Adidas
Name of founder
Founding date
Type of products
CEO
Adolf Dassler
1949
Sports footwear, bags, shirts, watches, eyewear
Herbert Hainer
Puma
Rudolf Dassler
1924
Sports shoes and clothes
Björn Gulden
Sponsorship
American football, Artistic gymnastics,
Baseball, Basketball, Boxing, Cricket,
Cycling, Football, Golf, Handball, Tennis,
Volleyball etc.
Football, Golfers, Boxing, Cricket,
Motorsports, Tennis, Rugby league,
Movies, Artists etc.
Divesification
Expansion
Focuses On Sports, Diversifying China shoe suppliers
China, India, Russia, Canada, South
America, Europe
Expansion of product categories,
Expansion with Non-PUMA Brands,
Products & Product Development
All over Europe

 Their father Christoph, a shoemaker, passed on the tips of the trade, and so it was that Adi gathered the tools and equipment left by retreating first world war soldiers and shaped their first shoe, a cross between a carpet slipper and a running, while Rudi took on distribution and general management according to Rolf- Herbert Peters, author of The
Puma Story.

 The split between the Dassler brothers was to
Herzogenaurach what the building of the Berlin Wall was for the German capital, says local journalist
Rolf-Herbert Peters.
 Town chronicles mention it only in passing as internal family difficulties, but the most common explanation is that Rudi (apparently the betterlooking one) had an affair with Adi's wife, Kauml, for which he was never forgiven.

 There was a time when you'd have risked the wrath of colleagues and family if, as an employee of one company, you married the employee of the other, says Klaus-Peter of the local Heritage Association.

 The wonderfully named mayor, German Hacker, tells me that, even when it came to the recent football match, it would not have done any good for the town's morale to have one firm beat the other.
 It's always good to have a heritage – it's your history and your experience combined, says Kirsten Keck,
Adidas's spokeswoman, showing me around its
World of Sport.

 Herzogenaurach had become nicknamed; the town of bent necks, because town folk would not strike a conversation with a stranger until they had first looked down at the shoes that person was wearing, said author Barbara Smit, who chronicled the history of adidas and Puma in her book Pitch Invasion.
 The enmity can be traced to a spat in the 1940s between two local shoemakers - brothers Adolf and
Rudolf Dassler - who fell out and set up rival companies, adidas and Puma, on either side of the town's river.

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Rudolf simply couldn't stand the fact that someone was wearing an adidas shoe in his private home, Frank told
Deutsche Welle.
Puma people not marrying adidas people, adidas and Puma gangs in the schools, pubs loyal to one firm refusing to serve workers from the other, it's all gone on here, he told The
Independent in 2006.
We will probably never know the real reason why Adi and Rudi fell out,
Ernst Dittrich, head of
Herzogenaurach's town archive, told
The Independent in 2006.

 In a joint release, adidas and
Puma said they were committing to the historic handshake in support of the Peace One Day organization, which celebrates its annual non-violence day on
Monday.
 In the small Bavarian town of
Herzogenaurach, only the bravest dared to wear their Puma shoes and cross the river to the adidas side of town.

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The town was really split in two like a sort of mini-Berlin with this little river as a partition in the middle," she told German broadcaster Deutsche Welle.
But the relationship soured and
Rudolf left to set up Puma, and
Adolf renamed the company adidas.
Teens in the town square could be seen hanging together wearing Puma, adidas and even
Nike, The Independent wrote.