Selects: Adidas v. Puma: A Sibling Rivalry

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0:31Significance years on. It's one of the interesting things about talking out loud for 17 years. At any rate, Ciroc vodka, anyone?

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0:53Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. There's Andrew over there, the guest producer. I'm wearing Adidas. Chuck is wearing Puma. Andrew's wearing Reebok. None of us are speaking to one another right now. Yeah, it's weird. Andrew is wearing white Reebok high tops with bronze pantyhose and orange dolphin running shorts. And he claims he doesn't work for Hooters part-time. Oh, oh, oh, yes. I like that you didn't know that because that means you don't go into Hooters. No, no. I've seen pictures on TV. I had to go. Actually, I've only been there once, and that was when I worked at that awful job with the chicken killers.

1:37And it was on a stupid work trip they made me go on, and that was like the only place in town. Yep. And all these yokels that I worked with were like, yeah, man, let's go to Hooters. And I went in there, and I was just like, oh, my Lord, what is – they were trapped in time. I've been there a couple of times, actually, when I was a younger man. It's the same, I imagine. It is, I'm sure. And I was there on my 21st birthday in Jacksonville because it was the only place open. It was like a Tuesday night or something. And I was like, this is not the best 21st birthday I'll ever have. Yeah. And, hey, we don't want to yuck your yum.

2:14If you work at Hooters or if you love going there, more power to you. Sure. Sure. Why not, right? That's pretty awesome that you said you don't want to yuck anyone's yum. Yeah, it's funny. I was thinking about a couple of weeks ago when it was like the Costanza moment when you thought of a line after the moment. Yeah. When you were talking about how I was crazy for not liking olives and I got on to you. I should have said, don't yum my yuck. Right. Or I was, it's funny you said that because I was thinking about that later on too. I thought that I should have said, well, actually I'm not yucking your yum.

2:53I'm yucking your yuck, which is different. Oh. You know? I don't think about it. Man. Are you thinking about it? I think it's weird that we both thought about that moment afterward. I think so, too. Because usually we just go back into our hyperbolic chambers and float for the next six days. It's a pretty great life we have. Pretty nice. Just soaking in our own urine. God. Don't you pee in your hyperbaric chamber? Well, yeah, but, I mean, that's how you're supposed to fill it up, right? Right. so chuck obviously what we're talking about today is athletic gear sports shoes in particular and two of the most well-known sports brands in the entire world adidas and puma and some people might not know this chuck but adidas and puma were founded by two brothers who spent many decades of their lives not speaking to one another.

3:50And some people might even know that, that they are rival brands founded by rival brothers. But I guarantee they don't know the full story behind one of the most bitter family rivalries of all time that gave us Adidas and Puma. And it is extraordinarily fascinating. There's Nazis, there's Run DMC, there's all this stuff all rolled into one. And And it turns out that this is one of the better stories I've ever come across. That's right. And before we dive into that awesome story, to head off emails, I know I said hyperbolic inside of hyperbaric. There's no such thing as a hyperbolic chamber. I guess there could be.

4:30It's a chamber that's like, I'm the biggest chamber ever. Probably so. All right. So this is a great story. And I had heard bits and pieces of this over the years. But it is interesting that Nazis and Run-DMC and feuding brothers all come together. Because you know my Pumas. I've been a Puma guy. Sure. For many, many years, even though I did have a pair of Adidas superstars at one point. But they're too... Flashy? No. I liked them, but they were, you know, white shoes aren't good on me. I get them too dirty too quick. Yeah. Yeah. So now I just vary my Pumas between the black and the black suede and sort of like the olive green suede usually.

5:16You know, Adidas makes non-white shoes you could try. Yeah, but those classic white superstars with the three blue stripes. Oh, yeah. Those are the ones. The shell toes. Yeah. Well, I mean, they have some other cool ones too, like gazelles are pretty cool, like the flat bottom soccer shoe. Yeah, my brother was into, I wore gazelles for a while when I was a soccer poser. but my brother was into Stan Smiths. Oh, yeah, those are cool, too. I've got some Stan Smiths that are like this blue mesh. Now that I think about it, if I have a loyalty to either one, it would be Adidas, but I don't consider myself like Adidas loyal.

