Armin A. Dassler was born on 15 September 1929 in Herzogenaurach, in Franconia, the son of Rudolf Dassler and nephew of Adi Dassler. He grew up as the family's shoe business split in two: in 1948 his father left to found the company that became Puma, while Adi built adidas on the other side of the town. Puma's timeline notes that, like his father, Armin trained as a shoe technician.
He joined the management of his father's company in 1952, at first looking after sales to the United States. In 1961 he fell out with his father, took a payout and moved to Salzburg, where in 1962 he began making sports shoes under the Puma name. Puma Austria had to pay a licence to the German Puma company for sales outside Austria, and after a change of contract in 1963 it sold shoes in England and the United States under the name Condor-Dassler. The Austrian business did well enough that, towards the end of the 1960s, Rudolf asked his son to come back to Germany. Sports Illustrated's account of the period describes Armin then deferring to his forceful father on Puma matters, while his cousin Horst made adidas his own.
When Rudolf Dassler died in 1974, Armin took over the running of Puma with his younger brother Gerd (1939–2020). Puma's own history credits him with a phase of international expansion, stronger athlete partnerships and a renewed focus on performance. English Wikipedia sums up his tenure as turning Puma from a small provincial company into a much larger worldwide business.
Innovation was central to that. In 1984, Puma's archive says, Armin Dassler had a vision of using new technology to help athletes perform better. He asked the company's sports-science adviser, Dr Peter Cavanagh, to make Puma a technology leader, and the research, carried out with Cavanagh and the University of Erlangen, produced the Running System, or RS, and the RS-Computer, one of the first running shoes to record a run digitally. The same years brought some of Puma's best-known moments: Boris Becker won Wimbledon at 17 in 1985 with Puma shoes and racket, and Diego Maradona scored the 'Goal of the Century' at the 1986 World Cup in Puma Kings. In 1986 the family firm went public as Puma AG, listed in Munich and Frankfurt.
His strategy also had costs. To close the gap on adidas commercially, he had Puma shoes made for large discount chains, which, German Wikipedia notes, damaged the brand's image and contributed to the company's financial difficulties.
After he became ill with cancer, the Dassler brothers sold their 72 per cent stake in Puma to the Swiss trading group Cosa Liebermann in May 1989, ending the family's control of the company. Two of Armin's three sons, Frank (1956–2020) and Jörg (born 1957), had worked at Puma until the sale; Frank later moved to adidas. Armin Dassler died in October 1990, aged 61.
