Fair Uses

There was a strange little tale about Puma and Adidas in the papers yesterday. They were founded by two brothers who had a falling out and each took half of the town with them.

Herzogenaurach was a town split into footwear factions. Townfolk were marked as adidas or Puma people. Intermarriage was out of the question.

The enmity can be traced to a spat in the 1940s between two local shoemakers – brothers Adolf and Rudolf Dassler – who fell out and set up rival companies, adidas and Puma, on either side of the town’s river.

The pair had made shoes together in the 1920s in their mother’s kitchen, trading as Dassler Brothers Shoe Factory.

But the relationship soured and Rudolf left to set up Puma, and Adolf renamed the company adidas. The split spawned decades of fierce business rivalry, split a town in two, and led to the establishment of two of the best-recognised sporting brands in the world…

“Some of the stories you hear are just mind-blowing,” Puma marketing manager Filip Trulsson said.”Puma people not marrying adidas people, adidas and Puma gangs in the schools, pubs loyal to one firm refusing to serve workers from the other, it’s all gone on here,” he told The Independent in 2006.

Herzogenaurach had become nicknamed “the town of bent necks”, because townfolk would not strike a conversation with a stranger until they had first looked down at the shoes that person was wearing, said author Barbara Smit, who chronicled the history of adidas and Puma in her book Pitch Invasion.

“The town was really split in two like a sort of mini-Berlin with this little river as a partition in the middle,” she told German broadcaster Deutsche Well.

Fortunately for the townsfolk, “The rift in the town also appeared to be have mended. Teens in the town square could be seen hanging together wearing Puma, adidas and even Nike, The Independent wrote.”

It’s an interesting history behind Adidas, one of the more litigious sportwear manufacturers. The comany has racked up a number of trademark disputes over the years with the upshot that it now appears to own the placement of three (and even two) stripes on clothing. That is a subject that deserves its own post another day.

Source: Town divided by tale of two shoes (Sydney Morning Herald)

Tags: Adidas, Puma, sportswear