5:54Well, I'm a Puma guy just because they look good on me and they're comfy, but I was also a low-top Converse all-star guy for a while. and in high school, of course, in the preppy days, I was all about the tree torrents. I never had tree torrents. It was a look. Oh, I know, for sure. Those are comfy. I was right after tree torrents when I started getting the shoes K-Swiss were in. Oh, yeah. I never had any of those. Those are cool. And then what was the other shoe? The Vans, there's a particular style of Vans that I really still enjoy. The slip-on ones with the black and white checks? No, those are cool, but I don't know if I can pull those off at 47.

6:37You could, but people will laugh at you behind your back. That's already happening. Yeah, I'll remember at some point. Okay, well, just shout it out. And plus, I just wanted to cover our bases by saying as many name brands as possible. Don't forget British Knights. Oh, the BKs? Yep. So, Chuck. Yes. Let's start the story, shall we? We're going to have to get in the Wayback Machine for this one. Okay.

7:08And this is also full of urine. So that was you, though. Let's let everybody know. We're going to go back to the end of World War I in Germany. And we're going to go to a little town that I'm going to let you pronounce because I've been trying and I cannot do it. And I thought it was interesting that we're recording this now because we just acknowledged and recognized the 100 years removed from World War I. The end of World War I. Yeah. And the beginning of the Spanish flu that killed like three times as many people right after it. Yeah, that's another celebration. Right. So we're going back there.

7:46We're just going back 100 days almost to the day. Yeah, and so the name of that town is Herzoginarach. Well, I could have done at least that good. Yeah, Herzog in Erach. It's not exactly said like that. Here, let's play this. Herzog in Erach. That's how it's said. Okay. Okay, so maybe we should just have that voice say it for us, but we're not going to. It turns out the locals just call the town Herzog, so that's all we'll call it. But it's a little tiny village in Bavaria. They can't even pronounce it. No, they're like, we're not even going to try, and we were born here. Don't be too hard on yourself, Josh, is what they're saying.

8:27So in Herzog, it's a little town in Bavaria, a little village. There's a river running through it. Yeah, significantly. Yes. And around 1918, one of the villagers who was born there, a guy named Adolf Dassler, takes a seat in his mother's laundry. His mother ran a laundry out of their house. And he starts cobbling athletic shoes, specifically track shoes, I think, to begin with. And he had a knack for it. He started making shoes that athletes actually wanted pretty early on, pretty much out of the gate. And he started doing so well so quickly that within a year or two, he asked his older brother, who is by far the more outgoing extrovert salesman-y type of the two brothers, his older brother Rudolph, to start selling his shoes, start kind of creating a business operation out of it.

9:23And I think within just a few years, they had 12 employees, and they founded a company called Sports Fabric Gebruder Dassler, which they called Geta for short. Yeah, so Gebruder is, you know, for brothers, so Gebruder Dassler is the Dassler Brothers shoe company. And people were like, wow, so I don't have to wear my high-heeled leather sport boot any longer on the pitch? I don't have to tie some sharp rocks to the bottom of my feet? So their nicknames, you'll probably hear us refer to them as Adi and Rudy, R-U-D-I. And if you kind of put your head to it, you can see where this is headed. This is exciting.

10:08So the laundry business wasn't going well. So like you said, little Adi started making these shoes and things started going great. And it turns out they made a pretty good team at first because they complemented one another in what they were good at. So Adi was creative and he was the brains and Rudy was a little more extroverted and he was a really good salesperson. Right. So they start to do a pretty good business. and it's if you're like well it's a weird thing to start doing as a younger man to start making support shoes it turns out that Herzog is like a shoemaking town it has a long tradition of shoemaking and in 1922 for example their population was 3500 but they had 112 shoemakers that's amazing that's a high shoemaker to regular population ratio so it's not the weirdest thing ever.

