Adidas China Turns AI Translation Error Into RedNote Marketing Win

What happened Adidas China’s website auto-translated a jacket’s English product description — “running errands” — as “taking care of business in the city” (在城里办事), a phrase that struck Chinese netizens as oddly funny, spawning memes and going viral on Xiaohongshu (also known as RedNote). The brand played along, pinning a comment from its official account inviting shoppers to ask about its “in-city” (城里) products, then posting a series of images showing other pieces styled for handling business around town. When a user joked that whoever made the mistake shouldn’t be fired — city jobs are hard to find — the brand replied that nobody would be fired and the AI would take the blame (不开除 这锅 AI 背定了). When another commenter asked what it would recommend wearing going back to the village, Adidas replied that it came from the village itself and couldn’t forget its roots (本身就是村里来的,不能忘本), attaching a screenshot of its headquarters in Herzogenaurach — a Bavarian town of around 25,000 that is home to both Adidas and Puma. Adidas’ replies generated more engagement than the slip itself — the village-roots line alone outperforming the original post. The Jing Take Turning a blunder into a punchline is a familiar move on Chinese socials, and Adidas worked it about as well as the format allows. Blaming the AI while sparing the employee nodded to a widespread anxiety about technology replacing workers and put Adidas on the right side of it. The headquarters screenshot, meanwhile, turned a defensive moment into a show of self-awareness. Neither move came across as cultural tourism, since it draws on the same fluency that carried the brand’s Tang-inspired Chinese New Year jacket to third on Lyst Index’s hottest products list for Q1 2026. Why luxury brands in China keep missing the moment — and what’s really holding them back Most luxury houses choose not to run this play, and the reason has little to do with their origins — plenty of maisons started somewhere as modest as a Bavarian market town. What holds them back is posture. Luxury trades on elevation, and joking at your own expense means climbing down from the pedestal the customer pays to stand near. Organizational structure compounds the problem: approval chains that run through Paris or Milan rarely move fast enough to catch a Xiaohongshu thread before it cools. Commercial scale in China is no proxy for understanding the market. Lemaire opened its first mainland stores in late 2024 and has grown global revenue tenfold since 2019, yet its “Objets Senteur” fragrance campaign featured braided imagery that Chinese consumers read as a reference to the Qing-era queue hairstyle — a symbol of historical humiliation. The apology it issued convinced few. Adidas, with only a product page at stake, read the same audience and came away with goodwill; its slip was the sort wit can repair. Responsiveness of this kind has to be built into how a company operates. The houses able to respond like Adidas have given their China teams real authority and the cultural literacy to use it, and trust them to act before the window closes. The ones still routing every reply through European headquarters will keep arriving after the conversation has moved on, whatever their budget. The Jing Take reports on a piece of the leading news and presents our editorial team’s analysis of the key implications for the luxury industry. In the recurring column, we analyze everything from product drops and mergers to heated debate sprouting on Chinese social media.

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Adidas China turned an auto-translation slip into a viral win

How Bottega Veneta weaved China’s forever it bag