The Dassler Bross: The Family Feud That Created Adidas and Puma

Sure! Here’s a sanitized version of the transcript, with corrections for clarity and readability:

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Hello and welcome to another episode of Biographics. I’m your interim host, K. Smallwood, and today we’re talking about the Dassler brothers, the family feud that created two sportswear empires. This video is based on an original article by Ben Adelman. If they provided social links for us, they will be linked below. But let’s get to it!

You can choose your friends, but you can’t choose your family. Anyone who’s ever had a difficult relationship with a sibling can attest to the truth of that statement. Even the closest of brothers have moments that make them wish they had been born an only child. After all, as someone with two brothers and a sister, I get it.

The Dassler brothers were not the closest of siblings; they hated each other so much that they refused to speak to each other. What makes the feud between the Dassler brothers so unique is that it spilled over from their personal lives into their professional ones. They split the family shoe-making business into two separate companies that would come to dominate the athletic wear business in a way no one ever had before. The success of their respective companies can at least in part be credited to the rivalry between the two brothers, as they pushed their employees to outdo each other. A worldwide audience watched the feud split apart not just the Dassler family but their entire hometown, as well as every other family who was forced to pick a side.

The two companies are still household names today, each earning billions annually in sales, still competing against one another for their own market share, forever linked together by the personal rivalry of their founders—two men, two brothers, who, though they were unable to resolve their family issues, surely wished they could have.

I’m just going to apologize now for my pronunciation of any German words or names. I’m hoping I’ve got the Dassler one correctly, but this next one is a doozy. Herzogenaurach was typical of a small Bavarian town in the early 20th century—a place with a very long but altogether rather uninteresting history, the perfect place where a German man of modest means could raise a family. At least that’s what Christoph Dassler must have thought. He was a shoemaker, a respectable profession in a town known for its many cobblers and small to medium-sized shoe factories. Christoph and his wife, Pauline, would raise their four children in Herzogenaurach, including Rudolf, born in 1898, and Adolf, born in 1900.

Rudolf, known as Rudy, initially worked side by side with his father at the shoe factory until the start of World War I, when he joined the army and served for the duration. Adolf, known as Adi, was too young to join the military at the start of the war and was instead an apprentice to a baker before being conscripted in 1918. When the Dassler brothers returned home, they found their country had been devastated by the war, both economically and physically.

While Rudy trained as a policeman, Adi, an avid athlete, had an idea for a business that would combine his love of sports with his family’s knowledge of shoemaking. At the time, most athletes wore ordinary shoes while competing, sometimes making modifications such as hammering in nails called spikes into the soles to increase traction on grass or dirt surfaces. Adi believed that if he could develop footwear specifically designed for athletic competition, it would enhance the performance of the athletes who wore them—a radical idea at the time.

When Adi Dassler first began making shoes in 1920, Germany was still experiencing shortages of nearly every kind of raw manufacturing material available, as well as money to purchase it. So, Adi scavenged discarded military equipment and repurposed it to make what he would later call “sport shoes.” Without electricity, Adi designed a leather milling machine powered by a stationary bicycle, which various family members and Dassler’s first employees manned to make the first completed products.

Adi sent samples of his shoes to sports teams, often demonstrating their effectiveness by testing them himself. As business began to pick up steam, Adi brought his older brother into it, and together they established the “Dassler Brothers Shoe Factory” in 1924. Initially, it was a perfect partnership. Rudy was the outgoing face of the business, handling sales and marketing, while Adi was the quiet behind-the-scenes presence who managed the technical design and manufacturing process. The Dasslers became pioneers in a new discipline: sports marketing.

Adi would travel to the 1928 and 1932 Summer Olympics, offering his shoes for free to interested athletes, particularly those participating in track and field events. When those athletes won medals while wearing Dassler shoes, setting world and Olympic records in the process, it demonstrated the effectiveness of their product to the world, which in turn led to more sales.

