Anniversary: ​​75 years of Adidas: How three straps became a brand icon – HORIZONT

The company was founded in 1949 a few months after Adolf Dassler separated from his brother Rudolf (“Puma”) in a bitter dispute. The two had already established their joint shoe factory in 1924 – if it had survived, it would have been 100 years old this year.

As early as 1928, Lina Radke won Olympic gold over 800 meters in Dassler shoes in Amsterdam. There was much more to follow. People in Herzogenaurach are sure that the competition in the same place made the success of the two world players possible.

Adidas had a meteoric rise. Today the company employs 59,000 people on the five continents and had sales of over 21 billion euros last year. Many coincidences helped. Perhaps he could not have imagined that the three straps on the side that the trained baker and cobbler Dassler later gave his shoes to stabilize the side of the foot would become an iconic symbol of the brand.

But it was also the perseverance and hard work of the entrepreneur Dassler after the war that made Adidas great. When the national football team achieved the legendary “Miracle of Bern” in 1954, Dassler himself sat in the dressing room and checked the position of the new screws used by Helmut Rahn and Co in “Fritz-Walter -Wetter” to win the award. eventually helped Hungary over the favourites.

Like almost any other manufacturer, Adidas has been able to produce products that have shaped the zeitgeist of entire generations. Freddie Mercury wore wrestling shoes with the three stripes at the famous Band Aid concert in London. Madonna appeared in Adidas boots. Shoes like the “Handball Spezial” or the “Stan Smith”, which were reborn on the retro wave, pushed the limits of the sports they were intended for.

Smith, who was once number one in the world of tennis in the 1970s and known personally to the founder of the company Adi Dassler, is only known to current generations through a sports shoe of the same name. His book is “Some People Think I’m a Shoe.” Today it is shoe models like “Samba” or “Gazelle” that shape fashion far beyond sports.

The current management around CEO Bjørn Gulden, who was brought in from rival Puma, benefits from Adidas’ almost inexhaustible archive. Due to globalization and global growth, the problems in everyday business have become much more complex than they were when Dassler founded the company. Wrong decisions during the corona pandemic, changing markets in China, for example, or problems with questionable brand ambassadors such as the rapper Kanye West have caused Adidas problems recently.

In 2023, the bottom line was a loss for the first time since 1992. At that time, in the 1980s, the company was even close to ruin. The founder’s widow Käthe Dassler and her son Horst died quickly, and the company was in strange but not always good hands. It wasn’t until Frenchman Robert Louis-Dreyfus took the company public in 1995 that things started to improve again.

Recently, the German Football Association was also a disappointment. Although the national team were still moving into their European Championship quarters at their “home ground” in Herzogenaurach and players like Manuel Neuer were celebrating their anniversary with thousands of Adidas employees in the June, the DFB followed the call of US dollars and appointed Nike as a supplier to the industry leader – a decades-long association comes to an end.

The CEO Gulden – described by “Manager Magazin” as the “Football boss on the football field” because of the way he often wears a t-shirt, but is considered in the world of sports – wants to throw his predecessor Kasper Rorsted’s strategy on board in the future based on these experiences. . Instead of focusing more on popular sports such as football, running or basketball, the former football professional wants to give more space to sports that are supposed to be smaller, the introduction of new Olympic movement sports such as breaking or BMX.

Adidas equipped ten Olympic teams at the recent Paris Games – there could and should be more in the future. A contract until 2032 was signed with the German Olympic Sports Federation. The supplier has also made a long-term commitment to the German Hockey Association