Kanye West is ending his billion dollar deal with Gap despite there being eight years left
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With eight years left in their contract, Kanye West - in typical Kanye style - has confirmed he's ending his partnership with Gap.
The outspoken rapper, who now goes by 'Ye', signed a decade-long deal with the fashion retailer back in 2020, leading to a wave of successful of Yeezy Gap sales.
Ye has had a long-running affection for Gap, since he worked at the retailer as a teenager and had been chasing a collaboration with the brand for quite some time.
However, just two years into the deal, Ye's lawyers have sent a letter to Gap to notify them that he'll be terminating the agreement.
Ye's team claims that Gap failed to meet the terms of the contract, which required the company to sell 40 percent of Yeezy Gap items in stores throughout the third and fourth quarters of 2021, and to open five Yeezy Gap dedicated stores by July 2023.
The Yeezy Gap line had been a roaring success and, according to Forbes, it made a whopping $1 billion in sales in its first year.
Despite that, an attorney for the rapper confirmed this week that a letter has been sent to the fashion retailer seeking to terminate the contract.
"Gap left Ye no choice but to terminate their collaboration agreement because of Gap’s substantial noncompliance", Nicholas Gravante, with Cadwalader Wickersham & Taft, told the Associated Press.
"Ye had diligently tried to work through these issues with Gap both directly and through counsel. He has gotten nowhere."
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Confirming that the partnership had come to an end, Gap president and CEO Mark Breitbard sent a letter to employees - as seen by Pitchfork - which read: "While we share a vision of bringing high-quality, trend-forward, utilitarian design to all people through unique omni experiences with Yeezy Gap, how we work together to deliver this vision is not aligned. And we are deciding to wind down the partnership.”
The letter adds that Gap will continue selling all existing Yeezy Gap products before ending use of the brand name.
Ye himself spoke about the deal termination on CNBC this week, explaining: "A king can't live in someone else's castle. A king has to make his own castle."
He spilled: "Sometimes I would talk to the guys, the leaders, and it would just be like I was on mute or something. Our agenda, it wasn't aligned."
“A king can’t live in someone else’s castle. A king has to make his own castle,” says @kanyewest on his decision to terminate a contract with Gap due to a lack of follow-through on obligations. pic.twitter.com/YoZU9x6sJ3
— CNBC (@CNBC) September 15, 2022
Meanwhile, Ye also appears to have fallen out with sports fashion brand Adidas over his Yeezy footwear range.
The multi-hyphenate flooded his personal Instagram account with callouts directed at the higher-ups at Adidas.
Currently, Ye is locked into a contract with the company until 2026 and he has suggested that he wants out, but there's no word yet of an official break-up just yet.
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Topics: Celebrity, Fashion, Kanye West
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