You’ve seen the trefoil. You’ve definitely seen the three stripes on the side of a pair of Sambas or Stan Smiths. But if you think the story of who started the company adidas is just some boring corporate timeline about a guy who liked track and field, you’re in for a weird ride. It’s actually a story about a massive family meltdown. It involves a literal war, a town split down the middle by a river, and two brothers who ended up hating each other so much they couldn't even be buried in the same part of the cemetery.
Adolf "Adi" Dassler is the name you’re looking for. He’s the guy who officially registered "Adi-das" in 1949. But honestly, you can't talk about Adi without talking about his older brother, Rudolf. They started out together, and if they hadn't spent years trying to ruin each other, the sneaker world as we know it would look completely different.
The Wash Kitchen Where It All Began
Herzogenaurach. It’s a mouthful of a name for a tiny Bavarian town in Germany. This is where the magic—and the drama—happened. Back in the early 1920s, after the first World War had left the German economy in a total tailspin, Adi Dassler started making shoes in his mother’s laundry room. He was a tinkerer. He was obsessed. While other people were just trying to put leather on feet, Adi was thinking about how to make an athlete run faster.
He convinced his brother Rudolf to join him in 1924, and they formed the Gebrüder Dassler Schuhfabrik (Dassler Brothers Shoe Factory). They were a perfect, if volatile, match. Adi was the quiet introvert who lived for the craft. Rudolf was the loud, brash salesman who could sell ice to an Eskimo. They were operating out of a space with no reliable electricity, sometimes having to pedal a stationary bicycle just to power their machines.
It worked. People liked the shoes. But the big break—the moment that put them on the global map—came during the 1936 Berlin Olympics.
The Jesse Owens Gamble
This is the part of the story that most people get wrong or gloss over. In 1936, Germany was under the thumb of the Nazi regime. The Olympics were supposed to be a showcase for "Aryan superiority." Adi Dassler didn't care about the politics; he cared about the feet. He drove to the Olympic village with a suitcase full of spiked cleats and convinced American track star Jesse Owens to wear them.
Owens won four gold medals.
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Suddenly, the Dassler brothers weren't just two guys in a laundry room. They were the guys who made the shoes for the fastest man on earth. Orders flooded in from all over the world. They were rich. They were successful. And they were about to absolutely implode.
Why the Brothers Split (And Never Spoke Again)
Nobody knows the exact moment the relationship died. It was probably a slow burn of resentment that finally caught fire during World War II. There’s a famous story—maybe a bit of local legend, but widely cited by historians like Barbara Smit—that during an Allied bomb raid, Adi and his wife climbed into a bomb shelter where Rudolf and his family were already sitting.
Adi supposedly muttered, "The dirty bastards are back again," referring to the Allied planes. Rudolf, being paranoid and already annoyed with his brother, thought Adi was talking about him and his family.
It sounds petty because it was.
After the war, things got worse. When the Allies were "denazifying" the region, the brothers traded accusations about who was more involved with the Nazi party. Rudolf was convinced Adi had snitched on him to get him sent to a prisoner-of-war camp. Whether it was true or not didn't matter. The trust was gone. In 1948, they split the company assets down the middle.
Adi took his nickname "Adi" and the first three letters of his last name "Das" to create adidas.
Rudolf tried to call his new company "Ruda" but eventually settled on "Puma."
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They built their factories on opposite sides of the Aurach River. The town became known as "the town of bent necks" because people would look at your shoes first to see which brother you supported before they decided whether or not to talk to you.
How Adi Dassler Revolutionized the Game
Adi wasn't just a founder; he was an inventor. He was the first person to really understand that a soccer player needs a different shoe than a long jumper. Most of his early patents were for things we take for granted now.
- Screw-in Studs: This is arguably the most important thing who started the company adidas ever did. In the 1954 World Cup, the German national team was playing the "Magical Magyars" of Hungary. It was pouring rain. The field was a mud pit. Adi’s team had shoes with removable, longer studs that they could swap out based on the weather. Germany won, a feat known as the "Miracle of Bern." It made adidas the undisputed king of soccer.
