"Family Feud: Adidas vs. Puma"

Interesting history:

The final paragraph is great:

“About the only time the rivalry resurfaces is when tradespeople hired to work in the Adidas or Puma headquarters show up wearing the wrong kind of shoes. That’s a tradition that dates back more than 60 years, when laborers deliberately wore the wrong shoes when working in Adi or Rudi’s homes -they knew that if Adi saw Pumas in his house or Rudi saw Adidas in his, they’d give workers a free pair of the right kind of shoes. “Rudolf simply could not stand the fact that someone was wearing an Adidas shoe in his private home,” Frank Dassler says.”

Can anyone confirm this, or has experience of the rivalry?

Wow. Pretty fascinating history there! Great read.

Yeah awesome article, thanks for sharing!

Loved this:

Most of the technical people stayed with Adi; most of the sales force and administrators went with Rudi. That might seem like a formula for faster growth at Puma, since Rudi’s people knew how to move the merchandise, but it wasn’t.