Meet the typical Adidas US customer, a 20-something who earns just under $100,000 and looks to Adidas for fashion and fitness apparel

• Adidas in 2022 reported $24.6 billion in sales across footwear, apparel, and sporting equipment.
• The German retailer is a giant in the sportswear industry, second behind only Nike.
• Adidas' typical customer is a millennial and Gen Z customer earning just under six figures.

Adidas was born in 1949 out of a family feud between brothers Adolf and Rudolf Dassler. They ran a shoe manufacturing company called Geda for decades before a falling-out.

As a result, Rudolf launched rival Puma in 1948. Adolf founded Adidas a year later in the same town of Herzogenaurach, Germany, where both companies are still based.

Today, Adidas employs over 59,000 workers and in 2022 reported $24.6 billion in sales, across categories like footwear and apparel. Its largest market is Europe, the Middle East and Asia followed by North America. The latter contributed $6.9 billion to overall sales last year.

The typical US Adidas customer earns a mid-to-high average income of between $75,000 and $99,000, according to Start.io, a mobile marketing platform that helps partners serve relevant ads on their apps. The startup collects users' first-party data, such as device or location info, from the over half-million apps that it is currently installed on.

The largest target market for Adidas is adults between ages 20 and 29, a period when fitness is typically a high priority for consumers, Start.io said. The Adidas target market is highly active, and includes athletes, as well as non athletes into sport.

Adidas US customers also tend to visit company-operated stores three times a year on average. Customers more often than not purchase footwear, which accounted for 55% of Adidas total sales in 2022. Sambas and Gazelles are two popular models currently, worn not only by Gen Z and millennials for fashion, but also celebrities like Harry Styles and Rihanna.

But US Adidas consumers are also into sports and fitness. They buy sporting accessories, including bags and water bottles. Globally, Adidas generated about $9 billion in sales from 1,990 company stores in 2022.

Adidas remains a giant of the sportswear industry, second only to Nike in terms of annual sales. As such, the two are often compared to one another. The companies' go-to market strategies are also similar, Start.io said.

"They're following the same lines in terms of fashion and sport," Omri Barnes, chief marketing officer at Start.io, told Insider. "You can see over the last two decades, they're kind of tailing one another and again, even though Nike is much bigger in terms of their presence in the market, they're very similar."