August 16, 2018 • 41 mins
Today Adidas and Puma are two of the industry's most well-known tennis shoe makers, and people around the world prize the footwear for its unique design and reliable craftsmanship. Yet there's a strange, bitter origin story behind these giants of the sneaker world. Join the guys as they delve into a tale of petty recrimination, family feuds and the unending contempt that, ultimately, created the Adidas and Puma we know today.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:24):
Welcome to the show, friends and neighbors. Thanks for tuning in.
We have two developments that we'd like to tell you
about that occurred outside of the studio only, one of
which is tangentially related to today's episode. First is that
it is my trusty co host Noel Brown's birthday today.
(00:44):
I'm sorry, I was running in place um birthday resolution
with my new Adida's track shoes. Right yeah, that so
happy birthday, Noel. I'm Ben. Let's say hello to our
super producer Casey Pegrum and the set can. Development, which
is I guess at best tangentially related to today's episode,
(01:04):
is that, for the first time in years, I bought
a pair of tennis shoes. You sure did, and Ben,
thank you for the birthday wishes. I was the endorphins
were flowing through me so much I I didn't even respond,
uh politely, and I do apologize. Let's talk about your shoes.
Yours are tigers though, right right right? Lions and tigers
and bears and pumas, and yes, yes, that is the
(01:26):
tangential relationship today. So one of the most well known
popular tennis shoe brands is Nike today, right, very true,
very very true, just do it. But other brands are
still in the international sphere and very very well known,
like Adidas and Pumas and um I don't know, we
(01:47):
can just spoil this part of the story in advance.
Nike kind of blew up as a result of Dita's
and Pumas kind of being distracted with sort of the
topic of today's episode and not really paying attention to
this impending shoe mcgeddon that Nike brought on. Yeah, absolutely absolutely,
because well, like, have you ever owned a pair of
(02:08):
Adidas or a Puma shoe? I have an Adidas hoodie
that I'm quite fond of, um uh, And I think
I've owned a Puma a pair of Puma shoes. Don't
think I've ever owned any Adidas shoes, but fan of
the hoodies. I think I've only owned a track suit
from Adidas. It was a different life. I could never
I could not picture track it was it was for
(02:29):
a show, it was unrelated. But I haven't own the
shoes either, which is, you know, not super unusual for us,
because neither of us are especially sneaker heads as they're called.
But but they are very very popular shoes and they
have a very strange story behind them. I guess to
(02:49):
start off today, we should go ahead and just be
upfront about the pronunciation in the name of this town.
Should we have a pronunciation off and then we can
check four of O and see who was closest. So
you're using four vo, right, that's okay? Is that your
go to pronunciation guide of choice? It is because it's
crowdsourced and it's usually from natives, so I find it
(03:10):
to be pretty reliable. And if they're if the word
isn't there, then I just, you know, roll the dice.
But this one, in fact was there. So let's how
about we spell it first so everyone knows where we're
coming from. It's h E r z O G E
in A U R A c h. So let's see
would that be who's ogan? Who's ok? Why do you
(03:32):
give you a shut well man? I may have told
you that in the past life I was once a
young German boy. That's true. I would defer to your pronunciation.
So I'm gonna give it a go with the help
of four vo, and then I'll check check myself. Hatzelgan
Alla hats Olgan got close close. I think I overpronounced
the gen again. So they're more like hat solgan al yeah,
(03:56):
g and kind of like just right. So you know
this is let's call it, what do we say, ben heart,
So that's what the locals call it. It's gonna be easier,
so I heard. So it has a storied sneaker past. Yes, yes,
our story begins with the Dozzler brothers, Rudolph and Adolph.
(04:18):
But Rudy and a ADDI to their friends and to
us and to us for the purposes of this. So
Addie is the younger brother. He's a cobbler. He's an inventor.
He's a bit of an entrepreneur. His favorite thing in
the world is to sit at his workbench and tinker.
And he starts making shoes. So I thought I thought
(04:42):
a shoemaker was a cobbler. It was a tinker. Is
a tinker as a thing too. There's tinker Taylor Soldier
Spine in that movie What's a Tinker? So you could
tinker with things. But the old profession is someone who
travels from place to place mending things like pots and pants. Right,
So he is a tinker and a cobbler. I would
(05:03):
say he's a tinkerer. So he's a tinkering cobbler, and
he's cobbling at his tinker bench, uh, and what does
he make? Ben there there's a little bit of more
of a story here too. This was after World War One.
Things were pretty dire in Germany um Bavaria where Hartzo
is located, and his the brother's mother had had a
(05:25):
laundry business that was no longer operational, and so that's
where Oddi set up his shop. He was eighteen years
old when he returned from World War One in nineteen eighteen,
and Harzo was a Northern Bavaria oddly enough to Shoemaking
was the biggest industry in the area at the time,
(05:47):
so it was a natural fit for him to go
into this empty laundry shed and begin making shoes. Right.
There's a great, great article that we're gonna pull some
good stuff from from Vice Sports by Brian Blickenstaff that
sort of mentions the idea that even in those kind
of salad days, uh, post World War One, when folks
(06:08):
were returning back home and things were kind of a
little bit um, getting by by hook or by crook.
You you might not have to buy the nicest clothes,
but you had to have functional shoes, right, you got
you gotta have shoes, And there's there's an excellent article
depicting his experience making his first pair of shoes over
on Today I found out folks. You may notice we're
(06:30):
avoiding giving you the headlines of these articles right now.
That's because we don't want to spoil things straight from
the gate. So he makes his first shoes for just
for his friends. But these shoes that he creates are
made out of leather scraps salvaged from helmets and wartime
uniforms another gear. These are like mad Max shoes. Yeah,
(06:52):
that's a good description. And it turns out people really
liked Addie shoes. His reputation spread far beyond Harzeh and
pretty soon he had one of the best problems you
can have when you start your own business. He had
more work than he could handle. Yeah, I think it
took him about three years to get to that point. Um,
And that's when he enlisted the help of his brother Rudy,
(07:16):
who was a little bit more of a business minded
kind of guy, a bit of a brash kind of
salesman type dude. And he really needed that because Addie
was sort of the brains behind the product, and Rudy
came in and became, you know, the power behind the throne,
the kind of guy that pushed the product out into
the marketplace. A bit. Yeah, Nree, Rudy joins. And we
(07:38):
must emphasize just how different these two guys are. ADDI
sounds to me like an introvert and Rudy definitely seems
like the extrovert. And this this worked in the beginning.
This was a fantastic partnership. I mean they had already
grown up together, so they knew what to expect, and
(07:58):
they worked pretty well in the early days. Uh. And
in nineteen twenty four, things were going well enough that
they said, you know what, let's make it official. Bro,
Let's start a company. Yeah. They're called the Dossler Bros.
Or Dossler the Dozzler Brothers Shoe Company. And they continue growing,
(08:19):
so I believe it's in nineteen twenties six they say, Okay,
this laundry shed operation isn't cutting it. We need an
actual factory. Oh. We shall also mentioned before we get
too far into the story. After World War One, Rudy
had decided he wanted to become a policeman, and he
actually he trained for it like a Gestapo type policeman.
(08:40):
Interesting that you would mention that part that is going
to come into play later, because yes, this is Germany
in the mid nineteen twenties at this time. Yes, yes,
So where where should we go next? We're we're still
in Harzoh right we are, and we're gonna we're gonna
mainly stay there. Yeah, yeah, towards the end we I'd
expand a little, but yes, this is a Harzos story
(09:03):
through and through. Uh do you want to talk a
little bit about what these shoes look like and how
they differ from modern shoes? Yeah? I think we really should.
There is a really cool blog post on a site
called design Boom called History of Adida's Audi Dostler's first
Track and Field Shoes, and it goes through a chronology
(09:24):
of these designs of between the twenties and the thirties.
