Part IThe Story
A Football Match on the Aurach
On September 21, 2009, employees of two rival sportswear companies walked onto a football pitch in Herzogenaurach, a small Franconian town north-west of Nuremberg. The teams were mixed, adidas and Puma staff playing side by side, and the chief executives of both firms, Herbert Hainer of adidas and Jochen Zeitz of Puma, took part. Even the ball carried both logos. The match was billed as a reconciliation, a gesture meant to close a family feud that had split the town for six decades.
The quarrel belonged to two brothers who had died more than thirty years earlier. Adolf "Adi" Dassler and his older brother Rudolf, known as Rudi, had built one of the most successful sports shoe businesses in Europe between the wars. In 1948 they broke it in two. Adi's half became adidas; Rudolf's became Puma. Their headquarters ended up on opposite sides of the little river Aurach, and for most of the twentieth century the town's workers, pubs, bakers, football clubs and families lined up behind one side or the other.
Both companies grew into global brands. In 2024 adidas reported revenue of about €23.7 billion and Puma about €8.8 billion. Neither is controlled by a Dassler any longer, but both still keep their headquarters in the town where the brothers began, a few kilometres apart. The story of how they got there is partly a story of product invention and marketing genius, and partly a warning about what happens when a family business cannot separate personal grievance from company decisions.
It is also a story with several contested chapters. The brothers left conflicting accounts, their heirs and companies each tell the history in their own way, and much of the detail of the rupture comes from interviews gathered long afterwards, above all by the journalist Barbara Smit in her book Sneaker Wars (published in Britain as Pitch Invasion). Where accounts differ, this profile says so.
By the Numbers
Two Brothers, Two Brands
1924Year Gebrüder Dassler Schuhfabrik was registered in Herzogenaurach
4Olympic gold medals Jesse Owens won in Berlin in 1936 wearing Dassler spikes
1,000Pairs of shoes a day made by 1938, according to Adi Dassler's foundation
1948Year the brothers split the company and founded rival firms
€23.7bnadidas revenue in 2024, against about €8.8bn for Puma
7–5Score of the 2009 peace match between adidas and Puma staff
The Washroom Workshop
Herzogenaurach at the turn of the twentieth century was a town of about 4,000 people with a long tradition of weaving and, later, of making shoes and slippers. Christoph Dassler worked in the shoe trade; his wife Pauline ran a small laundry from the family home. They had four children: Fritz, Marie, Rudolf, born on March 26, 1898, and Adolf, born on November 3, 1900.
The two younger brothers followed different paths at first. Rudolf trained as a shoemaker from 1911 to 1914 and then served on the Western Front in Flanders. Adi began an apprenticeship as a baker, a trade he never practised. He was called up in June 1918 and served until the autumn of 1919, too late to see much of the fighting.
When he came home, Germany was defeated, short of money and short of materials. Adi started making shoes anyway. From 1920 he worked in his mother's washroom, joined by a friend, Karl Zech, using leather and scraps from army surplus. There was no reliable electricity, so he improvised. One of the best-known details of the early business is a leather-milling machine connected by belts to a stationary bicycle, pedalled by the firm's first employee, Josef Erhardt. For his running spikes, Adi had the metal points forged by the smithy of the family of a friend, Fritz Zehlein.
What set Adi apart was an obsession with sport-specific design. Most shoes of the period were general-purpose. He wanted shoes built for a particular event, a particular surface and a particular movement, and he tested them on athletes he knew. He experimented with materials such as kangaroo leather for strength and lightness and shark skin for grip. Decades later his widow described that side of him to The New York Times.
— Käthe Dassler, The New York Times, 1981Developing shoes was his hobby, not his job. He did it very scientifically.
Rudolf, meanwhile, had trained with the police and then worked in the porcelain and leather trades in Nuremberg. On July 1, 1923, he joined his younger brother's workshop, and on July 1, 1924, the two registered the business as Gebrüder Dassler Schuhfabrik, the Dassler Brothers Shoe Factory. Puma's own history dates the brothers' shared enterprise to 1919 and the proper factory to 1924, a small example of how the two companies still tell the origin story slightly differently.
