Adidas
Adi Dassler pretty much invented the modern sports shoe. As a 20 year-old track enthusiast in Germany, Dassler made his first shoe, a canvas training shoe for runners, in 1920. Over the next two decades, Dassler expanded his line, and by 1937 was producing 30 models of shoes for eleven different sports. Early on, Dassler made a point of soliciting the opinions of the athletes themselves and being personally present at the sporting events in which competitors wore his shoes.
After the interruption of World War II, Dassler restarted his company and decided to register the trademark “Adidas,” a melding of the first syllables of his own first and last names. In 1949, he registered the company’s famous three-stripes design as a trademark. By the 1960s, Adidas dominated the professional sports shoe market and began manufacturing athletic equipment and Adidas logo clothing as well.
Hermes
In Ancient Greek mythology, Hermes was a god, the son of Zeus and Maia. Hermes was the messenger of the gods, known for his inventiveness, and also the god of both merchants and thieves. Hermes is usually represented wearing winged sandals and carrying a staff entwined with serpents. (If Hermes sounds familiar, it’s because the Romans later called him Mercury.)
In 1828 an inventive modern Hermes arrived in Paris from his native Germany. Thierry Hermes first went into business making saddles and harnesses, and within a few years became known for the high quality of his products. As the Hermes enterprise expanded under Thierry’s descendants and added European royalty to its clientele, leather garments and luggage were added, and in 1928 Hermes began buying silk scarves to sell along with their clothing line. The scarves were so popular that Hermes decided to design their own, and today Hermes scarves are probably the firm’s most famous product. But the firm also still produces around 400 hand-tooled saddles every year.
Hush Puppies
Even shoes can be late bloomers in America.
In 1958, Wolverine World Wide, a Michigan company that had been making shoes since 1883, was about to debut a new line of suede lace-up shoes with a crepe sole designed for comfort. The only detail missing was a good name for the shoe. Company sales manager Jim Muir happened to be visiting a friend in Tennessee one day, and noticed that his host quieted his barking dogs by tossing them bits of fried cornmeal. Such fried morsels, Muir learned, were called “hush puppies” in the South (”hush” being a verb meaning “to quiet”), and were also commonly served as a side dish at the dinner table.
In a moment of branding genius, Muir remembered that human feet had long been known in slang as “dogs,” and that someone with tired and aching feet would often say that “My dogs are barking.” The new comfortable shoe designed to soothe tired feet would henceforth be known as “Hush Puppies.”
The first Hush Puppies model, the Duke (a popular dog’s name) was introduced in 1958, and subsequent early styles also featured canine names such as Toby and Bozo.
Hush Puppies were popular in the 1960s, but by the late 1970s had come to be considered nerdy, associated with cardigan sweaters and aging relatives. Even Wolverine’s chief executive joked that Hush Puppies were the shoes that elderly widows put on their husbands in the casket, and by 1990 Wolverine was playing down its own brand.
All that changed, at least briefly, in 1994, when Tom Hanks wore Hush Puppies in the hit film Forrest Gump. Suddenly Hush Puppies were a fashion sensation and even celebrities had to put their names on waiting lists for the shoes.
By the late 1990s, however, the Hollywood bloom had faded and Hush Puppies sales slumped again. But there’s always the possibility that this old dog may have a few more tricks, and lives, left.