The very first shoe, called the Model Viitzer from nineteen
was a sprint shoe and it was actually worn at
the Olympic Games in Amsterdam of that year, and it
looks almost like a rudimentary, kind of very stark ballet
(09:44):
shoe mixed with like a bowling shoe. But it's very
very steeply angled from the heel to like where the
ball of the foot might be, and then it flattens
out and then has these cleats, these six pronounced almost
like crocodile teeth looking cleats UM. And this was kind
of um a revolutionary design because according to this blog,
(10:06):
it was the first shoe to use a screw system
in athletics, which were six handmade spikes that were cut
pressed through these holes that were punched in the out
sole of the shoe, and then we're screwed in um
using a steel disk that attaches from the outsold the
outside of the shoe. And there were some positives here
(10:28):
and that it gave runners traction that they had lacked
in the past. But it also they were a little
bit heavy because there were a lot of weighty metal parts, right,
and they were not manufacturing the actual spikes themselves. They
did have help from a blacksmith operation, but the rest
of it sourcing the material and assembling that that's that's
(10:49):
all Dostler, And it's true, this stuff is revolutionary. People
are loving it. We do need to mention that Adolf
Hitler and the Nazi Party come to power in what
round thirty three, and when this happens, both of the
Dozzler brothers do join the Nazi Party. That's true. Um,
(11:13):
they have been described, to their credit, I guess as
not being the most uh adamant Nazis. I guess they
were sort of low key Nazis. Yeah they were. They
were not. Um, I guess they were fair weather Nazis. Yeah.
It seemed like they were just doing it because they
were fitting in maybe, which is a huge problem. It's
(11:35):
a huge problem with the whole Nazi plague in general.
It's like I was just following orders. I was just
trying to fit in. That's not a discussion for today's episode.
But all the while, they they're blending into the background,
um while making these shoes, and it kind of comes
to a head when one of their designs gets worn
(11:56):
by a very famous African American UH sprinter by the
name of James Cleveland Owens a k a. Jesse Owens,
who wore these shoes and a very specific sporting event
that we have talked about in episodes past. Yes, we
were referring to the nineteen thirty six Summer Olympics, which
were held in Berlin. UH. If you've checked out our
(12:19):
earlier episode, then you noticed that Jesse Owens is a
returning guest to our show. Jesse Owens was a track
and field star, and given that the Dozzler brothers were
already benefiting from the Nazi Party's use of sports as
a propaganda tool, they saw the Summer Olympics as an
(12:41):
opportunity to go into the international sphere and get recognition
outside of Harzo and outside of Germany. So they pushed
and pushed to get Dossler shoes on Jesse Owens. All
they really seemed to care about in the Olympics, in fact,
was getting je See Owens to wear these shoes. He
(13:02):
did wear Dossler shoes and he won four gold medals, which, again,
if you look at the way these shoes are constructed,
is crazy because there you're not supposed to use your heel,
You're just supposed to like dig in and run on
your toes. And the plan worked. Owen's four medals gave
the company huge amounts of international attention, and athletes from
(13:24):
all across Europe started making their way to this village
harz Oh, which is pretty tiny, whenever they passed through Germany,
saying I gotta get a pair of one of those
Dossler Brothers shoes. Yeah, and from that original design we
talked about, from this one was much improved because it
actually left out the metal plate um and it had
(13:45):
very small islets where the and thin laces, which helped
to reduce the weight of the shoe, which was really
important for you know, sprinting. Absolutely in fact, instead of
they had to get really creative with materials because instead
of using that metal late they used something called vegetable
tanned bottom leather or vash leather um and that significantly
(14:07):
reduced the weight. So really forward thinking design work going
into these shoes that continued to carry on, specifically with
UH with Audi. Yeah, I look again, as we're going
to see, neither of these guys are perfect, but all
these innovations in the world of footwear are Audies. I
want to highlight that because I feel like that's very
(14:30):
important that Audi was the brains of the operation. Well,
at this point, their success is bringing them to a
more money, more problems sort of situation. Their relationship is
becoming strained, and as the company is succeeding, Germany is
inching closer to war and the brothers are experiencing a
(14:51):
failure in their relationship. One that a huge animosity that
extends to their wives, their children, their pair, it's their
other siblings, because they did have other siblings, and weirdly
both families lived together in the same villa, which seemed
less than ideal considering that every source we've looked into
(15:12):
has their wives just fighting like cats and dogs between
each other. They were not peacemakers, not at all. And
I'm sure that tension carried over into the brother's relationship.
When you're trying to defend your wife in some sort
of spat and take take their side, it probably soured
relations between the brothers and less not forget moms in
the picture too. So in nineteen forty, Addie gets the
(15:40):
call he is asked to serve in the German military,
and he does for about three months, but somehow he
is able to get an exemption, and you'll hear different
his story and speculate that this could have been due
to Rudy's effort to maybe back in Harzel. He was
pulling some strings to get his brother out to go
(16:02):
back to the shoe business, and we'll probably never know
for sure whether he was able to get that exemption
due to Rudy, but we do know that whatever happened,
it did not alleviate the tension between the families. As
as the war kicked into full swing, the tensions between
(16:22):
the families got worse and worse until they hit a
tipping point. Yeah, this is one of the most divisive
bits of the story. Um There there are various accounts
of this, but it is something that comes up repeatedly,
and so supposedly in when there was an Allied air
raid on um Hartze, the brothers and their families found
(16:44):
themselves sharing a bomb shelter um and supposedly Adolph made
a comment that Rudy was never able to shake because
he interpreted as being a direct insult to his family. So,
as the story goes, Adolph and hearing the sound of
the approaching um R a F Forces Royal Air Force
(17:08):
British planes, said something to the effect of there come
those pig dogs again or here come those bastards, The
dirty bastards are back again, exactly to which Rudy uh
heard that as an insult, lobbed at he and his
family as they got into the shelter. And this was
(17:31):
either a misunderstanding or grudge that both brothers would carry
throughout their lives and refuse to reconcile. Later that year
this Rudy himself gets called up for military service, and
at this point he suspects that Audi had schemed to
get him sent to the front to edge him out
(17:54):
of the business, and he serves from nineteen p three
to nineteen five. In Rudy deserts his post in Poland.
He flees just ahead of the oncoming Russian army and
he goes back to harriz Oh. He hurriedly gets a
friend of his who is a doctor to declare him
(18:17):
unfit for military service due to a frozen foot. But
then frozen foot, Yeah, frozen foot Is that like a
twisted ankle kind of it's you know what he was
in a hurry? Is that like bone spurs? Yeah, it's
just something to make you unable to walk? And so
this doesn't pass muster with the Gestapo. They arrest Rudy
(18:39):
Dostler for desertion and he blames that on Addie two.
But here's the thing. We don't know whether Aidolph Dostler
got his brother purposely sent into military service, but we
do have pretty compelling, circumstantial reports that both Audie and
his wife snitched on him. Yeah, I say, I see
(19:00):
referenced in several places. Um, one of which is in
a Fortune magazine article called the Hatred and Bitterness behind
two of the world's most popular brands by Omar Aktar
to a an American investigative report. Um, that was found
and that's in Fortune, right, Yes, that's Unfortune. And so
he's arrested first for dessert his post by the Gestapo,
(19:23):
and then when he's released by the Gestapo, he's arrested
by the Allies on suspicion of working for the Gestapo.
And that American investigative report that you mentioned, NOL does
give truth to his claims. And while he was languishing
wasting away in a pow camp. Uh, Adolph Dostler is
(19:47):
very hard at work. He's rebuilding the business and he
is making a killing selling shoes, selling quote unquote Jesse
Owen shoes. Two American soldiers who all know about the
legend very summer Olympics and all want to have the shoes.
And it feels to me this is a speculating but
told me, tell me if you think this is true.
(20:08):
Band that this is a really early example of this
kind of endorsement culture in sporting goods and war and
any kind of apparel. Right. I really do feel like
this is kind of the model setter for that whole thing,
and this is something that the company would continue to
lean heavily into and it would become another sore spot
between the brothers as time went on. Absolutely we should
(20:31):
also point out I couldn't find anything about Jesse Owens
getting any percentage of sales, So I think that was
I think that was rough spot for him because he
could have made millions. What was a different time, right,
I mean it was like a cutting edge stuff. They
were almost like, yeah, just give me the shoes so
I can perform better because other companies weren't making anything
(20:51):
that was quite up to this level of innovation, right, Right.