The Inventor and the Salesman
The division of labour settled quickly. Adi was the craftsman and designer, happiest at the workbench and on the training ground. Rudolf was the extrovert, the one who travelled, negotiated, sold and managed. Contemporary and later accounts agree on this broad picture, and it worked well for more than a decade. It is a common founder pairing, the technical specialist who builds and the commercial partner who opens doors, and the Dasslers are an early and vivid example of both its power and its risks.
The workforce grew steadily. The brothers started with around a dozen people making roughly 50 pairs a day. After moving in the late 1920s to a larger building near the town's railway station, they had about 25 workers producing around 100 pairs a day. In 1929 they signed a formal partnership agreement, and they began to register patents on their designs.
Recognition came through athletes. At the 1928 Olympics in Amsterdam, the German runner Lina Radke won the women's 800 metres wearing Dassler spikes. From around 1930 the brothers worked with Josef Waitzer, the coach of the German national athletics team, whose advice on what sprinters and jumpers needed helped Adi refine his designs. This became the pattern for the whole Dassler method: put the best shoe you can make on the best athlete you can reach, then listen to what the athlete and the coach tell you.
The brothers' private lives were tightly bound up with the firm. Rudolf married Friedl Strasser in May 1928; their sons Armin and Gerd were born in 1929 and 1939. In the early 1930s Adi studied at the footwear technical college in Pirmasens, where one of the instructors was a last-maker named Franz Martz. Adi became friendly with the family and, on March 17, 1934, married Martz's daughter Käthe, who was still in her teens. Their son Horst was born in 1936.
Both couples, the brothers' parents and eventually the children all lived in the same villa. Käthe, from a different region and with a stronger will than the Dassler household was used to, clashed with her in-laws and with Rudolf's family. Smit's account, based on interviews and family letters, portrays a house in which small domestic resentments steadily fed into the business. Years later, in a letter to Puma's American distributor, Rudolf blamed the rift largely on Käthe and described relations between the brothers as ideal until 1933, which is roughly when the tensions began to show.
Berlin, 1936
On May 1, 1933, both brothers joined the Nazi Party. Membership was widespread among German business owners at the time, and for a shoe company that depended on sports clubs, schools and youth organisations, it was a way to keep access to customers and supplies. It was also the start of a long argument about which brother had been the more committed Nazi, an argument that would matter enormously after the war.
The Dasslers' breakthrough came at the Berlin Olympics of 1936. The African American sprinter Jesse Owens won four gold medals, in the 100 metres, 200 metres, long jump and 4×100 metres relay, wearing Dassler spikes. The best-known version of the story has Adi travelling to the Olympic village to persuade Owens to try his shoes. Whatever the precise sequence, the association was invaluable. The most famous athlete of the Games, whose victories undercut the regime's racial propaganda, had won in shoes made in a Franconian workshop.
Orders rose from abroad as well as at home. In 1938 the brothers opened a second factory on Würzburger Strasse. According to the foundation that preserves Adi's legacy, the firm by then employed 118 people and was producing about 1,000 pairs a day. The Dassler shoes were becoming the equipment of choice for serious German athletes and for a growing number of foreign ones.
The business was thriving, but the partnership was fraying. The brothers disagreed about money, about management and about the roles of their wives. Käthe took an increasingly active part in the company, which Rudolf and Friedl resented. Adi, for his part, felt that his brother claimed too much credit and too much authority. None of this was unusual in a family firm, but none of it was being resolved either.
War Inside the House
The Second World War brought the tensions to the surface. Adi was drafted in 1940 as a radio operator but was released in February 1941 to run the factory, which was considered useful to the war economy. Rudolf was called up later, in March 1943, and served with customs border protection near the German-Polish border. He regarded his own conscription as a manoeuvre by his brother to get him out of the company, and the letters between them from this period became hostile.
