Design

Adidas' Face Cover Is The Fastest Product They've Ever Made

Claire Miles

Jul 11, 2020

Like many other companies, Adidas developed a face mask in response to the coronavirus pandemic in less than a month. It was the quickest products the brand has ever made, according to its designers. Adidas released its reusable Face Cover in May in response to the growing demand for face masks. People are using face masks in an effort to reduce their risk of getting or spreading the coronavirus. Typically, it takes sportswear products up to four years to be developed, but the face mask was taken from conception, through design and production, and put on sale in less than one month. “The process for the Adidas Face Cover was fast,” said Marc Dolce creative director for Adidas’ Advanced Concepts team which lead the development of the product.

Carolina (35) wears Transit T-shirt, Creative Freedom shorts, Zadig & Voltaire glasses, and Adidas face mask during Phase 1 of reopening from the COVID-19 lockdown

Getty Images/Entertainment/Miguel Pereira

“The entire process from ideation to production was less than one month. It’s one of the most rapidly produced products we’ve ever made. And created almost entirely from home,” he told Dezeen. “It can take up to four years to bring a new innovation from the brief phase to market, and often just short of two-years for a product or technology update, which is fairly standard across the industry.” The teams who developed the Face Cover worked mostly from home located all around the world. The global collaboration allowed the development process to continue twenty fours hours a day. “We’re fortunate at Adidas to have teams across every continent, so we were able to structure the project in a way where, when one person finished their day, they could pass the baton to someone else, who was able to pick up where they left off and keep things moving,” explained Dolce. “We relied quite heavily on cloud-based collaborative 3D tools for sharing face scans and concept simulations, which could be worked on by multiple teams in different time-zones.”