So these guys at first their personalities complementing one another.
Then their relationships became strained. Now they hate each other,
They loathe and a bore one another, and they can
barely stand each other's presence, which is weird because they
still both live in the same, very very small town
(21:14):
and we see this hate in the historical record. So
Rudy is not taken this on the chin or turning
the other cheek. He retaliates against his brother in nineteen
forty six when Adolph Dossler is hauled before the Deed
not Sification Committee and he could be classified as something
(21:36):
called a belstetter or a profiteer, which means if he
is proven to have made a lot of profit or
having broken financial laws during wartime, he could have lost
control of the entire company of Dossler Brothers. And that meant,
at least in Rudy's mind, that he could be appointed
(21:56):
to run the company. He could maybe even cut out
his brother in entirely, which is brutal when you consider
Rudy didn't make the shoes. This is this is very strange.
So he tried to paint Adolph Dostler in a terrible
light trying to get control of the company. But they
still lived under the same roof. Yeah, so he was
(22:18):
sort of like pointing the finger right at his right
in himself. Um. And ultimately the Allies determined that neither
of the Dostler brothers were problematic enough Nazis to really
mess with. They had bigger Nazi fish to fry. Yeah yeah,
And the American occupation forces. Actually it sees their villa.
(22:38):
So all these this, these two families that hate each
other are living in uh makeshift accommodations in the shoe factory,
so this is funny. In nineteen eight, they officially split
the company up and moved to opposite sides of the
river that bisects this tiny little hamlet in uh In
(22:59):
Bavaria River oroc. Yeah, and Audi names his company Adidas Adidas, right,
which is a portman to we were on dangerous ground
there of his first and last names. And Rudy tries
to do something similar and at first he calls his
(23:21):
company Ruda. Now to me, this is a big signpost
of how uncreative and kind of like rip off e
Rudy kind of was. That he immediately had to be like, oh,
you're gonna make a portmanteau for your company name. Well,
I'm gonna do the same thing, you know, And because
Adidas is clever, that's a good idea and it sounds
(23:42):
it sounds good. But you know, he did see the
light and whether he was counseled by some smart young
buck in marketing, he changed the name to the the
now much more ubiquitous Puma, which couldn't imagine I mean Ruda.
That sounds that's hard, that's not even fun to say.
It sounds like years ago, I did an episode for
Car Stuff on cars behind the Iron Curtain. Remember that
(24:04):
I was the producer of that producer that's yeah, wow,
we go way back. But the thing is, Ruda sounds
like a kind of iron curtain car. It also sounds
like the prefix for like rudimentary makes me think like
they're kind of like crappy shoes. Yeah, it just sounds
very plain, you know. Puma. On the other hand, I
(24:24):
picture a powerful, you know, prowling beast with speed and
precision and agility, something that leaps and pounces. Right. So, yes,
correct decision on Rudy's part to us shed that name
Ruda and go for something a little bit better. And
here's something interesting. We mentioned earlier that harz Oh is
(24:49):
in an area of Germany. It was known for shoemaking. Historically,
it was one of the primary industries of the area.
It's no surprise that shoe factories would take off here,
but eventually most of the town, if not all of
the town, ends up working for one of these two factories.
These guys still hate each other, by the way, Oh,
(25:10):
with a venomous passion, and that that passion extends this
to me, this was one of the weirdest parts. It
extends to the employees. Oh man, no, it is. It
was they created this whole hat field in McCoy's kind
of atmosphere, in this little town um that was literally
divided by that river we talked about. I mean, there
were restaurants, bars, grocery stores specifically designed to just be
(25:36):
for employees of one company or the other. They were
I mean, I can't imagine it would have been codified
in any kind of real way, but there was this
unspoken idea that they never the twain shall meet. There
shall be no coupling between Puma and Adida's employees, including yeah,
romantic pursuits. Yeah, I think that's that's that's yeah, exactly right,
(25:57):
And certainly marriage would have been hashtag for boating built in. Yeah.
And there's there's an interesting split in terms of the
internal workforce as well. So when the Dossler brothers split
the company up, the employees essentially had to choose they
(26:17):
could go to Adidas or they could go to Puma.
Most of the technical people like the actual cobblers stayed
with Adidas. Most of the salesforce and the admin folks
went with Puma and it showed pretty quickly and man,
making it even deeper bitterer family affair. Even the mom
(26:39):
had to pick sides. Yeah, yeah, who who did she think?
She went with the elder? Isn't that crazy? Which is
so crazy because Oddi's the was the idea man. He
was the Willy Wonka of this whole operation. He started
it in her abandoned laundry. How could she forsake her
her young son like at her bright young boy. Yeah,
(27:03):
I think clearly we have chosen our horse in this race.
We don't want to be too bias, but we do
want to be transparent about that. Rudy seems like the worst.
I'm on team Audi all the way. What about you, Casey.
I gotta side with the run DMC and Corn. I'm
going Adidas. It has been adjudicated, Casey on the case.
(27:24):
I love that segment. Have you seen that shirt design
that's floating around on the Facebook And no spoilers, guys,
but it's happening and I think it's going to have
some French on it. Check it out. Go to Ridiculous
Historians our community page, where you can see some A
plus memes as well. So let's let's pause for a
second before before we get into even more approbrium. There
(27:48):
is an interesting story about how they make how they
decide the iconic shoes, right, because clearly the Adidas or
the Pumas you buy today do not look like the
shoes the Jesse Owens. Oh no, like I said, I
mean you see on this amazing design blog design boom Um,
just the evolution of these shoes. And even as far
(28:09):
as it goes no, it's cool. You actually when you
start when it becomes Adidas because this this uh, this
site is particularly devoted to oddies designs, so they've obviously
chosen sides as well, you start to see more of
a fashion trend kind of coming into play. Spikes are
less pronounced, spikes are less pronounced, there's more color. They
have that like even in like sixty four um, you
(28:31):
have the the designs that use that kind of more
um Swede blue swede look. And then they've got the
little kind of stripes along the side, much more traditional.
Then you start seeing those like iconic like gold colored ones.
It's called the Azteca Gold Model. Um, and that's as
far as this blog goes. But yeah, so it took
like into the sixties for for them to really start
(28:53):
getting that iconic look that we know today from Adidas. Yeah,
and so we do have this story behind that iconic
three stripe arrangement on Adidas. So they had those strips
before and earlier versions of the shoe, but they weren't
really noticeable. They were the same color, like he said before,
the gold, before the blue and the white. So Audie
(29:15):
decided that the strips should be painted some other color
to make them look like stripes, and that this would
be the Adidas trademark. And so he made sample shoes,
some with two, some with three, some with four or
even as many as six stripes apiece, And then he
asked his wife and his sister in law to pick
which ones they liked best. They ended up saying that
(29:36):
four stripes is too many, it felt too busy, and
so on their advice, he went with the three stripe
design over at Puma. By the way, just to be fair,
Rudy had a couple of different depictions. He thought of
maybe having a Puma jumping through capital d but eventually
he just settled on the company's signature horizontal stripe, which
(29:58):
they call a form stripe. Man, and you have just
really expanded my sneaker head Oh no, oh, no, actual
sneaker heads who are listening to this. YEA. Hopefully you
find this of interest. Hopefully, but really, if you are
a sneaker head, I cannot I know I'm harping on it,
but I cannot recommend highly enough this Design Boom blog
(30:18):
because each shoe has very specific information about like some
of the design features, and there are some very specific
kind of jargon e terms that I was unaware of
that folks that are into that world might be a
little more hip too, so I recommend checking that out.
We should also mention I think we talked about this
(30:39):
a little bit off air. The entire time this story
is taking place, like since forty eight, they are suing
the pants off each other, right or trying to. I
mean pretty much just a NonStop torrent of lawsuits UM.
And I don't know if you were able to find
anything specific Ben or any specific UM documentation, but I
(31:00):
would conjecture I would hazard to guess that a lot
of it was around Rudy possibly nicking some of these
designs from his clearly more sneaker headed brother, ADDI, Oh yeah, absolutely.
