Rushil Nori moves up at adidas as retail planning chief

Beaverton, Oregon: Rushil Nori has swapped forecasting the future for running the present. The strategy and marketing hand, who has spent the better part of seven years climbing the ranks at adidas, has just been named senior director, retail planning, based in Portland, Oregon. It is a promotion with a philosophical twist: after years spent divining where the consumer, the marketplace and the business were headed, Nori now gets to turn that thinking into the daily decisions that actually move the retail channel.

The move caps a steady ascent through adidas’s commercial engine room. Nori joined the German sportswear giant in 2019 as assistant manager, merchandising, where he built out the digital and operational side of adidas’s dropship programme across key wholesale accounts, growing that business sixfold to $40 million in under 16 months. From there it was on to manager, digital partner acceleration, where he drove double-digit e-commerce growth with the brand’s top digital partners, before rising to senior manager, commercial strategy, where he crafted three-year growth plans and worked with finance, DTC and wholesale teams to sharpen omnichannel profitability. Most recently, as director, strategy, he covered marketplace, strategic planning and consumer insights, a role that now sits vacant and, per Nori’s own post, open for applicants keen to shape adidas’s North America consumer and marketplace strategy.

Nori’s résumé reads like a tour of global commerce. Before adidas, he cut his teeth at Mondelez International as a business manager and, earlier, as a management trainee on the company’s flagship leadership programme, one of just twelve graduates picked nationally that year, with stints across sales, supply chain and marketing. There was also a spell at Team SportzConsult in Mumbai running event marketing for clients including Star Sports, Mattel and Coke, with a marketing budget of $10 million under his watch, plus an early engineering apprenticeship at Ashok Leyland, where he led a vendor rationalisation project that cut purchase costs by 21 per cent.

Alongside the day job, Nori has picked up a teaching gig too, joining the University of Oregon in March this year as an instructor of strategic management on its SPM programme, a nod to his stated ambition of giving back to the industry by shaping young minds.

For adidas watchers, the appointment signals continuity rather than upheaval: an internal promotion that keeps institutional knowledge in-house while opening a genuinely meaty strategy role to the market. Expect competition for that vacancy to be brisk.