11:02But they're plodding along. They're making really high quality shoes, like right out of the gate. Adi had a real, like I said, a talent for making high quality athletic shoes. And one of the first things they made were a track shoe that one of these articles says looks like a ballet slipper with some nails coming out of the front of it, the front bottom, the foresole. and it was um it just changed everything it was a genuinely great track shoe at the time the the people who were running sprinters who were running track they didn't have any traction when they were taking off yeah this gave them traction and just gave them an immediate um leg up over the the competition and so the athletes like really really liked the the shoes that they were putting out.

11:49And the company started to grow and grow and grow. And then I think the 1928 Olympics in Los Angeles is where they really debuted their shoes. And a German sprinter was wearing a pair of their track shoes. And all he won was a bronze medal, but he won a bronze medal wearing the Dassler Brothers shoes. And as a German sprinter. Exactly. So that should say it all. It does. So he was wearing these track spikes and this helped him. This got him a little bit of notoriety. But it was really in 1936 in Berlin at that very, very famous Olympic Games where a young athlete named Jesse Owens dominated and literally tore up the track wearing those Gebruder Dassler track spikes with Hitler in the stands.

12:40And people were like, those shoes are amazing. And Jesse Owens was like, it's kind of me. But yeah, sure. The shoes are great. But I'm also a vastly superior athlete to the rest of these jumps out here. Yeah. So that was the Olympics that Jesse Owens famously finished in first place, won the gold, and did another lap around the track, went up into the stands, and slapped Hitler right in the face. Oh, man. Slapped his little stash right off that lip. So the fact that Jesse Owens was wearing these shoes immediately brought international attention to Geta, the Gebruder-Dossler company. Um, so they, I saw one article that said, had World War II not happened, this, this business would have just gone global immediately.

13:27And it started to, but then when World War II broke out and that was the 1936 Olympics, I think I said the 1928 Olympics. It was, I think the 1932 Olympics that I talked about first, but the 1936 Olympics within just a couple of years, the Nazis invaded Poland and, uh, were running Germany. and World War II kicked off in earnest and the time for sports apparel kind of got derailed a little bit. Yeah, so just like in the United States and actually in countries all over the world, the war effort was, it's not like they were just like, all right, we have a few companies that manufacture our military needs for our military and that's going to be good enough.

14:14It's like, no, we need to really co-opt kind of any manufacturing that we want to go toward the war effort. And certainly Germany did that along with the U.S. and kind of everyone else. And everything from Hugo Boss to Lufthansa to these little shoemakers in this small town in Bavaria. Yeah, their factories were co-opted for the war effort, basically. And what the Dossler Brothers factory ended up making are something called the Panzerschreck, which means the tank terror. And it was modeled after the American bazooka, which was one of the first shoulder-mounted recoilless rocket launchers that had enough power to punch right through a tank and blow up everybody inside.

15:04They were nasty little buggers, and the Panzerschreck was the German version of the bazooka, and the German version of the bazooka was created in the Dossler Brothers shoe factory. Yeah, it's December 1943 is when they kind of made the full switch, and these little, you know, German ladies who were sewing shoes the week before were now manufacturing German bazookas. The good news is by this time—because these things were really effective, actually, and had they been brought into the war sooner, things might have really changed. But thankfully by this time, even though they were doing the job, it was too late.

15:49The tides had turned and the allies were steaming toward victory. And even though they started pumping out these bazookas, it was sort of too little too late. Yeah. Have you ever wondered about the name bazooka? Not until just now. Okay. Well, I did. And I was like, what does a bazooka mean? Apparently there was an entertainer. I think he might have been Vaudeville, kind of a country act. Okay. Bazooka Joe? I can't remember his name. It doesn't matter. He created a musical instrument out of brass called a bazooka. And it was kind of like a trumpet and a trombone together. It was a weird little instrument.

