shoe brands in the world are Adidas and Puma. You may know that Adidas is named after Adolf Dassler, and you also may have heard that his brother Rudolph established Puma. But what I’m betting you probably didn’t know is that they formed those firms as part of a vicious and violent sibling rivalry.
dassler
Adolf Dassler and Rudolph Dassler, nicknamed Adi and Rudi to their friends, started the Dassler Brothers Sports Shoe Company in the 1920s. The firm would become the predecessor of not one, but two of the most significant shoe corporations in the world in Adidas and Puma. In fact, when Jesse Owens won the gold medal in the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, he was wearing a pair of their shoes.
But things were far from cheerful between the two brothers, beginning right around the time their firm began to blow up and both brothers joined the Nazi party just in time for World War II. What began out as a sibling rivalry grew into a nasty family dispute that led to paranoia, plotting, and even the potential of murder plots. Wait, murder plots?
Well, it’s not quite that straightforward. Still, the relationship between the brothers had already started to crumble before the war, to the point where when Rudi was called into service and sent to the front lines, he was utterly convinced that it was Adi and his wife who had pulled strings to get him there so that he would be killed, and they could have the business to themselves. It didn’t help that Rudi was seized as a prisoner of war and Adi believed it was an ideal moment to start rebuilding the firm.
Oh, and there’s also the fact that when Rudi fled his station and subsequently worked with the Gestapo, it was Adi who gave the intelligence that led to his arrest and incarceration. Something like that will undoubtedly strike a split between a few of brothers.
So with Rudi a POW, Adi developed his own brand called Adidas – taking his first and last name and fusing them together – and after the war ended and Rudi managed to live, he founded his own firm, Puma. The dispute between the brothers stretched to their whole company, and it continued until 2009, when it eventually came to an end due to a friendly soccer match with one team donning Adidas clothing and the other flaunting Puma.
The competition was so fierce that it really spilled throughout their hometown in Germany, too, creating an environment somewhat resembling the divided American South, with companies that backed Adi rejecting service to anybody who favoured Puma, and vice versa.