ADIDAS

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.

In 1963 Adidas started Ball production, and ever since 1970 the official match ball at all major soccer events has been an Adidas product.

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.

Schultz.

In 1981 when he traveled from New York to Seattle to check out a popular coffee bean store called Starbucks.

There was that great smell, sure, but what caused him to fall in love with the business was the care the Starbucks owners. He also was impressed with the owners' dedication to educating the public about the wonders of coffee connoisseurship.

"I walked away ... saying, 'God, what a great company, what a great city. I'd love to be a part of that,' Schultz told  myprimetime.

Schultz was born in 1952 and raised in a Brooklyn, N.Y.

It took Schultz a year to convince the Starbucks owners to hire him. When they finally made him director of marketing and operations in 1982, he had another idea. This one occurred in Italy, when Schultz took note of the coffee bars that existed on practically every block. He learned that they not only served excellent espresso, they also served as meeting places or public squares; they were a big part of Italy's societal glue, and there were 200,000 of them in the country.As the company began to expand rapidly in the '90s, Schultz always said that the main goal was "to serve a great cup of coffee." But attached to this goal was a principle: Schultz said he wanted "to build a company with soul."

 Schultz insisted that all employees working at least 20 hours a week get comprehensive health coverage -- including coverage for unmarried spouses.

Why was Schultz so generous?

 He remembers his father, his salary was very low”. He was beaten down, he wasn't respected," Schultz said. "He had no medical card, and he had no workers' compensation when he got hurt on the job." So with Starbucks, Schultz "wanted to build the kind of company that my father never got a chance to work for, in which people were respected."

 Starbucks managed to blossom without national advertising. Finally, Starbucks sells premium products. Starbucks become success during the go-go '90s, going public in 1992. The company has almost 4,000 stores in 25 countries, serving 15 million people a week, and new outlets are opening so fast it has Wall Street's head spinning. The company seems to be immune to market vagaries as well, gaining 25 percent in stock value last year while the Dow Jones Industrial Index lost 10 percent and the Nasdaq 60 percent.

Schultz indulged his love of basketball by buying the Seattle Supersonics for $250 million. He also handed over CEO chores to Orin Smith so that Schultz can focus on global strategy. He believes that Starbucks is just getting started.

"Despite the success that Starbucks has enjoyed in the U.S., we have a less than 6 percent market share of coffee consumption," Schultz said. "We are in the infant stages of the growth of the business even in America. And now seeing what we've done internationally ... we are going to shock people in terms of what Starbucks is going to be."

Asked the secret of his success, Schultz recounts four principles: "Don't be threatened by people smarter than you. Compromise anything but your core values. Seek to renew yourself even when you are hitting home runs. And everything matters."

Coco Chanel.

Coco Chanel Biography – beginning of her career

Several years passed at school before the young girl would try to make a start. At first she began as a shopkeeper specializing in linens and small wares. Later she would try to sing and dance, with an idea to make a career in the theatre. These attempts would not bring her any luck, with an exception to the nickname Coco acquired at that time. The nickname "Coco" had been given to her by her audience for her songs "KoKoRiKo" and "Qui qu’a vu Coco".

At the age of twenty-two Coco Chanel met Etienne Balsan, a gentlemen horse breeder and riding enthusiast, and accepted his proposal to live together. She would enjoy her life in a castle, even though she would never get used to her position of an official mistress. What did she really want? To make a career for herself as a modiste – a milliner.

Coco Chanel would soon meet another person who would find a merit in her idea and would help her change her life completely. This was an Englishman Arthur Capel, known to his friends as "Boy". She could have never before imagined herself together with a man who was so enterprising, athletic and, despite his youth, already an important businessman. He helped Chanel to open her first milliner shop in Paris in 1910, and later in 1913 her boutique in Deauville, France.

Coco Chanel Biography – The Woman Entrepreneur

Once she opened her business and began to apply her taste and capacities to it, she would change into a woman entrepreneur forever. Nothing would stop her: not the lack of experience, not even the war that soon exploded. For the rest of her life she would work as both craftsman and businesswoman, implementing her own view of the art of dressing on her ever expanding clientele…

She started as a hat maker to the divas, and they revealed her name to Paris.
Her business would soon grow into something never known in the history. Traditionally, dressmakers had never been part of a "society". But Coco Chanel changed that. Coco Chanel became a magnetic person, international figure invited everywhere. It did not seem to surprise her at all. She commented: "I did not go into society because I had to design clothes. I designed clothes precisely because I did go out, because I was the first to live the life of this century."

Coco Chanel received the attention of high-born, aristocratic suitors, like Grand Duke Dimitri of Russia and Duke of Westminster. She was surrounded by the creme de la creme of the society, the most famous women and men of her time.

At the age of fifty-five, Coco Chanel was in the prime of her beauty. Her face, like her figure, had reached their ultimate refinement. She had never dressed with more invention or with a greater perfection. At that time she was the most admired and most invited. People proved to be more interested in her face, photographers were passionate about it. These were the golden years in Coco Chanel biography.

Coco Chanel Biography – Years without work

Chanel closed her salon almost immediately after war (World War II) had been declared. She decided there was no time for fashion. Because of the rumors of her romantic involvement with a high ranking German officer, she was arrested in September 1944, at the order of the Committee of Public Morals. A few hours later, she was released, but shortly thereafter, she left for Switzerland, where she lived for almost ten years.