Sneaker Wars // Adidas, Puma, and the Dassler Brothers

Chapter 4 in Swoosh: The Unauthorized Story of Nike, entitled Shoe Wars, introduces an intriguing account of the origins of Adidas and Puma.

Rudolf, the oldest brother, and Adi were born into the Dassler family that would become one of the world’s most preeminent athletic shoemaking companies. During the economic struggle of World War I, the Dassler family set up a shoemaking operation in the back of the laundry room of their home and began making shoes from the leftover debris of war.

Adi Dassler, who would become known as the father of the modern sports shoe, excelled in the product development side of the business and his brother and wife handled sales and finance.

When Hitler went to war, the Dassler factory was given over to produce boots for the military. Rudi was called to serve in the military, but Adi stayed home to run the factory. After being away from the factory village of Herzogenaurach for years, serving in the war and then being detained in an American POW camp for a year after the war ended, Rudi walked away from the family business.

For reasons that remain a family secret, Rudi and Adi had become bitter enemies. One account states that the rivalry started because of a misunderstanding about the war itself, and that Rudi blamed Adi for turning him in to the Americans or for failing to use his connections to have him released. It was also said that Rudi attempted to cause a division between Adi and his wife, and Adi never forgave him.

Whatever the reason, Rudi walked across the river and started his own shoe factory. Adi and Rudi agreed that they would never use the Dassler name on their shoes. Adi named his company Addas, and Rudi named his Ruda. According to the authors of Swoosh, an advertising company suggested Rudi substitute a P and an M to make Puma, imaging a sleek running cat and a paw in motion. Addas eventually became Adidas, pronounced with an emphasis on the final syllable and not on the second, as is the common pronunciation in America.

As the two companies grew over the years, they also influenced a divided Herzogenaurach. For years, a sign in the middle of town had an arrow pointing to Adidas and one pointing to Puma. You would play on one of two soccer teams, drink at a specific pub, have children attend a certain elementary school, depending on the shoe factory you worked at.

Adi invented the first shoes designed for ice, the first shoes with four spikes, and the first track shoes with replaceable spikes. Adidas was also the first company to develop sports bags and set the style for athletic clothing. But Adi’s biggest breath through was the replaceable cleat. The cleats made their debut on soccer boots at the World Soccer Championships in Bern, Switzerland in 1954. The shoes were a vital part of the West German victory over the favored Hungarians, with longer spikes screwed into the shoes at halftime to better tread the rain and muddy fields, but also a symbol of hope for West German pride that had been destroyed by the war.

Although Rudi was considered to be stronger in promotions and sales, it was Adi who established the tradition of using the world championships and the Olympic Games as platforms to sell athletic shoes. In 1956, Adidas started another long tradition of naming a shoe model after the Olympics itself.

Adi sent his only son, Horst, only 20 years old, to the Melbourne Olympics in an innovative marketing campaign that would change the game in sports promotions for decades to come. The goal was to make sure that the world’s best athletes wore the new spike. Horst succeeded simply by giving the shoes away. Another major reason for success was Adidas’ solid relationships that were built with government sports officials all over the world, and signing contracts with national sports federations on both sides of the Iron Curtain.

Contracts with Communist countries would ensure that the whole Olympic team would wear Adidas. Adidas began to advertise itself as “the sports shoe of the world’s best,” and to spite Puma, it added that Adidas was “the only genuine German shoe of the world champions.”

Puma struck back in Rome in 1960, when Rudi paid one of Adi’s best athletes to wear Puma. Athletes began to not be satisfied with wearing a companies shoe for free.

It has also been said that track and field athletes had been paid under the table since the early 1900′s. The Dassler brothers used such methods as a way of winning the Sneaker War between each other and yet changed the way the business of sports was done.

For an additional reference on this story, a new book has been written, entitled Sneaker Wars.