Had world events turned out differently, it’s possible the partnership would have lasted for life, but it was not meant to be. In 1933, Hitler and the Nazi Party took power in Germany, which changed the country and eventually the world forever. Both Dassler brothers joined the Nazi Party after the regime change; both would later claim after the war, for obvious reasons, that they had felt pressured to join because it seemed like the only way to stay in business in the fascist country. Of the two, Rudy was said to be the more enthusiastic, while Adi apparently confined himself to sports-related activities like coaching Hitler’s youth-sponsored sports teams. Adi at least didn’t appear to be much of a believer in the National Socialist ideology, best demonstrated during the 1936 Olympics held in Berlin.

Before the games opened, Adi traveled to the Olympic Village and sought out star American athlete Jesse Owens, offering up his newly designed track shoe for Owens to wear. Owens would go on to dominate the games, winning four gold medals and undermining Hitler’s ideology of a superior Aryan race in front of the entire world. This is believed to be the first sponsorship of any kind offered to an African-American athlete.

By the time World War II began in 1939, the Dasslers were selling a reported 200,000 pairs of shoes per year. The war threatened everything they had built up to this point. Not only would the brothers be conscripted into the army, but civilian manufacturing of all kinds was severely curtailed and then shuttered completely by the Nazi war machine, as the entire country was transformed into a total war economy. Instead of making shoes, the Dassler factory was assigned to assemble the Panzerfaust, a German copy of the American bazooka anti-tank weapon.

The war also poisoned the two brothers against one another. Tensions between Adi and Rudy had existed since the mid-1930s, which Rudy blamed on Adi’s wife, Käthe, who had her own chilly relationship with Fridel, Rudy’s wife. Adi blamed Rudy’s insistence that he could run the family business better than Adi could. No one is really quite sure about the origins of this brotherly dispute—whether it was business or personal or a mix of both—but the grim wartime conditions certainly made things worse.

At the time, both brothers, their wives, and their children all still lived together at a family home with their parents, which put strain on family relations at the best of times. Wartime rationing, the threat of Allied bombing, and the threat and loss of their business pushed both Dasslers to the breaking point. Eventually, things reached a point of no return, and Adi and Rudy became bitter enemies instead of partners. Both suspected the other of using their influence to have the other drafted, allowing them to take over the factory. Correspondence between the pair became increasingly acrimonious, and at the end of the war, rather than an opportunity to make amends, it only intensified the bitter dispute.

As members of the Nazi Party, both Dasslers were required by the occupying Americans to go before a denazification panel to determine if they committed any crimes or if they actively participated in any of the many atrocities committed by the Nazis while they were in power. During the course of these hearings, both Rudy and Adi accused each other of being more deeply involved in the Nazi war machine than they had admitted. Adi accused Rudy of being a member of the Gestapo, and Rudy accused Adi in turn of being a war profiteer. Each presumably hoped that the Americans would imprison the other, allowing them to take control of the business for themselves.

Eventually, the authorities released both brothers without charging them, but by then the damage was done. In 1948, the Dassler brothers decided to go their separate ways. The company’s assets were split evenly between them, and the firm’s employees were allowed to decide for themselves which brother they wanted to work for—like the children of a divorced couple deciding which one they wanted to live with. Once their partnership was formally dissolved, Rudy and Adi Dassler never spoke to each other ever again, despite living for many years in the same town, only a few miles from one another.

In the wake of the split, each brother found his own shoe company. Adi Dassler took his nickname, Adi, and combined it with the first three letters of his last name to call his company Adidas. This is why I have to address any Americans who confuse my pronunciation: the company has released an official pronunciation guide for Adidas, and it is pronounced “Ah-dee-das,” not “A-didas,” as some Americans think. Rudy initially tried doing the same thing, naming his company Ruda, but the name didn’t stick and was changed soon after to Puma, the Incan word for the American big cat species sometimes known as a cougar or mountain lion.