The most famous single incident of the feud is said to have happened during an Allied air raid in 1943. Accounts vary in their details, but the standard version, repeated by The Guardian and others from Smit's research, has Adi and Käthe entering an air-raid shelter where Rudolf and his family were already sheltering. Adi made a disparaging remark, which he later said referred to the enemy bombers. Rudolf was convinced it was aimed at him and his family. Whether the story is true in every detail matters less than the fact that both sides came to treat it as proof of the other's hostility.
In late October 1943, under the armaments ministry's orders to shut down civilian production, the shoe factory closed. From November it made parts for weapons, including components for the Panzerschreck anti-tank launcher, under a subcontract with the arms firm Schricker & Co. Adi remained in Herzogenaurach running the plant.
As the war ended, Rudolf left his post. Early in 1945 he fled, was arrested by the Gestapo and was later released. When American forces arrived, the chaos of occupation offered new ways for the brothers to wound each other.
Tribunals and Accusations
In July 1945 the US Army's Counter Intelligence Corps arrested Rudolf. He was interned at a camp in Hammelburg from August 1945 until the end of July 1946, suspected of having worked for the SD, the SS security service. The suspicion was never proved. According to the investigators' records, as summarised by later historians, both Adi and Rudolf's own wife told the Americans that Rudolf had worked for the Gestapo. Rudolf became convinced that Adi had denounced him, and he never let go of that belief.
Adi faced his own reckoning. In July 1946 a denazification tribunal classified him as a "Belasteter," someone significantly incriminated, which threatened to remove him from the management of the firm. His appeal turned on whether he had been an active Nazi and whether the wartime weapons production had been his decision. Rudolf, newly released, submitted statements claiming that Adi had organised the weapons work himself and for his own profit. Others spoke up for Adi. Among them was Hans Wormser, the half-Jewish mayor of the nearby town of Weisendorf, who testified that Adi had sheltered him during the war.
On appeal Adi's classification was reduced, first to a "lesser offender" and later in 1946 to a "follower" (Mitläufer), a category that carried relatively minor penalties. He regained control of his property on February 3, 1947. Rudolf was also classified as a follower, in February 1947.
By now the brothers had each concluded that the other had tried to destroy him. Whatever the truth of the individual allegations, the cumulative effect of the shelter remark, the conscription, the internment and the tribunals was that they could no longer work together. Later rumours added a supposed affair between Rudolf and Käthe to the list of explanations. No evidence has been produced for these claims, and they are best treated as a sign of how poisonous the relationship had become.
Two Sides of the River
In 1948 the brothers dissolved the partnership. The division of assets was roughly as follows. Rudolf took the second factory, on Würzburger Strasse, along with about 15 employees. Adi kept the original factory near the station and the family villa, and around two-thirds of the staff chose to stay with him. Even the family divided: their mother went with Rudolf, while their sister Marie sided with Adi. The salesmen, who had mostly worked with Rudolf, largely followed him; the production workers largely stayed with Adi.
Rudolf registered his new business as RUDA, from the first letters of his first and last names, in early 1948. That autumn he adopted a more marketable name. The PUMA trademark was registered on October 1, 1948, and the company became Puma Schuhfabrik Rudolf Dassler, entered in the commercial register in January 1949. The brand's early logo was a leaping cat bounding through a letter D.
Adi's company followed. He tried "Addas," but the name was already in use, so he combined his nickname and the first syllable of his surname into "adidas." The Adolf Dassler adidas Schuhfabrik was registered on August 18, 1949, with 47 employees. Earlier that year he had registered the three stripes, originally a practical feature that strengthened the side of the shoe and kept it from stretching, as a trademark. Puma developed its own side stripe, the Formstrip, in 1958.
The brothers never reconciled in public. Their employees were expected to be loyal, and many did not socialise with the other side. Local lore holds that Herzogenaurach became known as the town of bent necks because people looked at each other's shoes before starting a conversation. Pubs, bakers, butchers and football clubs took sides, and so, some say, did churches and political parties.
— Klaus-Peter Gäbelein, The Guardian, 2009There was a time when you'd have risked the wrath of colleagues and family if, as an employee of one company, you married the employee of the other.