- The Three Stripes: Ever wonder why there are three? It wasn't for "branding" in the modern sense. Adi originally used the leather strips on the sides of the shoes to provide structural support and hold the shoe together. He realized they looked cool and distinctive from a distance. He actually bought the rights to the "three-stripe" logo from a Finnish brand called Karhu for the equivalent of 1,600 Euros and two bottles of whiskey. Seriously.
- Materials: He was one of the first to move away from heavy, water-clogging leather toward lighter synthetics and kangaroo skin.
Adi was a bit of a workaholic. He’d often show up at major sporting events with a toolkit, ready to fix an athlete’s shoes on the spot. He treated his athletes like test subjects. He wanted feedback. If a runner said their pinky toe felt a pinch after mile ten, Adi would go back to the factory and redesign the whole toe box.
The Brand After Adi
Adi Dassler died in 1978. His son Horst took over, and Horst was a different beast entirely. While Adi was about the craft, Horst was about the business and the politics of sports. He's often credited (or blamed) for inventing modern sports marketing. He realized that if you control the governing bodies of sports—like FIFA or the IOC—you control the world.
But by the 1980s, the company was struggling. They had missed the jogging craze in America. A small company from Oregon called Nike (started by Phil Knight and Bill Bowerman) was eating their lunch. The Dassler family eventually lost control of the company in the early 90s after a series of bad management decisions and the death of Horst.
It was Bernard Tapie, a French businessman, who bought it, followed by Robert Louis-Dreyfus. These guys turned adidas from a struggling "dad shoe" brand into a global lifestyle powerhouse. They leaned into the heritage. They brought back the old-school logos (the Trefoil) for the "Originals" line and started collaborating with people outside of sports.
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The Run-D.M.C. Factor
If you want to know how adidas stayed relevant, you have to look at 1986. A rap group from Queens, New York, released a song called "My Adidas." It wasn't a paid sponsorship. They just liked the shoes.
At a concert in Madison Square Garden, the band told everyone in the crowd to hold up their sneakers. Thousands of people held up their Superstars. Adidas executives were in the crowd, and they realized they were sitting on a gold mine. It was the first time a sports brand signed a multi-million dollar deal with non-athletes. This paved the way for everything from the Yeezy era (before that went south) to the current collaborations with Prada and Bad Bunny.
Misconceptions You Should Probably Ignore
You’ll hear people say "Adidas" stands for "All Day I Dream About Sport."
That is 100% fake. It’s a "backronym" created long after the company was famous. As we established, it’s just Adi + Das.
Another one is that Adi and Rudolf made up before they died. They didn't. There are reports they had a secret meeting at a hotel in the 70s, but officially, they remained rivals until the end. Even the town of Herzogenaurach didn't "heal" until a symbolic soccer match between employees of both companies in 2009.
Actionable Takeaways from the Adidas Story
So, what can we actually learn from the guy who started the company adidas? It’s not just trivia.
- Solve a specific problem. Adi didn't just want to "make shoes." He wanted to help runners run faster. If your product doesn't have a functional "why," it won't last.
- Adapt or die. Adidas almost went bankrupt because they ignored the "lifestyle" and "jogging" trends of the 70s and 80s. You can have the best tech in the world, but if you don't keep an eye on culture, you're toast.
- The power of a "Face." Whether it was Jesse Owens in 1936 or Lionel Messi today, adidas has always understood that people don't buy shoes; they buy the achievements of the people wearing them.
- Protect your IP. Buying those three stripes for two bottles of whiskey was the best investment in corporate history.
If you're interested in digging deeper into the specific mechanics of their early shoe designs, look up the "Adidas Archive" books. They show the actual prototypes Adi worked on. It's a masterclass in iterative design. You can also visit the "Adi-Dassler-Stadium" in Herzogenaurach if you're ever in Germany; the town still breathes this history.
Basically, the next time you lace up, remember you're wearing the result of a massive family grudge. It just happens to be a very comfortable grudge.