And as this stuff is happening, Adidas and Puma are
both growing as companies. The town is getting further and
(31:24):
further and further divided. It becomes known as did you
see this nickname? No? Oh? Yeah, the bent Next, Yes,
the town of bent Next. Because, according to the story,
if you were walking around town and you saw some
when you didn't know, you would look at their shoes
before you decided whether to talk to them. If you
were a Puma person and they wore pumas, you're in Yeah.
(31:47):
That is just crazy how it's such a specific industry
and such a small town to be divided so and
have such a very interesting way of identifying and easy, right,
you could just look at the other person's US and say,
I know what team you're on, buddy. Here's how deep
it went. This is something I found. I only found
this in one place, so I hope it's true, but
(32:09):
I couldn't confirm me yet. Apparently each side had their
own tombstone carvers. Ye, that will come into play a
little bit later. I did find an article on a
blog called Duets blog that deals with the intersection of
creativity and the law, and it talks about how a
lot of the lawsuits between Puma and Adidas were in fact,
(32:30):
uh quibbling over that three stripe design that you mentioned
earlier and went into um Apparently Puma, in a burst
of creativity made it a four stripe design um to
just you know, one one stripe better in the mind
of in the mind of Rudy. Not to mention the
fact that we talked about earlier, how there was this
(32:53):
um focus on getting these athletes to endorse these products, right,
and that continued and became a game of one upsmanship
between Addie and Rudy as their respective companies kind of
started to gain steam on their own. And this continued
on throughout the years. When Addie actually turned down the
(33:13):
idea of sponsoring this young up and coming tennis player
by the name of Boris Becker. If you've heard of him,
he was a big deal in the in the eighties
and in the nineties. UM. And so just just as
a you know, act of pure one upsmanship, Rudy signed him,
not because he thought he was awesome or he saw
any promise in him. He just wanted to piss off
(33:35):
his brother. Um. And this is from a fantastic article
in the Telegraph called Addas and Puma. Bury the hatchet
after sixty years of brothers feud? What Bury the hatchet? Ben?
What does that mean? It means that the brothers died.
And remember that that tombstone carver you were talking about, Well,
those respective tombstone carvers carved those respective tombstones on polar
(33:58):
opposite sides of the town. Yes, that's correct. Rudy Dossler,
the elder of the Dossiler brothers, died on October nineteen
seventy four of lung cancer. He was seventy six. Uh.
The priest called his little brother Adolf to his side,
and they did not squash the beef. As far as
(34:19):
we know. Adolf himself expired four years later, he was
seventy eight. Ben, I want to correct myself here. I
think I said earlier that there were separate cemeteries and
opposite side of the town. That seems to be not
quite right. They just made sure that in the town
cemetery they were as far away from one another as possible,
symbolically as to the telegraph rights, symbolically representing their unending hatred,
(34:43):
so they did it on purpose. Can you imagine that
deathbed conversation? Man? Yeah, and I cannot know. I cannot
and I cannot imagine. I mean, the circumstances were pretty insane.
You're talking about a lot of money, a lot of
intellectual property. Um, a weird power dynamic, weird familial relations,
not to mention being in the heart of one of
(35:06):
the most brutal conflicts in the history of the world,
if not the most brutal conflict in history of the world.
So you know, lots lots of factors at play here.
But um, I did read in that Vice article that
the brothers purportedly never spoke to each other again. But
then there are in hints that maybe they did here
and there from time to time throughout their lives. But
(35:28):
it's certainly never smoothed things over. But there's a really
good quote from a book called Sneaker Wars, The Enemy
Brothers who founded Adidas and Pumas and the family Feud
that Forever changed the Business of Sports, by Barbara smit
And it is a quote from Rudolph Dossler Uh much
later in his life. Um, and he says this the
(35:48):
relation to my brother was ideal from nineteen four till
nineteen thirty three. Then his young wife tried to interfere
in business matters, although she with her sixteen years had
experience at all, and the warfare began. Wow. So it
was probably a situation where he said I hate your wife,
like a Yoko Beatles kind of situation. Maybe maybe that's
(36:12):
the needle in the conflict taste that here. We do
know that the feud carried on to later generations, and
the brothers had notoriously bad relationships with their children as well.
I was reading a pretty interesting article in The Guardian
that talked about this uh Adidas versus Puma, the bitterer
(36:35):
rivalry that runs and runs, and in this they explore
the problems that the brothers had almost universally relating to
family members. So Audi always fought with his son and heir,
a guy named Horse Dostler, and eventually banished him to France.
Banished him, Yeah, he banished him to work on a
(36:58):
shoe factory that was failing losing a ton of money.
He turned it into a money maker that he built
a thing called Adidas France that rivaled the rest of
Adidas but it wasn't good enough for his dad. And
Rudy over at Puma had a son named Armand Dassler.
It was his oldest son and heir. He routinely made
(37:18):
fun of him in front of other company executives. Uh.
And he was going crazy because he saw his cousin
Horst succeeding at Adidas. So Armand finally exiled himself to
Salzburg to run a Puma factory there. And then he
started selling shoes on the US market, which his father
had forbidden him to do. And when Rudy died in
(37:43):
four his oldest son was startled to learn he had
been written out of the will. That's cold many Well,
after all this bad blood and bitter familial feuding, surely
there's a silver lining here somewhere right then, it's somewhere
in the end zone of this story, on the on
the pitch. Yeah, maybe uh laid on me bro. Well,
(38:05):
the two companies do still exist in that same tiny
town of twenty um harz Oh. I'm not gonna even
try to pronounce it again because I don't have it
in front of me. Um. But in two thousand nine,
the company's kind of put their differences aside, and then
this this this really brutal history of one upsmanship aside
and stepped out to play a friendly soccer game, whereas
(38:30):
the Europeans call it a football uh. And it was
to support the Piece One Day Organization UM, which chose
September twenty one of two thousand nine as the first,
I believe, of an annual day of non violence. So um.
But then this article in the Telegraph ends with the
very knowing little Kicker line quote but despite the friendly handshakes,
(38:53):
those who know the townspeople say it will take more
than one game of soccer to bury the hatchet. And
business terms, Adidas, if you just look at the numbers,
is by far the larger company. I think in two
thousand nine they had thirty nine thousand employees compared to
Puma's nine thousand. But Puma says they're not hurting. They
(39:14):
have a great reputation for getting the endorsements of world
famous athletes like use same bolt was one of the
one of the more recent ones. And that's a legacy
that's just carried over from the old Dostler Brothers days.
So very very forward thinking. And I did read somewhere
the While Adidas maybe wasn't the first custom sneaker company,
(39:34):
they were the first to like man mass produce and
sell them to the public. Because you make a custom
sneaker designed for an athlete, there was a time where
it was literally a custom product designed for an individual.
Now these custom products, people want them on their feet,
even though they are not Hussain Bolt, even though they
are not Michael Jordan's, you know, makes them feel a
(39:56):
little bit closer to their heroes. Yeah, like Reebok pumps,
you know, remember those lights? Oh yeah, easies. It's an
interesting pattern, and it makes me think that we found
a crazy piece of history that a lot of people
don't know. If you are listening to this, gosh, I
hope someone out here is. If you're listening to this
(40:18):
and you're wearing Adidas and Pumas, Adidas or Pumas, I
don't know how you'd wear. I guess one on one
ft one on the other. That would look ridiculous. It's
very forward fashion, I think. But if you're wearing those,
be aware that you are treading on strange history with
each step. You take a waxing poetic here, just because
it's such an interesting story and the image of treading.
(40:41):
We're talking about shoes that works quite nicely. Yeah yeah, oh,
thanks man, and we hope that you enjoyed this episode
as much as we enjoyed making it. No again, you know,
I don't want to blow up your spot, but happy
birthday man. We'll have a drink after work maybe. Yeah. Yeah,
let's see. Let's look into that case here you down,
let's do it all right? Well, Casey is spoken, and
(41:03):
of course we want to thank you Casey for helping
us out as always, thanks for saving the show. We
want to thank our research associate Ease Jeff Cope. Also
want to thank Alex Williams, who composed our theme and
um yeah, we want to thank you for joining us
for another episode of ridiculous history. Stay tuned for our
next episode where we blow up the moon try to.
