Adi Dassler was born in Herzogenaurach, Bavaria,
Germany on November 3, 1900. The son of Christoph Dassler, a shoe factory
worker made his foray into the shoe making business when he was 20 years old.
Adi was an avid sportsman and had a passion to create a shoe specifically for
athletes.
He started in
his mother’s laundry room using spare materials. With his brother Zehlein (who
made the metal spikes) and later his older brother Rudolf (who joined in 1924),
the brothers opened the Dassler Brothers Shoe Factory. Adi made it a point to
attend every major sporting event in an effort to tell them wear his sport
shoes. By the 1928 Olympics in Amsterdam, several athletes were wearing special
shoes from the Dassler workshop.
Adi concentrated his efforts on
the shoes of track and field and was experimenting with spikes. By the early
1930s, the company was making 30 different shoe brands for 11 different sports
and had a workforce of nearly 100.
The 1936 Olympics in Berlin
offered a great opportunity for Adi as he equipped Jesse Owens with spiked
shoes that reportedly helped him to win 4 gold medals. Adi is purported to have
driven to Berlin to meet with Owens just before the games were to begin. He
visited Jesse Owens in the Olympic village and handed him a suitcase full of
spikes. After persuading Owens to wear the shoes, Owens, over the next week won
an unprecedented 4 gold medals.
By 1948, Rudolf and Adi separated ways as Adi
reformed the shoe company using his nickname and first three letters of his
last name to form Adidas, while Rudolf went on to locate his factory across the
river and calling it Puma.
In 1949 Adi produced the first
shoes with molded rubber studs. A breakthrough in 1954 occurred for Adi when
the Germans won the World Cup Soccer , the Germans all wore Adidas shoes. This
event helped Adi recapture his pre-war sales of over 200,000 pairs of shoes per
year. His company was beginning to again become a dominant supplier of athletic
shoes in the world market.
In 1960 Adi introduced a sports
clothing line to complement sales of their now famous three-stripe shoes. That
same year in the Olympic Games at Rome, 75% of all athletes wore Adidas brand
shoes. Adi courted many sports celebrities throughout his career as Owner
of Adidas to promote the brand name. Notables such as Muhammad Ali, Max
Schmeling, Sepp Herberger and Franz Beckenbauer.
On September 6, 1978 Adolf ‘Adi’
Dassler passed away, leaving his widow and son to carry on the tradition he
started nearly sixty years earlier.