Entrepreneurial Lessons from Adi Dassler – the Founder of adidas

Adolf “Adi” Dassler, the founder of adidas, always put great emphasis on documenting his ideas, thoughts and learnings. Thanks to this habit, we still know a lot about what drove the man who gave our brand its name, the man who laid the foundation for the entire sporting goods industry..

Being an athlete himself, he was so passionate about his vision of providing every athlete with the best possible equipment that some would even call him obsessed.

Adi Dassler knew that to make your dreams come true, you should never be afraid to take creative and extraordinary measures. He rolled up his sleeves to “make sports and athletes better”. He was convinced that only by trying can you get it right.

But he didn’t stop at applying this principle to his work as a shoemaker. He also spoke to athletes as often as possible, keen to find out what they were looking for in products. Soon, athletes around the globe admired “Adi” for his listening, observation and problem-solving skills. Adi Dassler literally went the extra mile and was rewarded with a worldwide network of top-class athletes loving his shoes.

One of these athletes is Willi Holdorf who won the Olympic decathlon gold medal in Tokyo (1964). After his career, Willi had the chance to get to know Adi Dassler from a different perspective when he started to work as an adidas sales rep.

So let’s see what Willi Holdorf, the world’s ’1964 Athlete of the Year’, has to say about his ‘boss’ and patron, the man who founded adidas and led it to global success.

Willi Holdorf, before you joined adidas, when you were a young athlete – did you wear adidas spikes or did they not yet exist then?

I had spikes but they didn’t have a brand name. When I was 19 and ran very fast at an indoor meeting against the European bronze medallist, Peter Radford, a pair of spikes and a tracksuit turned up at my house. And that was my first contact with adidas.

It was really something very special at that time for a young athlete to get a gift like that. It boosted your self-confidence. You said, look, somebody’s taken notice of me. I think even for today’s athletes it’s still a big motivation to get a contract with adidas.

In those days spikes were spikes, they didn’t vary very much; you wore the same ones for everything, from long jump to 5.000 metres. That was ok by you?

It had to be! There wasn’t anything else. Then came high jump spikes with the soles a bit thicker, then I got more and more into the decathlon and I needed spikes for throwing the javelin. But I did all the running events with the same spikes. But then that changed, too.

I had big problems in the decathlon 1,500 metres because I always ran on my heels; I wasn’t a good long-distance runner. So, I had a word with Adi Dassler and he made shoes for me with the heels built up a bit so I was always running a bit more on my toes.

I think that won me a few seconds, maybe even five. Later he made a shoe from that, called Interval, that sold for a long time.

What was the most remarkable characteristic of Adi Dassler from your point of view?

I always say he was an athlete himself; he did a bit of everything, tennis, high jump – I only ever saw him when he was doing something. It always fascinated me how he would work on things in such detail and would stick at it, working out some new idea.

Sometimes it got on our nerves a bit, it was always the same with him – we would say right, that’s good now, it’s fine, but he would keep at it and we would always end up saying, ok, it’s a good job he tested it as long as he did.