(41:23):
We'll see it then, folks,
Welcome to the show, friends and neighbors. Thanks for tuning in.
We have two developments that we'd like to tell you
about that occurred outside of the studio only, one of
which is tangentially related to today's episode. First is that
it is my trusty co host Noel Brown's birthday today.
(00:44):
I'm sorry, I was running in place um birthday resolution
with my new Adida's track shoes. Right yeah, that so
happy birthday, Noel. I'm Ben. Let's say hello to our
super producer Casey Pegrum and the set can. Development, which
is I guess at best tangentially related to today's episode,
(01:04):
is that, for the first time in years, I bought
a pair of tennis shoes. You sure did, and Ben,
thank you for the birthday wishes. I was the endorphins
were flowing through me so much I I didn't even respond,
uh politely, and I do apologize. Let's talk about your shoes.
Yours are tigers though, right right right? Lions and tigers
and bears and pumas, and yes, yes, that is the
(01:26):
tangential relationship today. So one of the most well known
popular tennis shoe brands is Nike today, right, very true,
very very true, just do it. But other brands are
still in the international sphere and very very well known,
like Adidas and Pumas and um I don't know, we
(01:47):
can just spoil this part of the story in advance.
Nike kind of blew up as a result of Dita's
and Pumas kind of being distracted with sort of the
topic of today's episode and not really paying attention to
this impending shoe mcgeddon that Nike brought on. Yeah, absolutely absolutely,
because well, like, have you ever owned a pair of
(02:08):
Adidas or a Puma shoe? I have an Adidas hoodie
that I'm quite fond of, um uh, And I think
I've owned a Puma a pair of Puma shoes. Don't
think I've ever owned any Adidas shoes, but fan of
the hoodies. I think I've only owned a track suit
from Adidas. It was a different life. I could never
I could not picture track it was it was for
(02:29):
a show, it was unrelated. But I haven't own the
shoes either, which is, you know, not super unusual for us,
because neither of us are especially sneaker heads as they're called.
But but they are very very popular shoes and they
have a very strange story behind them. I guess to
(02:49):
start off today, we should go ahead and just be
upfront about the pronunciation in the name of this town.
Should we have a pronunciation off and then we can
check four of O and see who was closest. So
you're using four vo, right, that's okay? Is that your
go to pronunciation guide of choice? It is because it's
crowdsourced and it's usually from natives, so I find it
(03:10):
to be pretty reliable. And if they're if the word
isn't there, then I just, you know, roll the dice.
But this one, in fact was there. So let's how
about we spell it first so everyone knows where we're
coming from. It's h E r z O G E
in A U R A c h. So let's see
would that be who's ogan? Who's ok? Why do you
(03:32):
give you a shut well man? I may have told
you that in the past life I was once a
young German boy. That's true. I would defer to your pronunciation.
So I'm gonna give it a go with the help
of four vo, and then I'll check check myself. Hatzelgan
Alla hats Olgan got close close. I think I overpronounced
the gen again. So they're more like hat solgan al yeah,
(03:56):
g and kind of like just right. So you know
this is let's call it, what do we say, ben heart,
So that's what the locals call it. It's gonna be easier,
so I heard. So it has a storied sneaker past. Yes, yes,
our story begins with the Dozzler brothers, Rudolph and Adolph.
(04:18):
But Rudy and a ADDI to their friends and to
us and to us for the purposes of this. So
Addie is the younger brother. He's a cobbler. He's an inventor.
He's a bit of an entrepreneur. His favorite thing in
the world is to sit at his workbench and tinker.
And he starts making shoes. So I thought I thought
(04:42):
a shoemaker was a cobbler. It was a tinker. Is
a tinker as a thing too. There's tinker Taylor Soldier
Spine in that movie What's a Tinker? So you could
tinker with things. But the old profession is someone who
travels from place to place mending things like pots and pants. Right,
So he is a tinker and a cobbler. I would
(05:03):
say he's a tinkerer. So he's a tinkering cobbler, and
he's cobbling at his tinker bench, uh, and what does
he make? Ben there there's a little bit of more
of a story here too. This was after World War One.
Things were pretty dire in Germany um Bavaria where Hartzo
is located, and his the brother's mother had had a
(05:25):
laundry business that was no longer operational, and so that's
where Oddi set up his shop. He was eighteen years
old when he returned from World War One in nineteen eighteen,
and Harzo was a Northern Bavaria oddly enough to Shoemaking
was the biggest industry in the area at the time,
(05:47):
so it was a natural fit for him to go
into this empty laundry shed and begin making shoes. Right.
There's a great, great article that we're gonna pull some
good stuff from from Vice Sports by Brian Blickenstaff that
sort of mentions the idea that even in those kind
of salad days, uh, post World War One, when folks
(06:08):
were returning back home and things were kind of a
little bit um, getting by by hook or by crook.
You you might not have to buy the nicest clothes,
but you had to have functional shoes, right, you got
you gotta have shoes, And there's there's an excellent article
depicting his experience making his first pair of shoes over
on Today I found out folks. You may notice we're
(06:30):
avoiding giving you the headlines of these articles right now.
That's because we don't want to spoil things straight from
the gate. So he makes his first shoes for just
for his friends. But these shoes that he creates are
made out of leather scraps salvaged from helmets and wartime
uniforms another gear. These are like mad Max shoes. Yeah,
(06:52):
that's a good description. And it turns out people really
liked Addie shoes. His reputation spread far beyond Harzeh and
pretty soon he had one of the best problems you
can have when you start your own business. He had
more work than he could handle. Yeah, I think it
took him about three years to get to that point. Um,
And that's when he enlisted the help of his brother Rudy,
(07:16):
who was a little bit more of a business minded
kind of guy, a bit of a brash kind of
salesman type dude. And he really needed that because Addie
was sort of the brains behind the product, and Rudy
came in and became, you know, the power behind the throne,
the kind of guy that pushed the product out into
the marketplace. A bit. Yeah, Nree, Rudy joins. And we
(07:38):
must emphasize just how different these two guys are. ADDI
sounds to me like an introvert and Rudy definitely seems
like the extrovert. And this this worked in the beginning.
This was a fantastic partnership. I mean they had already
grown up together, so they knew what to expect, and
(07:58):
they worked pretty well in the early days. Uh. And
in nineteen twenty four, things were going well enough that
they said, you know what, let's make it official. Bro,
Let's start a company. Yeah. They're called the Dossler Bros.
Or Dossler the Dozzler Brothers Shoe Company. And they continue growing,
(08:19):
so I believe it's in nineteen twenties six they say, Okay,
this laundry shed operation isn't cutting it. We need an
actual factory. Oh. We shall also mentioned before we get
too far into the story. After World War One, Rudy
had decided he wanted to become a policeman, and he
actually he trained for it like a Gestapo type policeman.
(08:40):
Interesting that you would mention that part that is going
to come into play later, because yes, this is Germany
in the mid nineteen twenties at this time. Yes, yes,
So where where should we go next? We're we're still
in Harzoh right we are, and we're gonna we're gonna
mainly stay there. Yeah, yeah, towards the end we I'd
expand a little, but yes, this is a Harzos story
(09:03):
through and through. Uh do you want to talk a
little bit about what these shoes look like and how
they differ from modern shoes? Yeah? I think we really should.
There is a really cool blog post on a site
called design Boom called History of Adida's Audi Dostler's first
Track and Field Shoes, and it goes through a chronology
(09:24):
of these designs of between the twenties and the thirties.
