Two Brothers and a Divided Town

Adolf and Rudolf Dassler made shoes together in Herzogenaurach, a small town in Bavaria. Then they stopped speaking to each other, permanently, and never started again.

The reasons are disputed and unpleasant, involving the war, an air raid shelter, accusations made to a denazification panel, and two wives who could not stand each other while being made to live in the same house. What is not disputed is the outcome.

In 1948 Rudolf set up on one side of the river Aurach and called his company Puma. In 1949 Adolf set up on the other side and called his Adidas. Most of the workforce went with Adolf.

That detail is worth pausing on, because it is the only part of this story that reads as advice. Adolf was the one obsessed with making the shoe better. Rudolf was the one focused on selling it. Offered a straight choice between them, the people who actually made things followed the product man.

Then the town, which is where this chapter earns its place in the subject.

Herzogenaurach divided completely. Which company you worked for determined which baker you used, which bar you drank in, who you were friends with and who you were permitted to marry. Two families on the same street could be on opposite sides and simply not speak.

And it acquired a nickname: the town of bent necks.

Because everybody looked down. Before you spoke to a stranger you checked their shoes, because their shoes told you which side they were on and therefore how to treat them.

That is the earliest clear picture in this subject of clothing functioning as a declaration of allegiance rather than as a product, and it happened in a town of a few thousand people, in Bavaria, because two brothers hated each other.

Everything the sportswear industry has done since is downstream of it.

Consider what the rivalry actually produced. Not one company, but two global ones, each forced to define itself against the other, neither able to coast for a single season, both spending enormous effort on being visibly different from the company across the water. A rivalry is a more demanding condition than any market was imposing.

And it produced something more valuable than a preference, which is a side.

This is the part worth understanding properly. A customer who prefers your product is weakly attached and can be won over by a better product at a better price. A customer who is on your side is attached to an identity, and identity does not respond to a discount. Adidas against Puma became Adidas against Nike became every argument anybody has ever had in a playground about which trainers are correct.

Which leads to the uncomfortable footnote, and it should be said, because the industry has spent seventy years trying to manufacture this.

The Dassler feud was not a marketing decision. Nobody sat in a room and identified an opportunity to create tribal attachment through a staged rivalry. Two brothers genuinely loathed one another for the rest of their lives, built competing companies two hundred metres apart out of that loathing, and were buried at opposite ends of the same cemetery, as far from each other as the ground allowed.

Every engineered rivalry since has been an attempt to reproduce the structure without the feeling. It is why most of them read as a campaign and are forgotten in a season, and why this one divided a town for fifty years.