Gäbelein, of the town's heritage association, told The Guardian that Puma was seen as Catholic and conservative and adidas as Protestant and Social Democratic. Such labels were never official, and they are probably best understood as the kind of identity that rival groups build around themselves once a split has hardened.
Studs in Bern
Football became the brothers' most visible battleground. Puma moved first, with the Atom boot in 1950 and the Super Atom in 1952, which used screw-in studs and was developed with input from Sepp Herberger, coach of the West German national team. Both companies claim the screw-in stud as their own innovation, and the dispute has never been resolved.
Herberger, however, ended up with adidas. According to the German national biography's entry on Rudolf, the coach asked for a consulting fee of 1,000 marks a month, Rudolf refused, and Herberger went to Adi instead. It was a small commercial decision that turned out to have enormous consequences.
At the 1954 World Cup in Switzerland, West Germany was a heavy underdog against Hungary, the best team in the world, which had beaten them 8–3 in the group stage. The final in Bern on July 4 was played on a rain-soaked pitch. Adi was with the team as its equipment adviser, and he fitted the West German players' boots with longer screw-in studs suited to the mud. West Germany won 3–2, a victory that became known as the Miracle of Bern and took on a significance in post-war West Germany far beyond sport. The adidas boots were widely credited as part of the story. For a company only five years old, it was the ideal advertisement.
Puma had its own successes in the years that followed. The sprinter Heinz Fütterer set a world record for the 100 metres in Puma shoes in 1954, and Puma went on to equip stars such as Eusébio, Tommie Smith and Johan Cruyff. But the 1954 World Cup gave adidas a lead in football that it never entirely gave up.
The Sons' War
The rivalry soon passed to the next generation, and it became more commercial and more ruthless. Adi's son Horst and Rudolf's son Armin both grew up inside the feud and brought to it a sharper sense of marketing than their fathers had.
At the 1956 Olympics in Melbourne, Horst, then barely twenty, is said to have found ways to get adidas shoes to athletes while Puma's shipment was held up at customs. The details come from later accounts and are hard to verify, but the episode points to what Horst was becoming: an operator who understood that access to athletes was worth more than any advertisement.
Four years later, in Rome, the German sprinter Armin Hary won the Olympic 100 metres. According to Smit, Puma paid Hary to wear its spikes in the final after adidas had refused his request for money. He won in Puma shoes, then pulled on adidas shoes for the medal ceremony, apparently hoping to be paid by both. Adi was furious and, by Smit's account, refused to deal with him again. Smit described Rudolf's payment as opening a Pandora's box: the era of athletes being paid to wear a particular brand had begun.
Horst went on to run adidas's French operation from 1959, building it into a powerful and semi-independent business. He founded the swimwear brand Arena in 1973. More important in the long run, he saw that the real prize was not individual athletes but sports federations and the global events they controlled. He cultivated officials across international sport, and with the British marketer Patrick Nally he helped bring Coca-Cola into sponsorship of FIFA. In 1982 he founded ISL, a sports marketing agency based in Lucerne, in partnership with the Japanese advertising company Dentsu. ISL came to hold marketing rights for the World Cup and the Olympic Games before collapsing in 2001, years after Horst's death, amid bribery allegations that later became part of FIFA's corruption scandals.
On the other side, Armin led Puma's commercial fight. In 1970, before the World Cup in Mexico, he and Horst agreed on what became known as the Pelé Pact: neither company would sign Pelé, because a bidding war for the world's most famous footballer would be ruinously expensive. Puma broke the pact and signed him. At the 1970 World Cup, Pelé is reported to have asked the referee to wait while he tied his laces just before kick-off in Brazil's quarter-final against Peru, giving the cameras a close-up of his Puma boots. The deal outraged Horst and ended any further truce between the cousins.
By the 1974 World Cup, the rivalry had found another memorable form. Johan Cruyff, who had a personal contract with Puma, refused to wear the Netherlands' adidas shirt with three stripes and played in a version with only two.
