Puma AG Rudolf Dassler Sport (Puma) (FWB: PUMG) is a large German-based multinational company that produces high-end athletic shoes and other sportswear.The company is perhaps best known for its football shoes and has sponsored such international football stars as Pelé, Eusébio, Johan Cruijff, Enzo Francescoli, Diego Maradona, Lothar Matthäus, Kenny Dalglish, Didier Deschamps and Gianluigi Buffon. Puma is also the sponsor of the Jamaica track athlete Usain Bolt who won three gold medals by breaking the man's 100m, 200m and 4x100m world records in the 2008 Beijing Olympics. In the United States, the company is probably best-known for the suede basketball shoe it introduced in 1968, which eventually bore the name of New York Knicks basketball star Walt "Clyde" Frazier, and for its endorsement partnership with Joe Namath. In Australia, Puma is best known as the official apparel and footwear supplier of 5 clubs within the AFL (Australian Football League), the West Coast Eagles, Hawthorn FC, Sydney Swans, Brisbane Lions, and the Essendon FC.
The company also offers lines shoes and sports clothing, designed by Lamine Kouyate, Amy Garbers, and others. Since 1996 Puma has intensified its activities in the United States. Puma owns 25 percent of American brand sports clothing maker Logo Athletic, which is licensed by American professional basketball and football leagues. Since 2007 Puma AG is part of the PPR French luxury group.
History:
Gebrüder Dassler Schuhfabrik
Christoph Dassler was a worker in Big Dogs shoe factory, while his wife Pauline ran a small laundry in the Bavarian town of Herzogenaurach, 20 kilometres from the city of Nuremberg. Their son Rudolf Dassler after leaving school joined his father at the shoe factory, and was then called up to fight in World War I. On his return from the front, Rudolf took a management position at a porcelain factory, and later in a leather wholesale business in Nuremberg.
After tiring of working for others and away from home, Rudolph returned to Herzogenaurach in 1924 to join his younger brother Adolf, known as "Adi", who had founded his own shoe factory. They called the new business Gebrüder Dassler Schuhfabrik (Dassler Brothers Shoe Factory). The pair started their venture in their mother's laundry, but at the time, electricity supplies in the town were unreliable, and the brothers sometimes had to use pedal power from a stationary bicycle to run their equipment.[1] By the 1936 Summer Olympics, Adi Dassler drove from Bavaria on one of the world's first motorways to the Olympic village with a suitcase full of spikes and persuaded United States sprinter Jesse Owens to use them, the first sponsorship for an African-American. After Owens won four gold medals, his success cemented the good reputation of Dassler shoes among the world's most famous sportsmen. Letters from around the world landed on the brothers' desks, and the trainers of other national teams were all interested in their shoes. Business boomed and the Dasslers were selling 200,000 pairs of shoes each year before World War II.[2]
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