Initially, both companies faced the same issue they had faced in the aftermath of the First World War: a ruined German economy and shortages of everything, including manufacturing materials. This time, however, they were helped by the American government, which was interested in rebuilding the economy of Western Europe and provided both cash and raw materials as part of legislation like the Marshall Plan. Adidas, in particular, benefited greatly from close cooperation with the Americans. Local officers in charge of the occupation knew Adi personally because the Dassler home had been requisitioned for use as their quarters. Supposedly, the only reason the Americans hadn’t blown up the Dassler factory when they first occupied the town was because they recognized the name Dassler as providing shoes to Jesse Owens during the Olympics. Their factory was literally saved by a shoe.

Adidas and Puma set up shop on opposite sides of the town, and what had to this point been a personal feud now became a full-blown business rivalry as both companies sought to outdo one another. Both companies developed distinctive styles; Adidas’s three stripes not only became their signature look but also the company’s logo, while Puma, in addition to the leaping cat logo, developed the formstrip, which initially was just a piece of leather reinforcement added to their shoes that later became a distinctive style in itself.

Personally, I’m an Adidas guy; your boy is rocking his Adidas gear—these are my gym clothes. The feud between the Dasslers not only divided the entire Dassler family— their mother Pauline sided with Rudy, while their sister Marie sided with Adi—but also the entire town. The two shoe companies quickly became the largest employers in the area, and almost every family in town had a member working for one or the other, but rarely both. Adidas people and Puma people did not associate with one another; they patronized separate businesses, were members of different clubs, and they never intermarried. Even the town’s two football clubs were split along these lines, with one sponsored by Adidas and the other by Puma. The rest of West Germany eventually took to calling the town “the town of bent necks” because the first thing residents did upon meeting someone new was look down to check which shoes they were wearing.

During this time, the war between Adidas and Puma spilled over onto the world stage. Beginning in the 1950s, both Dassler brothers recognized the effectiveness of sponsoring top athletes in regards to the increased sales that would result from the public. The two most popular and widely viewed sporting events in the world, the FIFA World Cup and the Olympics, became their biggest battlegrounds. Initially, the West German national football team had been sponsored by Puma but switched brands to Adidas after a falling out between Rudy Dassler and German coach Sepp Herberger during the 1954 World Cup, the first to be televised. Adi Dassler became a national hero after the West Germans triumphed over the heavily favored Hungary in the final. All the Germans were wearing football boots that had been custom-designed by Dassler himself to have detachable cleats that could be adjusted by hand, which gave the Germans a distinct advantage during the muddy conditions on the field that day. The modern football boot had been born.

The Olympics proved to be a trickier beast to tame. In those days, the Olympics were a strictly amateur event; professional athletes were barred from participating. Even accepting something as simple as a pair of free running shoes in theory could lead to an athlete being disqualified by the International Olympic Committee (IOC). As a result, both Adidas and Puma had to resort to, shall we say, clandestine methods to get their shoes onto the feet of various athletes. Occasionally, this did backfire, as was the case of Armin Hary, a German track athlete who Puma reportedly paid under the table to wear their shoes in the 1960 Olympics after initially seeking payment from Adidas, which was refused. After winning the gold medal in the 100-meter dash while wearing Puma’s, it was a shock to both companies when Hary appeared on the medal stand wearing Adidas shoes instead. Hary had hoped to take advantage of the rivalry between the two companies to collect money from them both, but it had the exact opposite effect; neither company wanted anything to do with him anymore, and he got nothing from either.

The rivalry ended up being a boon to the sporting world, as the two companies spurred countless innovations in the field of sportswear. Each Dassler brother saw a performance edge by developing increasingly sophisticated footwear for athletes. On a positive note, the rivalry between the two companies did end up spurring countless innovations in the field of sportswear, as each Dassler brother sought a performance edge by developing increasingly sophisticated footwear for athletes. They sponsored Adidas and Puma, branching out into more and more sports, developing specially made shoes for baseball, basketball, gridiron football, golf, and more. Both companies also expanded their products to lines outside of shoes and other sportswear, including swimwear, t-shirts, athletic shorts, jerseys, underwear, etc.

