Adidas’ headquarters is stationed in Herzogen­aurach, a town of 22,000 just outside of Nuremberg whose claim to fame is that it is home to both Adidas and Puma. The competing sportswear companies were founded by brothers Adolf (Adi) and Rudolf Dassler, rumored to have had a falling out while taking cover in a bunker during World War II. For a time, their rivalry supposedly divided residents; Herzogen­aurach was nicknamed “the town of bent necks,” due to the local habit of entering conversation by peering at the feet of one’s interlocutor in order to identify their corporate and social affiliations.

This was not a problem on Adidas’ campus, where affiliation was unambiguous: Everyone in sight was wearing sneakers made by their employer. The campus, dubbed the World of Sports, occupies a sprawling 146-acre former Nazi air base that corporate communications understandably prefers to describe as an old US military station. (After being commandeered by the US Army in 1945, the base was returned to the German government in 1992 and was acquired by Adidas five years later.) Some of the original barracks still stand and have been repurposed as office space. They cut an odd silhouette next to a glass-enclosed cafeteria named Stripes and a mirrored, angular office building named Laces that looks like a high-design airport terminal. Inside Laces, glass walkways crisscross elegantly from side to side, as if pulled through the eyes of a shoe.

The campus holds a full-size soccer pitch, a track, a boxing room, and an outdoor climbing wall. There are multiple outdoor courts for beach volleyball, basketball, and tennis, and employees actually use them. When I visited in early July, small packs of well-shod workers trotted diligently across the campus, threading through sidewalks and toward forest trails. Nearly everyone, on and off the courts, was wearing Adidas apparel along with their sneakers. Disc-like robotic lawnmowers rolled through the grass, munching slowly. Though I am predisposed, as an American Jew descended from Holocaust survivors, to be slightly uneasy at a former Luftwaffe base populated by several thousand well-behaved young people with unifying insignias, the campus had an energetic, spirited vibe. The employees, who hail from all over the world, seemed healthy and happy. It all felt a bit like what you’d imagine if The Nutcracker had been set in a Foot Locker.

Adidas' German headquarters felt a bit like a production of The Nutcracker set inside a Foot Locker.

Compared with the World of Sports, the Speedfactory—an hour-long bus ride from headquarters—is a relatively featureless box. It is housed in a white office building in the middle of the aforementioned cornfield; the exterior is marked with Adidas flags and the logo of Oechsler Motion, a longtime manufacturing partner, which operates the facility. I went there with a small group of other visitors for a tour. In a carpeted foyer, we pulled on heavy rubber toe caps, a protective measure. Liability thus limited, we traveled down the hallway toward the back of the building and shuffled inside.

The factory was white and bright, about the size of a Home Depot, with high ceilings and no windows. There weren’t many people, though there weren’t that many machines either. Along an assembly line made of three segments, an engineered knit fabric was laser-cut (by robots), shaped and sewn (by humans), and fused into soles (a collaborative, multistep, human-and-machine process). At the far end of the room, an orange robotic arm, perched high on a pedestal atop a particle foam machine, moved in a majestic, elegant, preprogram­med sweep.

The raw components of the sneakers being produced inside the Speedfactory were minimal: rolls of engineered knit fabric; finger-wide strips of semi-rigid thermoplastic polyurethane, which fuse to the exterior of a shoe to give it structure; white granules of thermoplastic polyurethane for Adidas’ signature Boost soles; an orange neon liner imported from Italy; and a “floating torsion bar,” purportedly for increased support, that looked like a double-headed intrauterine device.