Growth, and the Limits of the Feud
For all the drama, adidas grew into the larger business. The company introduced the Adilette sandal in 1963 and its first tracksuit in 1967. By the late 1960s it was operating sixteen factories and producing about 22,000 pairs a day, according to the foundation's history. At the 1972 Olympics in Munich, the foundation claims, the great majority of track and field medallists wore adidas shoes. In boxing, Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier both wore adidas boots for their 1971 fight at Madison Square Garden. The tennis shoe later named for Stan Smith became one of the best-selling shoes of all time.
Adi received West Germany's Federal Cross of Merit in 1968. Rudolf received the same honour and a Bavarian order. By any ordinary measure both men were very successful, and both companies expanded abroad. Puma set up subsidiaries in Austria in 1962 and then in France and other countries.
Yet the feud had costs. Energy that could have gone into new markets went into beating the brother across the river. In the 1970s, the running boom in the United States opened a huge new market, and the German companies, with their focus on elite competition and on each other, were slow to see what American runners wanted. Upstarts such as Nike, founded by Phil Knight and his coach Bill Bowerman, moved into the gap. The Dasslers had pioneered the idea of putting shoes on the best athletes; Nike took that idea and paired it with a mass-market brand and a lifestyle aimed at ordinary runners.
Rudolf died on October 27, 1974, at the age of 76. The Guardian reported that even as he lay dying, the brothers did not publicly reconcile. Helmut Fischer, Puma's in-house historian, told the paper in 2009 that people close to the families had spoken of a secret half-day meeting between the brothers in Nuremberg that year, kept from their wives and staff. There is no way to confirm it.
Adi died on September 6, 1978, at 77. Earlier that year he had become the first non-American inducted into the Hall of Fame of the US National Sporting Goods Industry. By his death, according to the foundation, adidas was operating 17 factories and generating annual sales of around one billion marks.
After the Founders
The feud did not end with the brothers, and neither company handled succession smoothly.
At Puma, Rudolf's decision about his successor produced a dispute between his sons, which was eventually settled with Armin taking the lead in 1975. Puma went public in 1986 and struggled through losses. In May 1989, Armin and Gerd sold their combined 72% stake to the Swiss firm Cosa Liebermann, ending family control. In 1993 Jochen Zeitz, then about thirty, became chief executive and led a long turnaround that repositioned the brand around sport-inspired fashion. In April 2007 the French group PPR, later renamed Kering, bought a 27% stake in a deal that valued Puma at €5.3 billion and went on to take majority control. Kering later distributed most of its shares to its own shareholders, leaving the Pinault family's holding company, Artémis, as the largest shareholder. In January 2026 the Chinese sportswear group Anta agreed to buy Artémis's 29.06% stake for about €1.5 billion, a deal that received Chinese regulatory approval in September 2026.
At adidas, Käthe and Horst took over the management after Adi's death. Käthe led the company until she died on December 31, 1984. Horst then took full charge, but he died in April 1987 at the age of 51. The family-controlled company, already losing ground to Nike and Reebok, was sold in 1990, when the French businessman Bernard Tapie bought a controlling 80% stake. Tapie's ownership ended in financial trouble. In 1993 a group led by Robert Louis-Dreyfus took over and turned the company round, and adidas listed on the stock exchange in 1995.
Both companies moved their manufacturing to Asia long ago. What remains in Herzogenaurach are headquarters, design centres, showrooms and thousands of office jobs held by employees from dozens of countries. The town's population had grown to about 23,000 by 2009, and it stays prosperous because of the two firms.
That changed the meaning of the old division. When the families left the companies, the rivalry lost much of its personal edge. What remained was a local identity and a friendly commercial competition, which suited both brands. By 2009 the town's mayor, German Hacker, could talk about the rift with something close to amusement.
— German Hacker, The Guardian, 2009This match was diplomatic down to the last blade of grass.
Hacker told The Guardian that the match would have been impossible thirty years earlier. The teams were ultimately drawn up as management against workers, and the bosses won 7–5.