16:26But he was popular enough, and the bazooka looked like his instrument enough that it became called the bazooka, this shoulder-mounted rocket launcher. Interesting. I thought so, too. Sure, why not? But the point is, is that all of a sudden, the Germans, who had been totally helpless against the American tank divisions, were messing the American tank divisions up. And the source of their power was the Dossler Brothers shoe factory. And you mentioned their seamstresses welding bazookas together. Yeah. Also in their factory, there was forced labor of French POWs. Sure. So they had slaves and seamstresses working together to create bazookas to take out the American tank divisions or the allied tank divisions thanks to the companies that would eventually become Adidas and Puma.

17:17All right. That's a great setup. Thank you. That's only part one into what is a very interesting story. Yeah. So we're going to take a little break and we'll come back and talk about what went wrong with these two brothers right after this.

17:52All right. So we've got to go back in time a little bit because we sped right up to World War II. It was just too interesting to wait to talk about any longer. But we need to go back to about 1933 because these brothers ended up fracturing in a big, big way. And there have been, you know, some legendary sibling rivalries through the years. But this is really one of the greats. And I believe even Rudy wrote as an older man, the relation to my brother was ideal from 1924 to 1933. Then his young wife tried to interfere with business matters, although she with her 16 years had no experience at all, and the warfare began.

18:37Yeah. So here's how the story goes. Is that in 1933, Adi was indeed married to a 16-year-old, which seems very creepy now, but back then it was not the strangest thing in the world. Slightly less creepy. Slightly less creepy. Well, they just – it was a different time. Okay. So he was married to a 16-year-old and tried to get involved in the business. Rudy was not happy about this. And they all lived together. The two brothers and their wives all lived together in the same townhouse. Yeah. Which is not a great recipe for success anyway. Right. You know, you need to have your own place. So you can imagine that all the little bickering and snide remarks and just all the stuff that if you have two couples that don't really, really, really like and love each other, living together will accumulate.

19:30If you translate that to a business relationship, it's going to be hard on the business. And it was. For sure. So there is apparently a series of just little things like that. But as far as the family legend goes, the real break happened during World War II when the allies were bombing the the village of Herzog. And Rudy and his wife made their way to the bunker, the bomb shelter. And shortly after that, Adi and his wife, I think her name was Kata, they made their way into the bomb shelter. And when they entered, he said, oh, well, it looks like the bastards are here again. And Adi apparently went to his grave saying that he was referring to the allied bombers.

20:15but Rudy took it that Adi was talking about Rudy and his wife. Yeah. And apparently that was the final straw. Yeah, this was true evidence that things were really bad if something as simple possibly as just a little misunderstanding of whether or not the bastards were the Allies bombing or you, my brother and my sister-in-law. Right. So, I mean, things were pretty bad if this is what did it. Right. So World War II is still going on. And at some point, Rudy gets called to go fight for the Nazis. He gets drafted. So Rudy has to go to war. And the whole time he's away, so this rift has already happened.

20:57So he's suspecting, one, that his brother and his brother's wife plotted to get him drafted. And he can't get that idea out of his head. So much so that apparently multiple times he deserted his post to go home to make sure that he wasn't being ousted. from the business he'd built with his brother. And then he gets arrested for desertion. And he's sure that his little brother ratted him out for desertion. Which he may have. And so he's arrested. He's held for a while. And as he's making his way back after the war to Herzog, he gets picked up by the Allies under suspicion of being a Gestapo agent.

21:36Yeah. He's sure again that it's his little brother, Adi, who got him this time landed in a POW camp that he stays in for a little while. And it turns out he was right. There is documentary evidence from an American officer who took the accusation down. And apparently it was Adi who went to the Americans and said, my brother is a Gestapo agent. You may want to arrest him. What a jerk. This is the level of stuff these brothers are doing to one another. And the rift just kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger. There's one other thing we have to say because the wife, the younger wife, the 16-year-old Kata, gets historically blamed for creating this rift, I think in a lot of ways unfairly.

