ADIDAS IS NAMED AFTER FOUNDER ADI DASSLER

Adidas is named after its founder, Adolf Dassler, who everyone in Herzogenaurach called Adi. He merged his nickname with the first letters of his surname when he registered the company on August 18, 1949. His older brother Rudolf had registered a rival shoe company on the other side of that small Bavarian town the year before. It became Puma.

The name has now outlasted the family that built it by two generations. Neither brother's descendants own a share of either company today, and the two factories that once split a river now compete in overlapping product categories, from soccer boots to lifestyle sneakers, without a single Dassler on either payroll.

1948. A Factory Splits Along the Aurach River

Adi and Rudolf Dassler ran one shoe factory together for two decades, Gebrüder Dassler Schuhfabrik, registered in Herzogenaurach on July 1, 1924. By 1948 the partnership was over, and the brothers split its machines, workers and patents into two operations on opposite banks of the Aurach River that runs through town.

Adi's first idea for a company name was addas, a blend of his own first and last names. A German children's shoe brand already used something too close to it, so he added one letter and registered adidas instead the following August, at age 49, with 47 employees.

Two years later, on that same factory floor, Adi designed the adidas Samba, an indoor training shoe built for coaches working frozen pitches. It is still adidas' best selling lifestyle shoe, and it carries his name into stores that opened decades after he died.

Rudolf Called His Company Ruda Before Puma

Rudolf set up on the opposite bank and first registered his company as Ruda, a shorter blend of his own name, before renaming it Puma. Locals cited two reasons for the break, his wife's rivalry with Adi's wife, and his suspicion that Adi had a hand in his wartime conscription and later arrest by Allied forces. Neither account has ever been confirmed on the record, and both still circulate in Herzogenaurach.

The rift reorganized the whole town. It split into an adidas side and a Puma side, with separate bars, barbers and soccer clubs for each factory's workers, employees were discouraged from marrying across the line, and residents earned a nickname for checking a stranger's shoes before deciding whether to speak to them, the town of bent necks.

Kanye West's Yeezy Exit Repeated the Original Rift

Adidas ended its own highest profile modern partnership the same way the Dassler brothers' company began, with a public break nobody could walk back. Kanye West left Nike for adidas in 2013 and built the Yeezy Boost 350 into 1.7 billion dollars a year of business by 2021, close to eight percent of the company's total sales at its peak.

Adidas ended the Yeezy deal on October 25, 2022, after West made a string of antisemitic remarks. The company halted Yeezy production immediately and booked a hit of up to 250 million euros to net income that year. West's own fortune dropped by roughly 1.5 billion dollars almost overnight, the value the market had assigned to his adidas royalties alone.

It is the pattern that named the company in the first place. A partnership generates the product everyone remembers, and the partnership still ends first.

Bjørn Gulden Answers to Shareholders, Not a Dassler

Neither Dassler family controls adidas today. The company has traded publicly on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange as a DAX component for decades, and its current chief executive, Bjørn Gulden, took over on January 1, 2023.

The supervisory board has already extended Gulden's contract through December 2030 and is restructuring its own leadership around that timeline. Ownership passed out of Dassler hands decades ago, through a series of sales that eventually put adidas shares on the Frankfurt exchange for anyone to buy, a structure closer to Puma's own public listing than to the family business both brothers started in 1924. The Dassler surname still sits on every box the company ships. Nobody named Dassler sits on the shareholder register that decides who runs the company shipping it.

Every Shoe Built Under the Name Outlived the Feud

The adidas name has outlasted three generations of the products built under it. The Samba turned 75 this year and posted a 14 percent jump in footwear sales during its most recent revival. The Stan Smith has sold more than 70 million pairs since adidas renamed it after the tennis player in 1971, and it has never once been discontinued.

The pattern keeps repeating on purpose. Grace Wales Bonner's adidas Originals partnership has sold out every season since 2020, and adidas used that archive plus collaborator formula to relaunch the Superstar for fall 2026 with JENNIE. Even Real Madrid's 2026/27 away kit leans on the trefoil that Adi Dassler's company adopted decades after he registered its name, on a jersey deal now reported near 1.1 billion euros through 2034.

Adidas the word turns 77 next August. Adidas the company has spent every one of those years proving the name outlasts whoever is running it, on either side of the river, and the next silhouette pulled from Adi Dassler's own archive will do what the Samba and the Stan Smith already did. It will sell under a name two brothers stopped speaking to each other over.