Their most lucrative expansion by far was into the world of non-athletic specific sportswear, as sneakers became the world’s most popular shoe starting in the 1960s. As Adi and Rudy Dassler grew older, their sons began to assume larger and more prominent roles in their respective businesses. The introduction of Horst Dassler at Adidas and Armin Dassler at Puma might have provided an opportunity to thaw the longstanding feud that had divided the family and the town, but both of them had their own ideas of how to expand their respective businesses, which would bring them into conflict and bring the feud to an entirely new generation.

In the run-up to the 1970 World Cup in Mexico, all eyes were on the Brazilian team and indeed their star player Pelé, who was the world’s most famous athlete at the time. Years earlier, Adidas and Puma had concluded an informal gentleman’s agreement with each other that neither company would attempt to sign Pelé to a sponsorship contract. The so-called Pelé Pact was a recognition by both companies that starting a bidding war over the world’s best footballer would be costly and possibly disastrous for either of them. But before the World Cup, Armin Dassler decided to break it, instigating one of sports’ most famous publicity stunts in the process.

Behind closed doors, Puma had signed Pelé for a huge, at-the-time $125,000 sponsorship deal to wear Puma’s at the World Cup and all competitions going forward. In order to get their money’s worth, Puma asked Pelé to do something all of us do every day without thinking: tie his shoes. And that is exactly what Pelé did just before the start of the quarterfinal match between Brazil and Peru. Pelé asked the referee to hold off on blowing the whistle so he could bend down to retie his shoes right there in the middle of the field, allowing TV cameras broadcasting to the entire world to zoom in and get a close-up look at one of the greatest players in the world lacing up his brand-new Puma cleats. The ingenious stunt worked out for Puma, as it brought increased recognition and sales to what had been, at that point, a fairly small niche brand. But it also outraged Horst Dassler and Adidas, who felt they had been played for fools. The war was back on in earnest.

The next year, when boxers Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier squared off in the so-called “Fight of the Century,” viewed by more than 300 million people worldwide, Horst made sure that Adidas was prominently featured, signing an endorsement deal with both fighters to supply them both with footwear during the match. Horst had his own approach to sports marketing that went beyond just signing individual athletes and teams; he envisioned corporate sponsorship of entire sports federations like FIFA and the IOC, which would expand the reach of his and his other brands beyond the fans of a particular player or team to fans of an entire sport. Horst ended up starting his own sports marketing company and established close ties with the presence of both FIFA and the IOC, securing them lucrative sponsorship deals with huge corporations like Coca-Cola and McDonald’s. This made lots of money for the sports federations but also worked well for Adidas too. Every World Cup since 1970 has been supplied with match balls designed by the three stripes.

The efforts to commercialize the Olympics, meanwhile, finally brought to an end the so-called amateur era at the end of the 1980s, opening the door to professional athletes and huge lucrative sponsorship opportunities. Adi and Rudy Dassler were bitter foes until the end of their lives, never reconciling. You could even argue the feud went beyond the grave, as while both of them were buried in the same cemetery in their hometown, when they died—Rudy in 1974 and Adi in 1978—they made sure to secure burial plots on opposite sides of the cemetery, as far away from one another as it was physically possible to be buried.

The war between Adidas and Puma continued after the deaths of the original brothers, however, as Horst and Armin duked it out with each other in the 1970s. The rise of new popular sports like jogging and tennis spurred massive growth in sportswear sales, leading to huge bounds for both companies, who continued to focus not only on growing their own brand but on defeating their hated eternal rivals. In the 1980s, the Adidas-Puma rivalry was on the verge of destroying both companies. You see, they had been so focused on each other that they failed to recognize the very serious and potent threat posed by the rise of American companies like Nike and Reebok.

These two companies were especially popular in the United States, which just happened to be the largest sportswear market on planet