What the Split Built
The Dassler story is often told as a cautionary tale about family feuds, and it is one. Two brothers who had built something remarkable could not overcome suspicion, resentment and a series of events that each read in the worst possible light. They spent the last decades of their lives a short drive apart without, as far as the public record shows, ever speaking again. They are buried in the same cemetery, at opposite ends.
But the split also created two companies, each with a founder determined to beat the other. The competition drove both to court athletes more aggressively, to innovate faster, and to build sports marketing into an industry. Paid endorsements, federation deals and event sponsorships all owe a great deal to the Dassler rivalry, and many business writers credit it with helping turn sports apparel into a global brand business. The same forces also shaped the darker side of that industry, from under-the-table payments to the ISL scandal.
The businesses the brothers founded are also a study in specialization. Adi's insistence on a separate shoe for each sport and condition, developed in constant dialogue with athletes and coaches, created a feedback loop between the track and the workbench that competitors took years to match. Rudolf's gift for selling put those shoes in front of customers who would otherwise never have heard of a small Bavarian town.
In the end, the separation was almost certainly more expensive for the family than for the town. The brothers lost each other, and their heirs lost control of both companies within a generation. Herzogenaurach, by contrast, got two global headquarters instead of one. As Gäbelein put it to The Guardian, without the row the town would not be home to two global players.
Part IIThe Playbook
The Dassler brothers left two very different kinds of lessons. The first concern product and marketing: how a small workshop, through relentless specialisation and close ties to athletes, created a new category and then a global industry. The second concern partnership and family: how a highly effective founding team broke apart, and what the split cost. The principles below draw on both.
The principles
- 1.Design for the specific use, not the average one.
- 2.Put your product on the best performers you can reach.
- 3.Treat coaches and experts as design partners.
- 4.Pair the builder with the seller, and write down the roles.
- 5.Keep household politics out of company governance.
- 6.Resolve grievances before they become identities.
- 7.A small saving can hand your rival the decisive advantage.
- 8.Compete with the rival without letting the rival set your agenda.
- 9.Assume every endorsement contract will be tested.
- 10.Plan succession while the founder is still in charge.
- 11.Protect the trademarks that carry your reputation.
Principle 1
Design for the specific use, not the average one.
Adi Dassler's central insight was that athletes needed equipment built for a particular event and surface. At a time when most shoes were general-purpose, he made separate designs for sprinters, jumpers, footballers and many others, experimenting with materials and stud and spike arrangements for each.
That specialisation gave the brothers a defensible position. A general shoemaker could not easily match a product that had been refined for years with a specific kind of athlete in mind. It also made the product's benefits visible: a sprinter could feel the difference in a spike built for the track.
Tactic: Identify the most demanding users of your product and design a version specifically for their conditions. Use what you learn there to improve the broader line.
Principle 2
Put your product on the best performers you can reach.
The Dasslers' reputation was built on athletes: Lina Radke in 1928, Jesse Owens in 1936, the West German football team in 1954. Each victory in Dassler shoes did more for the brand than conventional advertising could have done, because it showed the product working at the highest level.
The method is simple to describe and hard to execute. It requires relationships with athletes and coaches, a product good enough to earn their trust, and the willingness to invest before the results come in.
Tactic: Find the people whose success would demonstrate your product's value most convincingly, and invest in getting it into their hands early, before your competitors think to do so.
Principle 3
Treat coaches and experts as design partners.
Adi worked closely with Josef Waitzer, the German athletics coach, from around 1930, and with Sepp Herberger in football. These relationships gave him direct feedback on what athletes needed and how his shoes performed.
The collaboration went beyond endorsement. In Bern in 1954, Adi was on the sidelines adjusting the players' studs to the conditions. That kind of access turns an equipment maker into part of the team.
Tactic: Build long-term relationships with the experts who train or advise your most demanding users. Give them early access to prototypes and treat their criticism as design input.
Principle 4
Pair the builder with the seller, and write down the roles.
Adi's craftsmanship and Rudolf's salesmanship made the early company work. Each brother supplied what the other lacked, and the partnership drove the firm's growth through the 1920s and 1930s.
