Adidas in Naupan: when the story
outruns the facts.

For the 2026 World Cup, Adidas partnered with Mexican social enterprise Someone Somewhere to produce a limited hand-embroidered jersey collection. The canvas: 150 Nahua women from Naupan, a mountain community in Sierra Norte de Puebla. The product: 2,026 numbered pieces retailing at up to $285 USD each, tagged with a QR code linking to the artisan who made it. Two women flew to Adidas headquarters in Germany to have their work archived. Others walked onto the pitch during a pre-tournament friendly.

The project had everything a brand story needs — craft, identity, purpose, scarcity. It sold out fast.

The controversy did not begin on social media. On May 18, Proceso published an interview with Tatiana Bernaldez, a semiotician with 18 years of specialization in the textile symbolism of Naupan, who alleged hourly pay of 36 pesos, techniques imposed from outside the local tradition, and a promised health insurance that never materialized. Bernaldez spoke not from Naupan, but from her academic position and her contact with artisans who had declined to participate in the project.

From that text, the story traveled. Denunciations multiplied across social media, and among them the influencer and cultural promoter Luz Valdez stood out, amplifying the story with videos that reached millions of views — also without visiting the community. The New York Times was the only outlet that sent a reporter to Naupan, spoke with more than two dozen women who had worked on the project, reviewed pay stubs, and cross-checked figures against living wage benchmarks for rural Mexico.

Bernaldez was interviewed by the Times. Her words were not published. That detail says something about the verification standard the paper applied.

Adidas arrived at this project carrying a recent precedent. 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 about cultural appropriation and labor conditions with indigenous Mexican communities.

The communications problem was not only the crisis. It was that the crisis was foreseeable. 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 did not.

When Luz Valdez published her first video — reaching 83,000 likes before the companies had said a word — the asymmetry was immediate: a verified, emotionally charged story on one side, silence on the other. Valdez spoke in the name of the artisans. The artisans who worked on the project had signed confidentiality agreements and could not respond publicly. The narrative set before any rebuttal existed.

Adidas chose silence as a posture. Not by omission, but by calculation. With 2,026 jerseys already sold, the World Cup underway, and the green Piedra del Sol jersey confirmed as the best-selling shirt of the tournament worldwide, the calculus was straightforward: speaking opened flanks, silence let time do its work. A two-line statement through its communications agency was all the brand issued.

Someone Somewhere took the opposite path and paid for it. Its May 27 statement attempted to contextualize the accusations and ended up confirming three of the central ones: no formal IMSS employer registration, modification of traditional techniques, and use of a public building as a private workshop. Each point had an explanation. The sum of them made things worse.

The only real counterweight to the viral narrative came from the New York Times, which traveled to Naupan on its own initiative. What it published did not absolve the brands — it documented real frictions — but it dismantled the central exploitation claim. 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.

That work was done by a third party, not the brands. And that is precisely the difference between having an operation that withstands scrutiny and having a communications strategy that anticipates it. A brand confident in what it does can invite the most demanding outlet in the world and ask it to go see for itself. Adidas did not do that. The Times went anyway.

There are lessons in this case that go beyond conventional crisis management.

The first concerns the terrain on which the debate was fought. When criticism operates from semiotics, cultural identity, and intangible heritage, no press release dismantles it. Telling someone who accuses a brand of symbolic epistemicide that community income grew 400 percent does not close the argument — it expands it. In that kind of conversation, the only viable path is to stay out of the debate, let documented facts speak, and avoid feeding the cycle of replies. Adidas understood that, though likely for commercial reasons rather than strategic ones.

The second lesson is about the difference between resolving a crisis and surviving one. The topic did not stop. Proceso returned on July 4 with a long-form analysis of the lasting cultural damage in Naupan — including what Bernaldez describes as a rupture in the generational transmission of textile knowledge: girls who no longer learn the pepenado from their grandmothers, now replicating patterns dictated by outside designers. The crisis lost oxygen because the World Cup moved on and so did the news cycle. That is not the same as resolution.

The third is about ecosystem memory. Adidas now has an active group of academics, journalists, activists, and community members with documented arguments and established sources. If the brand works again with indigenous communities in Mexico, the scrutiny will be immediate and better equipped than the first time. The open question is whether that changes how marketing integrates these considerations from the design of the project — not from the moment a crisis requires it.

The 2,026 pieces sold out. The green Piedra del Sol jersey is the best-selling shirt of the 2026 World Cup, by Adidas's own account. Commercially, the episode left no visible mark.

Reputationally, the file remains open. Proceso maintained active coverage through July. The community of Naupan faces internal tensions between those who worked with Someone Somewhere and those who did not — a fracture the media exposure aggravated. Bernaldez continues to document cultural damage that outlasts the news cycle.

The case will remain a reference point in Mexico each time a global brand attempts to connect its product with indigenous cultural heritage. Not because of what went wrong in the communications response, but because of what was not built before a response became necessary.