Adidas Early Track Shoes

Adidas (it’s actually spelled with a lower-case “a”) has a long, storied history dating back to the 1920s. Two German brothers, Adi and Rudi Dassler, had started making sports shoes called Dassler in their mother’s laundry room. As sales steadily increased, they eventually expanded operations to a small factory in their home town of Herzogenaurach. Prior to the start of the 1936 Berlin Olympics, they somehow persuaded Jesse Owens to wear Dassler spikes. After Owens won four gold medals at the 1936 Berlin Olympics – 100 meters, 200 meters, long jump, and as a member of the 4×100 meter relay team—Dassler sports shoes became world famous. Now all coaches and trainers wanted their athletes to compete in these Teutonic track shoes.

The brothers were soon selling 200,000 pairs of shoes each year before the Second World War. Then, the story of the Dassler duo turns sinister, murky and downright weird. The two brothers joined the Nazi party and began making shoes for the German army, but a deep rift developed between them when Rudolf was arrested by American forces and sent to a prisoner of war camp. He thought his brother had ratted him out. They separated as business partners in 1948, with Adi starting his own shoe company now named adidas, while Rudi created a new sports shoemaking firm that he called Ruda before later changing it to Puma. The fierce rivalry between these two brother-led companies split the Bavarian town literally in half. Herzogenaurach became known as “the town of bent necks”, because local residents “would not strike a conversation with a stranger until they had first looked down at the shoes that person was wearing,” observed Barbara Smit, who chronicled the history of adidas and Puma in her book “Sneaker Wars.”

In terms of adidas’s iconic three stripes that are as recognizable and world-famous as the Nike swoosh, they were added much later–and served a dual purpose: 1:) consumer branding; 2.) and they provided additional lateral strength to a shoe’s upper.

The following photos of early adidas’s track shoes originally appeared here: http://www.designboom.com/design/adi-dasslers-first-shoes-an-exhibition-by-adidas/