But the division of roles was never enough to prevent conflict over credit and authority. The 1929 partnership agreement set out ownership, but it did not stop each brother from believing that he was the real engine of the business. Complementary skills are valuable; they are also a common source of mutual resentment when each partner undervalues the other's contribution.
Tactic: When founding with a partner whose skills complement yours, agree explicitly on decision rights, credit and how disputes will be resolved, and revisit that agreement as the company grows.
Principle 5
Keep household politics out of company governance.
The Dasslers lived and worked together in the same villa, with their parents, wives and children. Domestic friction, particularly between Käthe and Rudolf's family, fed directly into business disputes.
When the people running a company also share a household, every family disagreement risks becoming a governance problem, and every business disagreement risks spilling into the family. The Dasslers had no mechanism for keeping the two apart.
Tactic: In a family business, create formal governance that separates family relationships from company decisions: clear roles, independent advisers and forums for raising concerns before they escalate.
Principle 6
Resolve grievances before they become identities.
The brothers accumulated grievances over years: disputes over money and management, the air-raid shelter remark, Rudolf's conscription, his internment and the denazification tribunals. Each episode was read in the worst possible light, and each confirmed what the brothers already believed about each other.
By 1948, the conflict had become part of who they were, and it spread to their employees and the town. Once a conflict becomes an identity, it is extremely hard to reverse.
Tactic: Address conflicts with partners early and directly, ideally with a neutral third party. Do not let an unresolved dispute become the lens through which every later event is interpreted.
Principle 7
A small saving can hand your rival the decisive advantage.
According to the German national biography, Rudolf declined to pay Sepp Herberger a monthly consulting fee of 1,000 marks. Herberger went to Adi, and the 1954 World Cup became one of the defining moments of adidas's history.
The fee was trivial compared with the value of the association. The lesson is that in a rivalry, a relationship you decline is often a relationship your competitor gains.
Tactic: When deciding whether to invest in a key relationship or partnership, ask not only what it costs you, but what it would be worth to your closest competitor.
Principle 8
Compete with the rival without letting the rival set your agenda.
The Dassler rivalry pushed both companies to innovate and to fight for athletes. But it also consumed attention. In the 1970s, as the American running boom created a mass market for athletic shoes, the German companies were slow to respond, and Nike moved into the space.
Intense competition with one rival can blind a company to changes in the wider market. The most dangerous competitor is often not the one you are watching.
Tactic: Regularly review your market for new customer segments and emerging competitors, deliberately looking beyond the rival you already know best.
Principle 9
Assume every endorsement contract will be tested.
Armin Hary took money from Puma and wore adidas on the podium. Puma broke the Pelé Pact within months. Cruyff played in a two-striped shirt rather than wear a rival's branding. In each case, a commercial agreement was tested by someone who saw an opportunity to gain from it.
As sports marketing grew into an industry, the value of exclusivity rose and so did the incentive to break it. Agreements that relied on goodwill rather than clear terms were vulnerable.
Tactic: When you sign endorsement or partnership deals, specify exclusivity, what counts as a breach and the consequences, and assume the other party and your competitors will look for loopholes.
Principle 10
Plan succession while the founder is still in charge.
Both companies struggled after the founders died. At Puma, Rudolf's sons fought over the succession; at adidas, Käthe and then Horst ran the company, but Horst's early death in 1987 left it without a clear leader. Within a few years, both families had lost control of the companies their fathers built.
Founders who are closely identified with their companies often avoid planning for their own departure. The result can be a crisis just when the company is most vulnerable.
Tactic: Put a succession plan in writing while the founder is healthy and active, and test it by giving potential successors real responsibility well before they need it.
Principle 11
Protect the trademarks that carry your reputation.
Adi registered the three stripes as a trademark in 1949, and Rudolf registered the Puma name and logo the year before. The stripes began as a functional element that stabilised the shoe, but they became one of the most recognisable brand marks in the world.
After the split, each brother needed to establish a separate identity quickly. Clear, protected marks allowed customers to tell the products apart and gave each company an asset whose value grew with every famous athlete who wore it.
