adidas

Adolf Dassler, known as Adi, began making sports shoes in his mother's laundry room in Herzogenaurach, a small Bavarian town, after returning from the First World War. In July 1924 his older brother Rudolf joined him, and the business became Gebrüder Dassler Schuhfabrik, the Dassler Brothers Shoe Factory. Electricity was unreliable, so the brothers sometimes ran their machines by pedalling a stationary bicycle. Adi experimented with lighter spiked running shoes, and in 1936 he persuaded the American sprinter Jesse Owens to wear his spikes at the Berlin Olympics; Owens's four gold medals made the Dassler name known around the world.

The brothers' history in these years is also a darker one. Both joined the Nazi Party in 1933, and during the Second World War the factory supplied the Wehrmacht and was turned over to making anti-tank weapons. After the war their relationship broke down completely. In 1947 they split the business, and on 18 August 1949 Adi registered his company as adidas, from his own name, while Rudolf founded the firm that became Puma. The feud divided Herzogenaurach, which became known as the town of bent necks for the way people looked down to check each other's shoes.

Adidas's three stripes became the mark of postwar sport. Its screw-in studs were on the boots of West Germany's winning team at the 1954 World Cup, and over the following decades the company dominated football and athletics and moved into tennis and basketball. The Stan Smith tennis shoe, the Samba, originally made for training on icy ground, and the shell-toed Superstar, adopted by hip-hop through Run-DMC, became classics far beyond sport.

After Adi's son Horst Dassler died in 1987, the company struggled and in 1990 was bought by the French businessman Bernard Tapie, before being restructured and floated. In the 1990s it divided into performance and the heritage line adidas Originals, and in the 2000s it formed long partnerships with designers: Yohji Yamamoto's Y-3 from 2002 and Stella McCartney from 2004. It bought Reebok in 2006 and sold it in 2022. A lucrative partnership with Ye, formerly Kanye West, on Yeezy sneakers was ended by adidas in October 2022 after his antisemitic remarks.

Bjørn Gulden, a former footballer who had previously revived Puma, became chief executive in January 2023 and led a recovery built on terrace classics such as the Samba and Gazelle and on renewed strength in football. More than a century after the laundry room, the three stripes remain one of the most recognisable marks in sport.