The very first shoe, called the Model Viitzer from nineteen
was a sprint shoe and it was actually worn at
the Olympic Games in Amsterdam of that year, and it
looks almost like a rudimentary, kind of very stark ballet
(09:44):
shoe mixed with like a bowling shoe. But it's very
very steeply angled from the heel to like where the
ball of the foot might be, and then it flattens
out and then has these cleats, these six pronounced almost
like crocodile teeth looking cleats UM. And this was kind
of um a revolutionary design because according to this blog,
(10:06):
it was the first shoe to use a screw system
in athletics, which were six handmade spikes that were cut
pressed through these holes that were punched in the out
sole of the shoe, and then we're screwed in um
using a steel disk that attaches from the outsold the
outside of the shoe. And there were some positives here
(10:28):
and that it gave runners traction that they had lacked
in the past. But it also they were a little
bit heavy because there were a lot of weighty metal parts, right,
and they were not manufacturing the actual spikes themselves. They
did have help from a blacksmith operation, but the rest
of it sourcing the material and assembling that that's that's
(10:49):
all Dostler, And it's true, this stuff is revolutionary. People
are loving it. We do need to mention that Adolf
Hitler and the Nazi Party come to power in what
round thirty three, and when this happens, both of the
Dozzler brothers do join the Nazi Party. That's true. Um,
(11:13):
they have been described, to their credit, I guess as
not being the most uh adamant Nazis. I guess they
were sort of low key Nazis. Yeah they were. They
were not. Um, I guess they were fair weather Nazis. Yeah.
It seemed like they were just doing it because they
were fitting in maybe, which is a huge problem. It's
(11:35):
a huge problem with the whole Nazi plague in general.
It's like I was just following orders. I was just
trying to fit in. That's not a discussion for today's episode.
But all the while, they they're blending into the background,
um while making these shoes, and it kind of comes
to a head when one of their designs gets worn
(11:56):
by a very famous African American UH sprinter by the
name of James Cleveland Owens a k a. Jesse Owens,
who wore these shoes and a very specific sporting event
that we have talked about in episodes past. Yes, we
were referring to the nineteen thirty six Summer Olympics, which
were held in Berlin. UH. If you've checked out our
(12:19):
earlier episode, then you noticed that Jesse Owens is a
returning guest to our show. Jesse Owens was a track
and field star, and given that the Dozzler brothers were
already benefiting from the Nazi Party's use of sports as
a propaganda tool, they saw the Summer Olympics as an
(12:41):
opportunity to go into the international sphere and get recognition
outside of Harzo and outside of Germany. So they pushed
and pushed to get Dossler shoes on Jesse Owens. All
they really seemed to care about in the Olympics, in fact,
was getting je See Owens to wear these shoes. He
(13:02):
did wear Dossler shoes and he won four gold medals, which, again,
if you look at the way these shoes are constructed,
is crazy because there you're not supposed to use your heel,
You're just supposed to like dig in and run on
your toes. And the plan worked. Owen's four medals gave
the company huge amounts of international attention, and athletes from
(13:24):
all across Europe started making their way to this village
harz Oh, which is pretty tiny, whenever they passed through Germany,
saying I gotta get a pair of one of those
Dossler Brothers shoes. Yeah, and from that original design we
talked about, from this one was much improved because it
actually left out the metal plate um and it had
(13:45):
very small islets where the and thin laces, which helped
to reduce the weight of the shoe, which was really
important for you know, sprinting. Absolutely in fact, instead of
they had to get really creative with materials because instead
of using that metal late they used something called vegetable
tanned bottom leather or vash leather um and that significantly
(14:07):
reduced the weight. So really forward thinking design work going
into these shoes that continued to carry on, specifically with
UH with Audi. Yeah, I look again, as we're going
to see, neither of these guys are perfect, but all
these innovations in the world of footwear are Audies. I
want to highlight that because I feel like that's very
(14:30):
important that Audi was the brains of the operation. Well,
at this point, their success is bringing them to a
more money, more problems sort of situation. Their relationship is
becoming strained, and as the company is succeeding, Germany is
inching closer to war and the brothers are experiencing a
(14:51):
failure in their relationship. One that a huge animosity that
extends to their wives, their children, their pair, it's their
other siblings, because they did have other siblings, and weirdly
both families lived together in the same villa, which seemed
less than ideal considering that every source we've looked into
(15:12):
has their wives just fighting like cats and dogs between
each other. They were not peacemakers, not at all. And
I'm sure that tension carried over into the brother's relationship.
When you're trying to defend your wife in some sort
of spat and take take their side, it probably soured
relations between the brothers and less not forget moms in
the picture too. So in nineteen forty, Addie gets the
(15:40):
call he is asked to serve in the German military,
and he does for about three months, but somehow he
is able to get an exemption, and you'll hear different
his story and speculate that this could have been due
to Rudy's effort to maybe back in Harzel. He was
pulling some strings to get his brother out to go
(16:02):
back to the shoe business, and we'll probably never know
for sure whether he was able to get that exemption
due to Rudy, but we do know that whatever happened,
it did not alleviate the tension between the families. As
as the war kicked into full swing, the tensions between
(16:22):
the families got worse and worse until they hit a
tipping point. Yeah, this is one of the most divisive
bits of the story. Um There there are various accounts
of this, but it is something that comes up repeatedly,
and so supposedly in when there was an Allied air
raid on um Hartze, the brothers and their families found
(16:44):
themselves sharing a bomb shelter um and supposedly Adolph made
a comment that Rudy was never able to shake because
he interpreted as being a direct insult to his family. So,
as the story goes, Adolph and hearing the sound of
the approaching um R a F Forces Royal Air Force
(17:08):
British planes, said something to the effect of there come
those pig dogs again or here come those bastards, The
dirty bastards are back again, exactly to which Rudy uh
heard that as an insult, lobbed at he and his
family as they got into the shelter. And this was
(17:31):
either a misunderstanding or grudge that both brothers would carry
throughout their lives and refuse to reconcile. Later that year
this Rudy himself gets called up for military service, and
at this point he suspects that Audi had schemed to
get him sent to the front to edge him out
(17:54):
of the business, and he serves from nineteen p three
to nineteen five. In Rudy deserts his post in Poland.
He flees just ahead of the oncoming Russian army and
he goes back to harriz Oh. He hurriedly gets a
friend of his who is a doctor to declare him
(18:17):
unfit for military service due to a frozen foot. But
then frozen foot, Yeah, frozen foot Is that like a
twisted ankle kind of it's you know what he was
in a hurry? Is that like bone spurs? Yeah, it's
just something to make you unable to walk? And so
this doesn't pass muster with the Gestapo. They arrest Rudy
(18:39):
Dostler for desertion and he blames that on Addie two.
But here's the thing. We don't know whether Aidolph Dostler
got his brother purposely sent into military service, but we
do have pretty compelling, circumstantial reports that both Audie and
his wife snitched on him. Yeah, I say, I see
(19:00):
referenced in several places. Um, one of which is in
a Fortune magazine article called the Hatred and Bitterness behind
two of the world's most popular brands by Omar Aktar
to a an American investigative report. Um, that was found
and that's in Fortune, right, Yes, that's Unfortune. And so
he's arrested first for dessert his post by the Gestapo,
(19:23):
and then when he's released by the Gestapo, he's arrested
by the Allies on suspicion of working for the Gestapo.
And that American investigative report that you mentioned, NOL does
give truth to his claims. And while he was languishing
wasting away in a pow camp. Uh, Adolph Dostler is
(19:47):
very hard at work. He's rebuilding the business and he
is making a killing selling shoes, selling quote unquote Jesse
Owen shoes. Two American soldiers who all know about the
legend very summer Olympics and all want to have the shoes.
And it feels to me this is a speculating but
told me, tell me if you think this is true.
(20:08):
Band that this is a really early example of this
kind of endorsement culture in sporting goods and war and
any kind of apparel. Right. I really do feel like
this is kind of the model setter for that whole thing,
and this is something that the company would continue to
lean heavily into and it would become another sore spot
between the brothers as time went on. Absolutely we should
(20:31):
also point out I couldn't find anything about Jesse Owens
getting any percentage of sales, So I think that was
I think that was rough spot for him because he
could have made millions. What was a different time, right,
I mean it was like a cutting edge stuff. They
were almost like, yeah, just give me the shoes so
I can perform better because other companies weren't making anything
(20:51):
that was quite up to this level of innovation, right, Right.
So these guys at first their personalities complementing one another.
