Robert Louis-Dreyfus. The new CEO made an almost impossible job seem easy. Together with his partner Christian Tourres, he understood that the almost bankrupt adidas did not need to be reinvented, it simply needed a new direction. He turned the sleeping giant from a sales- to a marketing-driven company and steers adidas back on the growth path. In 1995, six years after becoming a corporation, adidas went public and its new marketing slogan could not sum it up better: “We knew then, we know now”.