the zeitgeist and that some decades later Adidas has finally decided to take up my ingenious design concept.
This is actually a surprisingly cool look (Image credit: Adidas)
The Adidas Box Shoes are made out of natural fiber (cardboard to the rest of us), while the wide flapping tongue recalls the Pharrell x Adidas Samba Humanrace. However, we suspect the real tongue is in Adidas's cheek. Closer inspection reveals that the cardboard clogs, supposedly available "on request" have the product code AF0104.
That does suggest that the shoe is an April Fools’ joke. Adidas showed kind of bad form by dropping it early, but after Elon Musk's replacement of the Twitter logo with the Dogecoin logo last year, it seems people aren't to bothered about respecting the strict traditions of April Fools' etiquette anymore (that was an April Fools' joke, right?). In fact, with brands competing to be the one that 'gets' people, maybe the only way to fool people now is by getting in early. Expect April Fools' Day 2025 jokes to start the day after New Year.
Unbox this (Image credit: Adidas)
That aside, we like to see a brand that can laugh at itself, and it seems that's what Adidas is doing. The Box Shoe is so funny and so almost believable because it sends up how absurd limited-edition brand drops and collabs have become, not to mention the whole unboxing trend (see our rundown of the weirdest brand collaborations).
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Joe is a regular freelance journalist and editor at Creative Bloq. He writes news, features and buying guides and keeps track of the best equipment and software for creatives, from video editing programs to monitors and accessories. A veteran news writer and photographer, he now works as a project manager at the London and Buenos Aires-based design, production and branding agency Hermana Creatives. There he manages a team of designers, photographers and video editors who specialise in producing visual content and design assets for the hospitality sector. He also dances Argentine tango.
