Adidas in Naupan: when the story
outruns the facts.

For the 2026 World Cup, Adidas partnered with Mexican social enterprise Someone Somewhere on a limited-edition collection of Mexican national-team jerseys featuring hand-embroidered indigenous art. The collection ran to 2,026 numbered pieces — a nod to the tournament year — priced at up to $285 USD each, each carrying a QR code that traced back to the artisan who made it. Behind every piece were 150 Nahua women from Naupan, a mountain community in the Sierra Norte de Puebla, whose work was unveiled at a private event in Mexico City's Roma neighborhood alongside influencers and entertainment figures. For the launch, two of the artisans flew to Adidas headquarters in Germany to have their work archived, and others walked onto the pitch during a pre-tournament friendly.

On paper, the project read as a bet on putting Mexican identity front and center at the most-watched sporting event in the world. But it was uneven ground from the outset, with a long record of multinational brands appropriating indigenous art unfairly — Adidas among them.

The controversy didn't take long to erupt. On May 17, Proceso — an investigative newsmagazine with more than five decades in Mexico — published an interview with Tatiana Bernaldez, a semiotician with 18 years specializing in the textile symbolism of Naupan. Bernaldez denounced what she considered abusive conditions: pay of 36 pesos an hour for the embroiderers, the use of techniques foreign to the community's tradition, and a promised health insurance that never materialized.

The story had every ingredient to go viral: a global brand, indigenous communities, the World Cup as backdrop, and a visible price gap. Various voices joined the accusation on social media, among them Luz Valdez, a cultural promoter and influencer with 1.3 million combined followers on TikTok and Instagram, who had already positioned herself as a critical voice on collaborations between global brands and Mexican artisans.

The pressure on Adidas was especially uncomfortable because it wasn't the first time. In 2025, the brand had faced a controversy over sandals designed by Willy Chavarria using Oaxacan iconography taken without permission or compensation from local artisans. Adidas apologized and visited the affected community. Less than a year later, the collaboration with Someone Somewhere in Naupan reactivated exactly the same questions. A brand that had already been through that scrutiny should have arrived at this project with prior documentation, transparent processes, and a preventive narrative. It didn't — and when Valdez's first video reached 83,000 likes before the companies had said a word, the asymmetry was immediate. The artisans who worked on the project had signed confidentiality agreements and could not respond publicly. The narrative was set before any rebuttal existed.

Adidas issued a brief institutional response through its communications agency, saying it had worked with Someone Somewhere to improve the artisans' working conditions and that the collaboration met its global standards. The operational defense was left to its intermediary.

Someone Somewhere issued a detailed statement on May 27, attempting to contextualize the accusations. In it, the company confirmed that the artisans operated under an external-supplier arrangement, that using the Casa de Cultura was the collective's own proposal, and that pay exceeded the minimum wage. Yet the document also confirmed three of the central accusations: no formal IMSS employer registration, the modification of traditional techniques, and the use of a public building as a private workshop.

Public conversation pointed mainly at Adidas, because it was the name on the shirt. In a crisis, visibility defines perceived responsibility, regardless of how contractual obligations are actually distributed. Neither response closed the debate. The topic didn't yield to statements; it lost oxygen as the World Cup advanced and the news cycle moved on — though it never fully died out.

The 2,026 pieces sold out. Adidas confirmed the green Piedra del Sol jersey as the best-selling shirt of the 2026 World Cup worldwide. Commercially, the episode left no visible mark.

Reputationally, the topic stayed alive. In June, The New York Times published a report on the case that reignited the conversation. What set that coverage apart from the rest is a detail that seems minor but isn't: it was the only actor, among all those who weighed in, that physically traveled to Naupan. It spoke with more than two dozen women who worked on the project, reviewed pay stubs, and cross-checked figures against living-wage benchmarks for rural Mexico. As is the outlet's standard practice, the Times notified the parties before publishing, so Adidas and Someone Somewhere knew the story was coming.

What it found did not absolve the brands — it documented real frictions — but it added direct testimony from the artisans themselves that significantly complicated the narrative that had dominated public conversation. The women who worked on the project contradicted Valdez directly. Several expressed anger at the influencers who, in their words, were helping themselves, not the community.

With the World Cup over and the news cycle moving on, the case gradually faded from public conversation. The file was never formally closed, but the testimony the Times gathered stands as the most complete account of what happened in Naupan — in a debate that, until then, had been waged almost entirely without going to the community.

The case leaves several lessons for any brand operating in this kind of collaboration.

The first has to do with internal coordination. In projects involving indigenous communities, cultural heritage, or sensitive labor conditions, the conversation between the brand team and the corporate communications team cannot happen after the crisis breaks. Corporate exists, among other reasons, to see this kind of risk coming. When that conversation doesn't happen beforehand, the brand arrives with no preventive narrative and no documentation ready — exactly what happened here, and with precedents that made the scenario foreseeable.

The second lesson is about how information moves today. The case showed clearly how media and influencers can complement each other to make a story go viral in little time, but it also exposed a fundamental difference between the two. Influencers are not journalists. They operate under different logics, with different sources and different standards of verification. That doesn't make them irrelevant — on the contrary, their reach is real and their speed is greater. But the information they generate travels along different lines than verification journalism, and brands need to understand that difference to know how to respond to each.

The third is perhaps the most counterintuitive. What many brands fear — a New York Times investigation — turned out in this case to be the element that most balanced the conversation. The Times did not absolve Adidas or Someone Somewhere; it flagged real irregularities. But it addressed the central accusation, exploitation, with the one resource no other actor had used: going to Naupan and speaking with the women who worked on the project. That direct testimony shifted the weight of the narrative. A brand confident in what it does can, in a situation like this, enable that kind of scrutiny rather than fear it.

The fourth lesson is about what remains afterward. The case didn't close. On the contrary, it left more fertile ground for the topic to flare up again. The influencers who had built their narrative did not take the Times report well — not because they refuted it in full, but because the focus landed on the fact that it contradicted their sources. That points to something beyond this case: when a crisis operates in the terrain of cultural perception and identity, facts don't necessarily settle the debate. Other brands considering similar collaborations in Mexico should keep that in mind from the start — not as a signal to avoid these projects, but to approach them with the rigor they demand.