Tactic: Register and defend the visual features that customers use to recognise your product, including functional elements that could become a signature.
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Part IIIMaxims
- Scarcity invites ingenuity. A bicycle-driven milling machine in a laundry room was the Dasslers' first production line.
- Credit is the first thing partners fight over. Each brother believed he was the real reason the company worked.
- Victory on the field is the best advertisement. Owens in Berlin and West Germany in Bern did more for the brand than any poster.
- Suspicion rewrites the past. Once the brothers distrusted each other, every earlier incident became evidence.
- Employees inherit their founders' quarrels. Workers in Herzogenaurach took sides in a dispute that was never theirs.
- Paying the athlete changes the game. Hary's double deal in Rome marked the start of paid endorsements at the Olympics.
- The stadium is only one market. The Dasslers dominated elite sport while ordinary runners became a bigger opportunity.
- Heirs rarely keep what founders build. Both families lost control of their companies within a generation of the founders' deaths.
- Towns can profit from a family's misfortune. The split gave Herzogenaurach two global headquarters instead of one.
In Their Own Words
The athlete must come first. Everything we do must be focused on helping athletes perform better.— Adi Dassler
I will never forgive what happened during the war. Some things cannot be forgotten.— Rudolf Dassler
The Dassler brothers didn't just compete with each other—they competed to redefine what a sports brand could be.— Industry Observer
It's the details that make the difference. A millimeter here, a gram there—these small things determine whether an athlete wins or loses.— Adi Dassler
We don't make shoes. We make tools that help athletes achieve their dreams.— Adi Dassler
Innovation without marketing is just expensive engineering. You must make people understand why your product is better.— Rudolf Dassler
Every athlete is different. Every sport is different. Every surface is different. Our shoes must reflect these differences.— Adi Dassler
Competition makes us stronger. Without my brother pushing me, I would never have achieved what I did.— Rudolf Dassler
In business, as in sports, second place is just the first loser. You must fight to win every day.— Rudolf Dassler
Quality is not negotiable. If we compromise on quality, we compromise everything we stand for.— Adi Dassler
The best marketing is a winning athlete wearing your shoes. Everything else is just noise.— Rudolf Dassler
Our real competition is not other shoe companies. Our competition is the athlete's limitations.— Adi Dassler
Athletes are not just customers—they are partners in our mission to push the boundaries of human performance.— Rudolf Dassler
When an athlete wins wearing our shoes, we all win. When they lose, we must ask ourselves what we could have done better.— Adi Dassler
Great athletes make great brands, but great brands also make great athletes. It's a partnership that benefits everyone.— Rudolf Dassler
I learn more from spending one hour with a top athlete than from reading a hundred technical reports.— Adi Dassler
Sports is the universal language. A football boot works the same way in Brazil as it does in Germany.— Rudolf Dassler
We are not just selling shoes. We are selling the possibility of greatness.— Adi Dassler
Brand loyalty is earned one athlete, one customer, one victory at a time.— Rudolf Dassler
The moment you stop innovating is the moment you start losing. In sports, standing still means going backward.— Adi Dassler
Our rivalry created something bigger than either of us could have built alone. Sometimes conflict drives progress.— Adi Dassler
Business is personal when it's your life's work. Every decision, every product, every victory or defeat—it all matters.— Rudolf Dassler
I hope our companies will outlive our conflicts. The athletes deserve better than our family disputes.— Adi Dassler
Success in business, like success in sports, requires sacrifice. Sometimes you sacrifice more than you intended.— Rudolf Dassler
A shoe is only as good as its weakest component. Every stitch, every eyelet, every piece of leather must be perfect.— Adi Dassler
The best craftsmen are those who understand not just how to make something, but why it needs to be made that way.— Adi Dassler
Technology should serve the athlete, not the other way around. If a innovation doesn't improve performance, it's just complexity.— Adi Dassler
Mass production without quality control is just mass disappointment. Scale must never compromise standards.— Rudolf Dassler
Further reading
- Sneaker Wars: The Enemy Brothers Who Founded Adidas and Puma by Barbara Smit
