adidas
A read on what a generation actually feels when something feels premium, and why premium is made by culture, not set by a price.
METHODS
Cross-brand premium e-commerce benchmark, 10 internal creator interviews, 15 consumer in-depth interviews
DELIVERABLES
Emotion Cards: eight emotions that make a product and its presentation feel premium (excitement, trust, joy, relaxation, interest, inspiration, pride, and guilt), framed as a north-star and as success metrics for designing premium experiences
Premium-as-a-journey principles: where and how the premium feeling is actually built, well before the product page
A cross-brand premium e-commerce benchmark, spanning luxury, pure-premium, performance and high-end streetwear
An internal-versus-external alignment: where the brand's own view of premium meets, and misses, the consumer's
Prioritised recommendations, split into what to elevate, the gaps to create for, and the open unknowns
MARKETS
United Kingdom, United States
THE SHIFT
Started with a concrete request, how to present premium products on the product page, alongside a broader brand question: where do we stand in the market, and what do we have to say. Landed by reframing premiumness from a page-and-price problem into an emotional and cultural one: a defined set of emotions a premium experience creates, and a recognition that premium is built across the journey and made real by community and scarcity, not manufactured on a single screen.
THE SIGNAL
Premium isn't a property of the object or a number on the tag, it's a socially constructed feeling. What makes something premium is scarcity, community, achievement, and the sense of belonging to the few: "just enough people having it, and more people wanting it than having it," "wanting the item feels more luxurious than needing it," "top-tier because of how the world views it, not just me." The crowd and the culture decide what counts as premium, and the feeling is built over time, across the whole journey, long before anyone reaches a product page.
The Stakes.
Premium is one of the most contested and least understood spaces in the market. For a brand built on scale and accessibility, moving into premium raised a harder question than "how should the page look": what does premium even mean to people now, and who gets to decide it. The stakes were understanding a shifting cultural definition, where premium is drifting away from price and craft toward meaning, scarcity and belonging, so the brand could meet it honestly rather than perform it.
The Tension.
The intuitive way to make something feel premium is to make it look premium: bigger imagery, more polish, louder price signals. The research held a harder truth. Premium is an emotional outcome built over time, not a visual treatment on one page, and several of the emotions behind it are counter-intuitive: pride at being one of few, guilt reframed as desire, relaxation that comes from trusting it will all be highest class. And premium is created, through desire and scarcity, as much as it is catered to. Designing for "looks expensive" would have missed the feelings, and the cultural machinery, that actually make something read as premium.
The Approach.
To read premium honestly, I looked at it from three sides at once, the market, the brand, and the people, so the definition came from culture rather than from a brief.
The Phases.
→ Benchmark
How premium is built and signalled across the market and by the best in class, spanning pure luxury, premium lines, performance premium and high-end streetwear, to see the shared codes and where they diverge.
→ Internal perspective
Interviews with ten adidas premium creators, enablers and story-tellers, on what premium means to the brand, how they imagine premium presentation, and where their own view strains against the consumer's.
→ External perspective
In-depth interviews with fifteen premium consumers, who buy across high-end streetwear, pure luxury, premium sport and performance, on what premium means to them, the emotions it carries, where adidas sits, and what makes something feel premium when they shop and when they see it.
→ Aligning the views
Triangulating the brand's story about premium against the meaning consumers actually construct, to locate the gap between what a brand performs and what a culture confers.
The Turn.
Premium is an emotional and cultural state, not a visual style or a price. People experience something as premium when it carries the right feelings, anticipation, trust, pride, the sense of being one of few, and when the meaning has been built over time and confirmed by the community around it. The wider signal, and why it matters beyond adidas: as premium detaches from cost and craft alone, it lives in meaning, in community-made status, and in the quiet economy of wanting more than having. Reading which feelings a culture attaches to "premium," and who it lets decide, is what lets a brand design the meaning rather than just the look.