Sibling rivalry creates two brandsfrom @alextwma

Transcript

So you own either Adidas or Puma, maybe both. But what you probably don't know is they're actually the same rank. Same factory, same town, same two brothers. Or at least it was until a fight between them split not just the factory, but the entire town. Literally. Adolf and Rudolf Dassler grew up in Herzogonneroch, a small town in Bavaria, Germany. In the early nineteen twenties, they were making shoes together in their mother's laundry room, hand stitched, purpose built for athletes. Their big break came at the nineteen thirty six Berlin Olympics where Adolf convinced Jesse Owens to run-in a pair of Dassler shoes. Owens won four gold medals and the brand was put on the map, but behind the scenes the brothers were already fracturing. The breaking point came during a Worse War Tier Allied bombing raid. The brothers and their families took shelter in a bunker. When the planes flew overhead, Adolf said the dirty bastards are back again. Rudolf believed he was referring to him and his family, not the enemy planes. And after the war, Rudolf was briefly detained by American forces believing Audi had informed on him. Audi denied it, but by 1948, the brothers had stopped speaking entirely. They divided the factory, the workers, and the assets. Rudolf took his operation across the Auroch River. Audi kept the original factory on the North Side. Audi combined his nickname and his last name and named his company Adidas. Rudolf named his Ruta and later changed it to Puma. And then the feud spilled out into the town. Herzogonorak had a small population, so almost everyone worked for one of the two companies. And the two sides did not mix. Both had their own bakery, their own sports club, their own everything. The town became so defined by which shoes people wore that it earned the nickname the town of best Necks, Because when a stranger walked in, everyone looked down at their feet first. The Adidas CEO decades later said that when he started at the company, he was forbidden from even mentioning the name Puma. They were only ever referred to as the competitor on the other side of the Auroch. Rudolph died in 1974, Adolf in 1978. Both brothers made the same final request for their graves to be kept as far apart as possible. They were buried at opposite ends of the same cemetery. The rivalry outlasted them both. Until 2009 when adidas and puma employees played a friendly football match to signify a truce. The irony is that it may have all started with a simple misunderstanding. One comment and one brother who took it the wrong way. And from that, we got two of the biggest brands in history. Some misunderstandings get resolved, but this one happens to build two empires.