Who Founded Adidas AG?

The split happened over a bomb shelter. Or maybe it was about a woman. Or wartime denunciations to the Gestapo. Nobody knows exactly what destroyed the relationship between Adolf and Rudolf Dassler — the brothers themselves gave contradictory accounts until they died — but by 1948, two men who'd built a thriving shoe business together couldn't stand to be in the same room. When they divided the Dassler Brothers Shoe Factory, they didn't just split a company. They split a town. Herzogenaurach, population 18,000, became two armed camps: adidas people on one side of the Aurach River, Puma people on the other. Butchers, bakers, and barbers chose sides. It sounds absurd. It lasted decades.

But rewind. Before the feud became the story, there was just a kid obsessed with making better shoes. Adolf Dassler — Adi to everyone who knew him — was born in 1900 into a family of craftsmen in a Bavarian town that made its living from textiles and small manufacturing. After World War I, he started cobbling sports shoes in his mother's laundry room. Not fashion shoes. Not lifestyle products. Shoes for sprinters, shoes for footballers, shoes for athletes who needed specific things from their footwear that off-the-shelf leather boots couldn't provide. He'd watch runners at the local track, study how their feet struck the ground, then go home and modify the sole. This was the 1920s. Nobody else was doing this.

Rudolf, the older brother, brought the commercial instinct. He could sell. He could charm retailers and negotiate with distributors. Together they built the Dassler Brothers Shoe Factory into something remarkable: a small-town workshop whose products ended up on Olympic athletes. Jesse Owens wore Dassler spikes at the 1936 Berlin Olympics — a Black American athlete in Nazi Germany, wearing shoes made by two Germans who may or may not have been party members. The politics were complicated. The shoes were excellent.

World War II broke everything. Both brothers served. Both were investigated by Allied forces afterward. Somewhere in the chaos of war, occupation, and mutual suspicion, the personal relationship disintegrated beyond repair. Rudolf believed Adolf had denounced him to the Americans. Adolf believed Rudolf had tried to get him drafted into combat. The truth probably involves both men behaving badly under pressure. By 1948, they couldn't coexist.

On August 18, 1949, Adolf registered adidas — a portmanteau of his nickname and surname — with 47 employees. Rudolf took his half of the workforce across the river and founded Puma. The rivalry was immediate, personal, and vicious. Both companies recruited athletes aggressively, sometimes paying them under the table. Both competed for the same retailers. Both defined themselves partly in opposition to the other.