Adidas to discontinue table tennis products

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Adidas is only a marketing company , they have stuff made in cheap chinese factories and sell it with high margin.
They were only into this sport for the money, and when it turned out they didnt win enough just stopped.
As said before, Adidas did absolutely nothing for our sport, no innovations whatsoever, totally useless for us players.

I'm confused by your post in this pretty dormant thread.

A 3rd party company purchased a (expensive!) licence to market TT stuff using the adidas brand. The rubbers were ESN and very well received. They had a good outreach program to get test materials into the hands of forum members. They sponsored a few up-and-coming young professionals. Their blades were made in china, but had much better QC than the real bargain basement taobao stuff you see, and IMO better QC than many swedish Stiga blades. And their blades also used several interesting compositions which couldn't be found in other brands.

At some point, the cost of the adidas licence became too much to bear and it was all over. Thankfully, the 3rd party company lives on to some degree in the shape of ITC.

So, who are you moaning about exactly? Adidas for the cost of their licence? The 3rd party for using Chinese factories for the blades?

IMO a few really interesting innovations came out under the adidas brand, and I'm happy to see ITC continue to seek success in TT. I found them far more than "useless".
 
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I agree with what you are saying about adidas product quality.

However I don´t think the rubbers were very well received. Over here, the general thinking was that adidas were just more derivative ESN rubbers not worth a try if you were happy with what´s already out there. Of course this doesn´t stop people from buying the latest xyz rubbers when they are released ...

Anyway, adidas surely had one standout rubber in p7. That one is missed. But the general acceptance of anything Tenzone, p3/5 and lastly E-Razor could have been better.

It´s just as if the "scene" didn´t welcome a large international player to their guarded community.
 
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I agree with what you are saying about adidas product quality.

However I don´t think the rubbers were very well received. Over here, the general thinking was that adidas were just more derivative ESN rubbers not worth a try if you were happy with what´s already out there. Of course this doesn´t stop people from buying the latest xyz rubbers when they are released ...

Anyway, adidas surely had one standout rubber in p7. That one is missed. But the general acceptance of anything Tenzone, p3/5 and lastly E-Razor could have been better.

It´s just as if the "scene" didn´t welcome a large international player to their guarded community.

Tenzone Ultra was also IMO sick good. Liked it better than MX-P for pure blocking. Though might have lacked a tiny bit of spin. I liked it better than Bluefire jp 01-Turbo as well.
 
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Tenzone Ultra was also IMO sick good. Liked it better than MX-P for pure blocking. Though might have lacked a tiny bit of spin. I liked it better than Bluefire jp 01-Turbo as well.

I am sure there are players out there who will sadly miss their preferred adidas rubber. But I am afraid they are too few, otherwise adidas would have sold more products and stayed in the market.
 
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I am sure there are players out there who will sadly miss their preferred adidas rubber. But I am afraid they are too few, otherwise adidas would have sold more products and stayed in the market.

I also think that P7 and TZU were excellent, I really liked P5 as well. TZU was well ahead of its time in particular. I never got to try E-Razor. There are probably loads of reasons why the enterprise failed. I always got a confused response from other players when I talked about Adidas TT stuff. Some didn't like a mega brand being involved in the sport (even though it wasn't actually adidas doing the work in the background). Some couldn't separate the newer gear from the older premade stuff you'd find in general sports shops.

The cost of the licence may have meant the whole concept was doomed to failure, but I can't agree with the post above that it was useless, no innovation, did nothing etc.
 
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I also think that P7 and TZU were excellent, I really liked P5 as well. TZU was well ahead of its time in particular. I never got to try E-Razor. There are probably loads of reasons why the enterprise failed. I always got a confused response from other players when I talked about Adidas TT stuff. Some didn't like a mega brand being involved in the sport (even though it wasn't actually adidas doing the work in the background). Some couldn't separate the newer gear from the older premade stuff you'd find in general sports shops.

The cost of the licence may have meant the whole concept was doomed to failure, but I can't agree with the post above that it was useless, no innovation, did nothing etc.

I think they should have spent some of the money on ONE real innovation. With that name in the background, what if they had released something like the Evolution rubbers, which by time would have won people over?

But they had P-series and R-series, then tenzone, variations of tenzone, they wanted to compete with the classics and released R-classic (or whatever it is called), then E-Razor, plus about two dozen different blades, and yet some that weren´t even available on every market.

Too much, too soon.

I was tempted to buy E-Razor when it was heavily discounted, just to see what it´s like. But I have been such a good boy lately when it comes to testing that I´ve really kept my money together ;-)
 
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I think they should have spent some of the money on ONE real innovation. With that name in the background, what if they had released something like the Evolution rubbers, which by time would have won people over?

But they had P-series and R-series, then tenzone, variations of tenzone, they wanted to compete with the classics and released R-classic (or whatever it is called), then E-Razor, plus about two dozen different blades, and yet some that weren´t even available on every market.

Too much, too soon.

I was tempted to buy E-Razor when it was heavily discounted, just to see what it´s like. But I have been such a good boy lately when it comes to testing that I´ve really kept my money together ;-)

IMO (and this won't be shared by everyone), TZU was a real innovation at the time. It was the first ESN tensor to have a suppressed bounce and was amazingly easy to use while retaining huge power. Evolution on the other hand was a variation on the Bluefire M and Rasant series (or they're all part of the same family of rubbers), and has the drawback of relying on extreme factory boost to get the job done. Tibhar's trick with evolution was to make sure their high-profile players were using it (something adidas couldn't replicate - they didn't have high profile sponsored players), and to cover the packaging with random japanese iconography in an attempt to fool the customer into thinking it had some japanese component (a bit underhand).

Now don't get me wrong - evolution is a great rubber in many ways, but hardly some kind of true innovation, unique among its peers. I've always preferred Bluefire M myself, and the original Rasant is still incredibly popular among Andro sponsored players. These aren't identical rubbers by any means, but there's nothing particularly special about Evolution when you look at the whole group in the round. Any innovation evolution can claim is shared by many similar ESN rubbers in that generation of products.

But anyway - I feel that TZU was a hugely important ESN rubber and has laid the template for many releases since, was the first of its kind, and was totally different to the original Tenzone. This was adidas' big investment and big push into the market. I think they did all they could considering their financial limitations - they ran forum testing schemes, made sure their sponsored players were using it and so on. But let's face it, the choices of the majority of amateur players are governed by two big factors - trust long-standing companies with your equipment selection, and copy what the pros are using. These aren't particularly rational factors, but are seen as low-risk, and who can afford the money and time to try everything out? I know a lot of players who won't use anything non-butterfly simply because they can't bring themselves to even contemplate using non-butterfly stuff. This isn't rational. Any new company trying to break into the TT market is in for a tough time because breaking down this cultural groupthink is incredibly difficult.

If you look at Xiom, and maybe Victas, the key thing is to start small and try to initially innovate with your marketing. There's only so much room in the TT world really. They're both following a similar model - chinese blades, ESN rubbers, niche marketing. Then hang on in there for a long enough time that players see you as an established, reliable TT brand. Plan for a long haul. Hope to get a fairly visible sponsored pro after a while (Victas now have Niwa). Then branch out (Xiom now have their own korean blade-making facility). Perhaps the problem with Adidas is that the business model seemed to rely on immediate impact based on existing brand power, and this would offset the high licencing costs. But TT players aren't sheep in this way - they're more likely to blindly follow TT trends than general sporting trends. I get the impression that ITC are treading much more carefully (they look to be going down a similar route to Nexy to me - specialist appeal), which is probably a sensible approach and I wish them every possible success.
 
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