Adolf Dassler: The Leader Behind Brand Adidas Success

Adolf Dassler: His Early life of Adidas Founder

Adolf Dassler was the youngest of the four siblings born in the German town of Herzogenaurach in 1900. His father, Christoph, worked as a tailor, and his mother, Pauline, ran the family laundry. Adolf finished high school and, at his father's request, began an apprenticeship as a baker. Although he completed this training, a life of bread making did not appeal to him, so he decided to learn the skills of shoemaking instead.

Adolf's main interest outside of work was sports. He played and competed in a variety of sports, including track and field, football, boxing, ice hockey, skiing, and ski jumping, accompanied by his childhood friend Fritz Zehlein (the son of a local blacksmith, who plays an important role later in the story). Through his exposure to such a diverse range of sports, he made a key observation that would later serve as the foundation of his success: he noticed that all athletes wore essentially the same shoes.

World War I

Adolf Dassler was forcibly recruited into the German Army in the late stages of World War I before he could immediately turn his sports shoe idea into a business. In 1919, when he returned to Herzogenaurach, Germany was in the grip of post-war economic depression. Jobs were scarce, but Adolf was determined not to let his dream die, so he converted the old laundry shed at the back of the Dassler house into a shoe workshop. He earned money by repairing footwear for the locals, using the shoemaking expertise he had learned.

This gave him the resources and time he needed to create his first pairs of specialized sports shoes. One of his first inventions was a pair of spiked running shoes for track and field athletes, which were a brand-new concept for the sport at the time. They had hand-forged metal spikes provided by the local blacksmith, Fritz Zehlein, Adolf's childhood sports buddy.

The Dassler Brothers Shoe Factory is Born

Adolf's manufacturing processes were just as innovative as his shoe designs. He rigged a leather milling machine to a bicycle that was peddled by the company's first employee to solve the problems caused by unreliable electricity supply.

Adolf was joined in his venture by his older brother Rudolf Dassler, and on July 1st, 1924 they registered their company as 'Gebrüder Dassler, Sportschuhfabrik, Herzogenaurach' ('Dassler Brothers Sports Shoe Factory, Herzogenaurach'). By 1925, their fledgling business had three employees working in their one-room workshop, manufacturing leather football boots with nailed studs and spiked track shoes. As the German economy improved, business increased, and the brothers moved to a larger building in Herzogenaurach, where they invested in infrastructure machinery and expanded their production.

Adolf Aims for Olympic Success

The World Cup of Football (soccer) and the Olympic Games were the two most important global sporting events in the late 1920s and early 1930s. The Dassler brothers suspected that if they could get their shoes on the feet of athletes, it would help them succeed and validate the Dassler product's quality. Adolf gave German marathoner Lina Radke a pair of his spiked track shoes at the 1928 Olympics in Amsterdam, and they had their first success. Lina won the contest with a World Record time because it was the first time women were allowed to compete in the 800m distance.

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