Then their relationships became strained. Now they hate each other,
They loathe and a bore one another, and they can
barely stand each other's presence, which is weird because they
still both live in the same, very very small town
(21:14):
and we see this hate in the historical record. So
Rudy is not taken this on the chin or turning
the other cheek. He retaliates against his brother in nineteen
forty six when Adolph Dossler is hauled before the Deed
not Sification Committee and he could be classified as something
(21:36):
called a belstetter or a profiteer, which means if he
is proven to have made a lot of profit or
having broken financial laws during wartime, he could have lost
control of the entire company of Dossler Brothers. And that meant,
at least in Rudy's mind, that he could be appointed
(21:56):
to run the company. He could maybe even cut out
his brother in entirely, which is brutal when you consider
Rudy didn't make the shoes. This is this is very strange.
So he tried to paint Adolph Dostler in a terrible
light trying to get control of the company. But they
still lived under the same roof. Yeah, so he was
(22:18):
sort of like pointing the finger right at his right
in himself. Um. And ultimately the Allies determined that neither
of the Dostler brothers were problematic enough Nazis to really
mess with. They had bigger Nazi fish to fry. Yeah yeah,
And the American occupation forces. Actually it sees their villa.
(22:38):
So all these this, these two families that hate each
other are living in uh makeshift accommodations in the shoe factory,
so this is funny. In nineteen eight, they officially split
the company up and moved to opposite sides of the
river that bisects this tiny little hamlet in uh In
(22:59):
Bavaria River oroc. Yeah, and Audi names his company Adidas Adidas, right,
which is a portman to we were on dangerous ground
there of his first and last names. And Rudy tries
to do something similar and at first he calls his
(23:21):
company Ruda. Now to me, this is a big signpost
of how uncreative and kind of like rip off e
Rudy kind of was. That he immediately had to be like, oh,
you're gonna make a portmanteau for your company name. Well,
I'm gonna do the same thing, you know, And because
Adidas is clever, that's a good idea and it sounds
(23:42):
it sounds good. But you know, he did see the
light and whether he was counseled by some smart young
buck in marketing, he changed the name to the the
now much more ubiquitous Puma, which couldn't imagine I mean Ruda.
That sounds that's hard, that's not even fun to say.
It sounds like years ago, I did an episode for
Car Stuff on cars behind the Iron Curtain. Remember that
(24:04):
I was the producer of that producer that's yeah, wow,
we go way back. But the thing is, Ruda sounds
like a kind of iron curtain car. It also sounds
like the prefix for like rudimentary makes me think like
they're kind of like crappy shoes. Yeah, it just sounds
very plain, you know. Puma. On the other hand, I
(24:24):
picture a powerful, you know, prowling beast with speed and
precision and agility, something that leaps and pounces. Right. So, yes,
correct decision on Rudy's part to us shed that name
Ruda and go for something a little bit better. And
here's something interesting. We mentioned earlier that harz Oh is
(24:49):
in an area of Germany. It was known for shoemaking. Historically,
it was one of the primary industries of the area.
It's no surprise that shoe factories would take off here,
but eventually most of the town, if not all of
the town, ends up working for one of these two factories.
These guys still hate each other, by the way, Oh,
(25:10):
with a venomous passion, and that that passion extends this
to me, this was one of the weirdest parts. It
extends to the employees. Oh man, no, it is. It
was they created this whole hat field in McCoy's kind
of atmosphere, in this little town um that was literally
divided by that river we talked about. I mean, there
were restaurants, bars, grocery stores specifically designed to just be
(25:36):
for employees of one company or the other. They were
I mean, I can't imagine it would have been codified
in any kind of real way, but there was this
unspoken idea that they never the twain shall meet. There
shall be no coupling between Puma and Adida's employees, including yeah,
romantic pursuits. Yeah, I think that's that's that's yeah, exactly right,
(25:57):
And certainly marriage would have been hashtag for boating built in. Yeah.
And there's there's an interesting split in terms of the
internal workforce as well. So when the Dossler brothers split
the company up, the employees essentially had to choose they
(26:17):
could go to Adidas or they could go to Puma.
Most of the technical people like the actual cobblers stayed
with Adidas. Most of the salesforce and the admin folks
went with Puma and it showed pretty quickly and man,
making it even deeper bitterer family affair. Even the mom
(26:39):
had to pick sides. Yeah, yeah, who who did she think?
She went with the elder? Isn't that crazy? Which is
so crazy because Oddi's the was the idea man. He
was the Willy Wonka of this whole operation. He started
it in her abandoned laundry. How could she forsake her
her young son like at her bright young boy. Yeah,
(27:03):
I think clearly we have chosen our horse in this race.
We don't want to be too bias, but we do
want to be transparent about that. Rudy seems like the worst.
I'm on team Audi all the way. What about you, Casey.
I gotta side with the run DMC and Corn. I'm
going Adidas. It has been adjudicated, Casey on the case.
(27:24):
I love that segment. Have you seen that shirt design
that's floating around on the Facebook And no spoilers, guys,
but it's happening and I think it's going to have
some French on it. Check it out. Go to Ridiculous
Historians our community page, where you can see some A
plus memes as well. So let's let's pause for a
second before before we get into even more approbrium. There
(27:48):
is an interesting story about how they make how they
decide the iconic shoes, right, because clearly the Adidas or
the Pumas you buy today do not look like the
shoes the Jesse Owens. Oh no, like I said, I
mean you see on this amazing design blog design boom Um,
just the evolution of these shoes. And even as far
(28:09):
as it goes no, it's cool. You actually when you
start when it becomes Adidas because this this uh, this
site is particularly devoted to oddies designs, so they've obviously
chosen sides as well, you start to see more of
a fashion trend kind of coming into play. Spikes are
less pronounced, spikes are less pronounced, there's more color. They
have that like even in like sixty four um, you
(28:31):
have the the designs that use that kind of more
um Swede blue swede look. And then they've got the
little kind of stripes along the side, much more traditional.
Then you start seeing those like iconic like gold colored ones.
It's called the Azteca Gold Model. Um, and that's as
far as this blog goes. But yeah, so it took
like into the sixties for for them to really start
(28:53):
getting that iconic look that we know today from Adidas. Yeah,
and so we do have this story behind that iconic
three stripe arrangement on Adidas. So they had those strips
before and earlier versions of the shoe, but they weren't
really noticeable. They were the same color, like he said before,
the gold, before the blue and the white. So Audie
(29:15):
decided that the strips should be painted some other color
to make them look like stripes, and that this would
be the Adidas trademark. And so he made sample shoes,
some with two, some with three, some with four or
even as many as six stripes apiece, And then he
asked his wife and his sister in law to pick
which ones they liked best. They ended up saying that
(29:36):
four stripes is too many, it felt too busy, and
so on their advice, he went with the three stripe
design over at Puma. By the way, just to be fair,
Rudy had a couple of different depictions. He thought of
maybe having a Puma jumping through capital d but eventually
he just settled on the company's signature horizontal stripe, which
(29:58):
they call a form stripe. Man, and you have just
really expanded my sneaker head Oh no, oh, no, actual
sneaker heads who are listening to this. YEA. Hopefully you
find this of interest. Hopefully, but really, if you are
a sneaker head, I cannot I know I'm harping on it,
but I cannot recommend highly enough this Design Boom blog
(30:18):
because each shoe has very specific information about like some
of the design features, and there are some very specific
kind of jargon e terms that I was unaware of
that folks that are into that world might be a
little more hip too, so I recommend checking that out.
We should also mention I think we talked about this
(30:39):
a little bit off air. The entire time this story
is taking place, like since forty eight, they are suing
the pants off each other, right or trying to. I
mean pretty much just a NonStop torrent of lawsuits UM.
And I don't know if you were able to find
anything specific Ben or any specific UM documentation, but I
(31:00):
would conjecture I would hazard to guess that a lot
of it was around Rudy possibly nicking some of these
designs from his clearly more sneaker headed brother, ADDI, Oh yeah, absolutely.
And as this stuff is happening, Adidas and Puma are
both growing as companies. The town is getting further and
(31:24):
further and further divided. It becomes known as did you
see this nickname? No? Oh? Yeah, the bent Next, Yes,
the town of bent Next. Because, according to the story,
if you were walking around town and you saw some
when you didn't know, you would look at their shoes
before you decided whether to talk to them. If you
were a Puma person and they wore pumas, you're in Yeah.