22:22She's also the one who saved the family business single-handedly. Yeah, so in April 1945, the Americans march into Herzog. Those tanks pull up in front of that factory. And the soldiers, the American soldiers, are out there, like, kind of going over what they should do. Should we destroy this building or not? This is the place where the Panzerschrecks were made. Yeah, so Adi's wife, Kata, comes out. And she basically walks right up to these enemy soldiers and says, We only want to make shoes. We only desire to make shoes. And they're like, Why are you talking like Colonel Klink? She said, we all do.

23:05Oh, okay. And that's basically like she convinced them to spare the factory. They did so. And not only that, the Air Force, the U.S. Air Force set up operations there at their air base and realized that they really like these shoes. Well, they found out that this was the company that made Jesse Owens famous track shoes. Yeah, and so they went off the charts. They started getting these huge orders for sports teams, American sports teams, because of this. So this is all going on or it's all starting while Rudy's off in a POW camp because his brother ratted him out. And the business all of a sudden is starting to turn international.

23:45Like you said, people around the world are taking notice of this thanks to the American GIs who are coming back with this Geta sportswear. and when Rudy comes back, it's done. His brothers ratted him out. There was the whole thing in the bomb shelter and the brothers split the company that they built together. They split Gebruder, Dessler, or Dessler and they go off and found their own companies. Yeah, 15 years after that bunker incident. Yep. So it took a long time to finally boil over. Right. And in between there was another war. They were not good Nazis, we should point out. Kind of, you know, they were members of the Nazi party and Rudy did get drafted.

24:30But like he said, he deserted his post a lot. And they, you know, they really did just want to sell shoes. Right. He's like Dwight Schrute's uncle or grandfather who spent a lot of the war in an allied POW camp. That's right. So like you said, they split up the company. And we mentioned earlier that this river ran through the center of town. And I said, significant. And it is significant because it literally divided the town. And they set up their business. It's not like one of them said, well, I'm going off to Berlin. Right. They just set up camp on opposite sides of that river. Adi Dossler said, I will name my company Adidas.

25:13Actually, at first they named it Adas. Well, yeah, but everyone said that stinks. Well, no, that was a different one. That one, there was a children's footwear line already called Adidas. So he added the I and turned it into Adidas. Yeah, Rudy went with Ruda. Which is terrible. And everyone said that no one's going to buy a shoes named Ruda, especially in the United States. And he said, I don't understand. And they said, don't worry about it. So somehow he got Puma out of Ruda. Right. Which I don't get, but it's a name that stuck. Yeah, and it works. Puma's definitely better than Ruda for sure.

25:49Oh, yeah. So these two go off and form directly competing companies that split from the same company that the brothers had founded together. And Adidas and Puma started making pretty good headway out of the gate. At first, Rudy had the sales team, had the marketing team, had the ability to move some product. but Adi had the technical know-how, the dedication to making high quality footwear that athletes, like professional athletes wanted to wear. And so he could get his shoes onto athletes who would wear them on the world stage. And eventually his, his, I guess his tack won out over his brothers.

26:35And, and from, from a very early stage on, Adidas has always led Puma, at least as far as like sales revenue goes. Yeah. And, you know, there were mistakes from both of them along the way, business-wise. One of the big ones for Puma early on was that Rudolf got into a spat with a coach of the German national soccer team. And of course, all that did was open the door for his brother in Adidas to go in there and say, what about these shoes? Which is exactly what happened. And so at the 1954 World Cup, Germany wears Adidas with those signature stripes. And even though they were not favored at all, West Germany actually won against Hungary, I believe.

27:23Yes. And that was a huge, huge deal on a national, international stage. It was like the miracle on ice on grass. You mean they were stoned? They were all stoned out of their gourds. The miracle on ice on grass. Yes, that might have legs, my friend. I think it might, too. You need to trademark that. Well, I do officially right now trademarked. I love it. So that was one mistake. Adidas would, of course, go on to make some mistakes later. I know that you sent that one article where they talked about how they said, you know, at one point that, like, yogging, no one's going to do that. So we're not going to make yogging shoes.