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Adidas Running announced yesterday the release of a new Ultraboost collection, this time in collaboration with the hugely popular HBO television series Game of Thrones.

Launching just ahead of the show’s eighth and final season, due to hit screens April 14, the new collection of six limited-edition Ultraboost silhouettes has been inspired by the locations and characters of Westeros, including the House of Stark, Lannister, and Targaryen as well as the Nights Watch and White Walkers.

In addition to the unique design details, each shoe also features high-performance technology and fabrics including adidas signature Boost midsole technology for unlimited energy return, a lightweight Primeknit Nike Internationalist Dame upper, and the shoe’s iconic heel counter for flexible support.

Back in 2012, if you asked anyone what the hottest sneaker brand in the world was and they didn’t immediately say Nike, you’d have thought they were either insane or lying. Nike's stiffest global competition, Nike Air Max 270 Damen Adidas, wasn’t so much a distant second as an almost non-existent one. In the United States, Nike’s home base, the Swoosh was even more dominant. Its market share of athletic footwear was hovering around 60 percent, and it had just introduced the most groundbreaking sneaker technology of the millenium in Flyknit, the godfather of knit upper running shoes. On both mass market and limited-edition level, from Air Maxes to Air Yeezys, Nike looked unstoppable.

A little over five years later, though, Adidas is not just more competitive than it was a half-decade ago Nike Air Max 720 Womens from a financial standpoint—with reported increases in revenue and market share—but it’s also made up serious ground in innovation and style. What sparked the turnaround? A few things.

In 2014, Adidas reissued its legendary Stan Smith tennis sneakers behind a massive Adidas Superstar Womens marketing campaign, helping make them the coolest shoes among both fashion designers and brunch-going bros. They also signed Kanye West, whose Yeezy line of sneakers pushed Adidas to the top of the hype conversation. But Adidas also owes much of its recent success to a white foam sole called Boost, which set a new standard in comfort and cool in the sneaker market. (So much so that we've started referring to Adidas's history in terms of B.B. [Before Boost] and A.B. [After Boost]). Five years after the first Adidas Energy Boost hit shelves, it’s worth breaking down Nike Air Max 2016 Femme how Boost, well, boosted Adidas to the top of the sneaker game.

Here’s the first thing to know about Adidas’s premier running shoe technology: it’s not actually made by Adidas. What we know as Boost is actually made by a German chemical company called Badische Nike Air Huarache Womens Anilin & Soda-Fabrik (BASF for short), and the Three Stripes just pays BASF for the exclusive rights to this technology. BASF first developed what became Boost in 2007. At the time, it was nothing more than tiny little white particles the company called “energy capsules” (which basically look like squishy Tic-Tacs). Later, BASF’s scientists realized the particles were useful when welded together with steam into one solid piece. The first time Adidas saw Boost, it was via a small, tennis-sized ball that was used as a demo to show just how bouncy the material is. “We could Nike Internationalist Femme not believe how higher the ball bounced back compared to EVA foams which were the standard material at that time. We could not stop watching this video and imagined what we can do with that material: we could revolutionize the running industry with that material,” Nike Air Max 270 Womens says Matthias Am, the Category Director of Global Running at Adidas. By 2012, the company was testing prototype shoes with Boost.