(31:47):
That is just crazy how it's such a specific industry
and such a small town to be divided so and
have such a very interesting way of identifying and easy, right,
you could just look at the other person's US and say,
I know what team you're on, buddy. Here's how deep
it went. This is something I found. I only found
this in one place, so I hope it's true, but
(32:09):
I couldn't confirm me yet. Apparently each side had their
own tombstone carvers. Ye, that will come into play a
little bit later. I did find an article on a
blog called Duets blog that deals with the intersection of
creativity and the law, and it talks about how a
lot of the lawsuits between Puma and Adidas were in fact,
(32:30):
uh quibbling over that three stripe design that you mentioned
earlier and went into um Apparently Puma, in a burst
of creativity made it a four stripe design um to
just you know, one one stripe better in the mind
of in the mind of Rudy. Not to mention the
fact that we talked about earlier, how there was this
(32:53):
um focus on getting these athletes to endorse these products, right,
and that continued and became a game of one upsmanship
between Addie and Rudy as their respective companies kind of
started to gain steam on their own. And this continued
on throughout the years. When Addie actually turned down the
(33:13):
idea of sponsoring this young up and coming tennis player
by the name of Boris Becker. If you've heard of him,
he was a big deal in the in the eighties
and in the nineties. UM. And so just just as
a you know, act of pure one upsmanship, Rudy signed him,
not because he thought he was awesome or he saw
any promise in him. He just wanted to piss off
(33:35):
his brother. Um. And this is from a fantastic article
in the Telegraph called Addas and Puma. Bury the hatchet
after sixty years of brothers feud? What Bury the hatchet? Ben?
What does that mean? It means that the brothers died.
And remember that that tombstone carver you were talking about, Well,
those respective tombstone carvers carved those respective tombstones on polar
(33:58):
opposite sides of the town. Yes, that's correct. Rudy Dossler,
the elder of the Dossiler brothers, died on October nineteen
seventy four of lung cancer. He was seventy six. Uh.
The priest called his little brother Adolf to his side,
and they did not squash the beef. As far as
(34:19):
we know. Adolf himself expired four years later, he was
seventy eight. Ben, I want to correct myself here. I
think I said earlier that there were separate cemeteries and
opposite side of the town. That seems to be not
quite right. They just made sure that in the town
cemetery they were as far away from one another as possible,
symbolically as to the telegraph rights, symbolically representing their unending hatred,
(34:43):
so they did it on purpose. Can you imagine that
deathbed conversation? Man? Yeah, and I cannot know. I cannot
and I cannot imagine. I mean, the circumstances were pretty insane.
You're talking about a lot of money, a lot of
intellectual property. Um, a weird power dynamic, weird familial relations,
not to mention being in the heart of one of
(35:06):
the most brutal conflicts in the history of the world,
if not the most brutal conflict in history of the world.
So you know, lots lots of factors at play here.
But um, I did read in that Vice article that
the brothers purportedly never spoke to each other again. But
then there are in hints that maybe they did here
and there from time to time throughout their lives. But
(35:28):
it's certainly never smoothed things over. But there's a really
good quote from a book called Sneaker Wars, The Enemy
Brothers who founded Adidas and Pumas and the family Feud
that Forever changed the Business of Sports, by Barbara smit
And it is a quote from Rudolph Dossler Uh much
later in his life. Um, and he says this the
(35:48):
relation to my brother was ideal from nineteen four till
nineteen thirty three. Then his young wife tried to interfere
in business matters, although she with her sixteen years had
experience at all, and the warfare began. Wow. So it
was probably a situation where he said I hate your wife,
like a Yoko Beatles kind of situation. Maybe maybe that's
(36:12):
the needle in the conflict taste that here. We do
know that the feud carried on to later generations, and
the brothers had notoriously bad relationships with their children as well.
I was reading a pretty interesting article in The Guardian
that talked about this uh Adidas versus Puma, the bitterer
(36:35):
rivalry that runs and runs, and in this they explore
the problems that the brothers had almost universally relating to
family members. So Audi always fought with his son and heir,
a guy named Horse Dostler, and eventually banished him to France.
Banished him, Yeah, he banished him to work on a
(36:58):
shoe factory that was failing losing a ton of money.
He turned it into a money maker that he built
a thing called Adidas France that rivaled the rest of
Adidas but it wasn't good enough for his dad. And
Rudy over at Puma had a son named Armand Dassler.
It was his oldest son and heir. He routinely made
(37:18):
fun of him in front of other company executives. Uh.
And he was going crazy because he saw his cousin
Horst succeeding at Adidas. So Armand finally exiled himself to
Salzburg to run a Puma factory there. And then he
started selling shoes on the US market, which his father
had forbidden him to do. And when Rudy died in
(37:43):
four his oldest son was startled to learn he had
been written out of the will. That's cold many Well,
after all this bad blood and bitter familial feuding, surely
there's a silver lining here somewhere right then, it's somewhere
in the end zone of this story, on the on
the pitch. Yeah, maybe uh laid on me bro. Well,
(38:05):
the two companies do still exist in that same tiny
town of twenty um harz Oh. I'm not gonna even
try to pronounce it again because I don't have it
in front of me. Um. But in two thousand nine,
the company's kind of put their differences aside, and then
this this this really brutal history of one upsmanship aside
and stepped out to play a friendly soccer game, whereas
(38:30):
the Europeans call it a football uh. And it was
to support the Piece One Day Organization UM, which chose
September twenty one of two thousand nine as the first,
I believe, of an annual day of non violence. So um.
But then this article in the Telegraph ends with the
very knowing little Kicker line quote but despite the friendly handshakes,
(38:53):
those who know the townspeople say it will take more
than one game of soccer to bury the hatchet. And
business terms, Adidas, if you just look at the numbers,
is by far the larger company. I think in two
thousand nine they had thirty nine thousand employees compared to
Puma's nine thousand. But Puma says they're not hurting. They
(39:14):
have a great reputation for getting the endorsements of world
famous athletes like use same bolt was one of the
one of the more recent ones. And that's a legacy
that's just carried over from the old Dostler Brothers days.
So very very forward thinking. And I did read somewhere
the While Adidas maybe wasn't the first custom sneaker company,
(39:34):
they were the first to like man mass produce and
sell them to the public. Because you make a custom
sneaker designed for an athlete, there was a time where
it was literally a custom product designed for an individual.
Now these custom products, people want them on their feet,
even though they are not Hussain Bolt, even though they
are not Michael Jordan's, you know, makes them feel a
(39:56):
little bit closer to their heroes. Yeah, like Reebok pumps,
you know, remember those lights? Oh yeah, easies. It's an
interesting pattern, and it makes me think that we found
a crazy piece of history that a lot of people
don't know. If you are listening to this, gosh, I
hope someone out here is. If you're listening to this
(40:18):
and you're wearing Adidas and Pumas, Adidas or Pumas, I
don't know how you'd wear. I guess one on one
ft one on the other. That would look ridiculous. It's
very forward fashion, I think. But if you're wearing those,
be aware that you are treading on strange history with
each step. You take a waxing poetic here, just because
it's such an interesting story and the image of treading.
(40:41):
We're talking about shoes that works quite nicely. Yeah yeah, oh,
thanks man, and we hope that you enjoyed this episode
as much as we enjoyed making it. No again, you know,
I don't want to blow up your spot, but happy
birthday man. We'll have a drink after work maybe. Yeah. Yeah,
let's see. Let's look into that case here you down,
let's do it all right? Well, Casey is spoken, and
(41:03):
of course we want to thank you Casey for helping
us out as always, thanks for saving the show. We
want to thank our research associate Ease Jeff Cope. Also
want to thank Alex Williams, who composed our theme and
um yeah, we want to thank you for joining us
for another episode of ridiculous history. Stay tuned for our
next episode where we blow up the moon try to.
(41:23):
We'll see it then, folks,
Ridiculous History News
Hosts And Creators
Ben Bowlin
Noel Brown
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