“The dirty bastards are back again”, The rise of Adidas & Puma.

 

This sounds like an age-old black and white movie story but the climax resulted in birth of two giants in sports shoe industry Adidas and Puma. Today's world is full of brands that touch our life style at every thought of our needs and especially few brands that we admire has an interesting story attached to their name. One such fascinating story is of how sporting apparel cash cows, Adidas and Puma made their way into our lives.

The Dassler Brothers Shoe Factory.

The movie screen moves back to the year 1924, Herzogenaurach a small town in Germany, where Christoph von Wilhelm Dassler was a daily labour in a shoe factory and his wife ran a laundry in a small room. Their kids, Rudolf Dassler and Adolf Dassler(Adi) were attracted towards shoe making and began preparing variety of sports shoes in their mothers kitchen and named it “Gebrüder Dassler Schuhfabrik” (Dassler Brothers Shoe Factory). The shoes gained popularity in 1936 summer Olympics, as Adi Dassler persuaded US sprinter Jesse Owens to use his company shoes. Jesse Owens agreed and went on to win four gold medals in that event. Adi Dassler used to take a suitcase full of spikes and promote it at different sporting events and hence shoes produced at  Dassler Brothers Shoe Factory, rallied to fame by the early 1940s.

Adidas & Puma Brand history  (The dirty bastards are back again).

The Dassler Brothers Shoe Factory was doing fast & fine, then came the turnaround, World War II raised the curtains between the two brothers Adi and Rudi. After a allied bombing attack on the city, Adi Dassler and his wife rescued into a bomb shelter already occupied by Rudi and his wife. “The dirty bastards are back again”, said Adi Dassler, referring to the planes at the war place, but Rudi Dassler firmly believed that his brother was targeting his family with such words. Their sprouted fierce rivalry between the siblings. Adi Dassller renamed the company to Adidas  (using first three letter of his first and last name ), Rudolf imitated the same trick to start RUDA (first two letters of his first and last name), RUDA later rebranded as PUMA. Interestingly Adidas And Puma are on the either side of the river Moselle. The riff out of miscommunication between the Dassler brothers led to the birth of two giants corporations. 

The rivalry continued between Adidas & Puma till the brothers life, In the year 2009 the companies came forward to play a friendly soccer match which formally called off the red blood between the companies. By 2010 Adidas reported € 11.99 billion in revenues & Puma with € 2.706 billion .So, Isn't interesting ?