Nike vs Adidas - The Starting Line | 2

Business Wars

Wondery

History, Business, David Brown, Management

4.6 • 13.2K Ratings

🗓️ 1 March 2018

⏱️ 27 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Rudi and Adi Dassler started the “Dassler Business” in the 1920s in their parent’s garage, recycling materials from WWI military gear and uniforms. They got a pair of their track spikes on an athlete named Jesse Owens at the 1936 Olympics and the company took off… until WWII.

The war may have been over for Germany, but the rivalry between Adi and Rudi was just heating up.

Rudi left to start his own company, Puma, and Adi created Adidas.

50 years later, with a waffle iron and inventory from Onitsuka Tiger, Phil Knight and Bill Bowerman start tinkering with some shoes in Bowerman’s kitchen. The waffle iron didn’t last long, but the shoes did.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, prime members, you can listen to business wars at free on Amazon music. Download the app today
0:13.7	August, 1936
0:15.7	Three years before the start of the Second World War an automobile putters down one of the first modern highways in Europe
0:22.6	Toward the jagged skyline of Berlin the capital of Nazi Germany
0:27.4	In the driver's seat behind the wheel sits a young man named Adolf Dastler known by his friends and family as Adi
0:35.9	Dastler's 36 years old with a movie star's good looks
0:39.8	He's driving a convertible
0:41.8	agrees whippin his coarse brown hair
0:44.4	The son of a weaver and a laundry operator
0:47.3	Adi grew up in a factory town in the state of Bavaria
0:50.4	His father was a master weaver his mother ran a laundry
0:54.7	When he was a teenager training to be a baker's assistant he'd been sent to fight against the French in World War 1
1:00.7	He was dispatched to the front where he witnessed many gruesome ways to die and
1:06.1	to survive
1:07.7	He still carries the trauma of all that he saw
1:12.0	Well when he returns from the war
1:14.7	Adi desperately wants to put it all behind him
1:18.4	To find something to pour his energy into and to occupy his mind
1:23.5	Adi is extremely ambitious soon he and his brother Rudy start building their own footwear company
1:30.3	They call it Gabruder Dastler the Dastler brothers
1:35.1	They launched their company from their mother's laundry room learning the necessary stitching skills from their father
1:40.9	High quality materials are hard to come by after the Great War so Adi and Rudy initially rummaged through any discarded Army gear old
	...

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