Welcome to brain Stuff from How Stuff Works. Hey, brain Stuff, I'm Lauren Vogelbaum, and I'm here today to talk about how family feuds can change the world. For example, if only two brothers named Addie and Ruddy Dossler had learned to get along, Germany's Gruder Dossler might have bested Nike
as the world's top sports footwear company today. Instead, the brother's bitter feuding resulted in the Gruder Dossler brand that's German for Dossler brothers being split in half and reborn as Adidas and Puma, which today are the world's second and third top sports shoe businesses. Aidolph or Audi Dossler began making shoes in his mother's laundry room shortly after returning home to the Bavarian village of head Skoonocha following
World War One. His business did well, and his older brother Rudolf or Ruddy Dossler joined him a few years later to help shy. Audi was the creative force and brains behind the business, while extroverted Rudy was the salesman. The brothers Dossler soon gained to claim for rolling out the first track spikes, but the company really took off after the brothers persuaded American Olympic athlete Jesse Owens to wear their shoes in the nineteen thirty six Berlin Olympics.
He did, and he won four gold medals while doing so. Yet it wasn't quite the triumph it should have been for the brothers, as things were beginning to sour between the two. The bad blood had started a few years earlier, in nineteen thirty three, when ADDIE's sixteen year old wife tried to interfere in the business. Rudy was not pleased. It didn't help that Addis and Rudy's families lived together in the same town home, and their wives didn't really
get along. But the breaking point came during a World War two air raid. Rudy and his family were tucked into a bomb shelter, and as Addie and his family entered,
Addie said, the dirty bastards are back again. He was purportedly commenting on the Royal Air Force planes roaring overhead, but Rudy was positive Addie was referring to his family from their Things quickly unraveled when Rudy was called up to serve in the Nazi military and nineteen forty three, he was sure that Addi had arranged it to have
him sent away from the factory. Anxious to get back, Rudy deserted his post in later, when arrested for desertion, he again blamed Addi, who it appears did snitch on him. After a few more scuffles, the two split up the company in ninety eight, moving assets and employees into one of two competing operations located on opposite sides of the Ala River that flowed through the town. Audi renamed his
business Adidas, combining his first and last names. Rudy did the same, dubbing his Ruta, though he later changed it to Puma. Soon most of the town citizens were employed by either Adidas or Puma, and these siblings intense rivalry spread throughout the town. If you worked for one company, you did not socialize with employees of the other. Marrying across enemy lines was strictly for Boden. You only shopped in the stores on the same side as the river
as the factory in which you were employed. Over time, Adida's far surpassed Puma in sales, thanks to ADDIE's creativity and technical acumen, though Puma also did quite well, But while the two were hard at work competing against one another, they paid no attention to another shoe company, Nike, that was quietly gaining market share. Today, Nike is king of the sports shoe business with seventeen sales of twenty one billion dollars compared to Adidas's ten billion dollars and Puma's
two billion. The brothers did speak to one another a few times later in life, but they never reconciled. Both died in the nineteen seventies and were buried at opposite ends of the local cemetery. Their feud finally ended in two thousand nine, when employees of both companies played together in a friendly soccer match. Nonetheless, the Dossler brothers epic fight was named by Time magazine as one of history's top ten family feuds, alongside such notables as Cain and
Abel and the hat Fields and McCoy's. Today's episode was written by Melanie Redzeki McManus and produced by Tyler Clang. For more on this topic, check out our sibling podcast, Ridiculous History. They have a whole episode on it called Adidas Versus Puma, a tale of two brothers and of course, for lots of other contentious topics, visit our home planet, how stuff Works dot com. H