"Sneaker Wars" by Barbara Smit
The seven years I got to work in the running industry gave me some of the most valuable relationships, experiences, and insights I could ask for, especially so in the time I got to serve as a brand specialist in running at one of the most pervasive companies in the world: Adidas.
There are many reasons the footwear category ranks among the best places a person can find themselves within running’s business, events, and communities, from shoes being foundational to any outfit (mostly, all due respect to our barefoot practitioners), wildly profitable when done right, and rife with fierce competition on the technology and market-share fronts.
This has been particularly the case in our current time commonly dubbed as the “running boom,” a period spanning from around 2019 to 2024 as I write this.
The root causes for this growth are abundant and diverse, including but hardly limited to:
Critical needs for community and personal empowerment during the pandemic
New accessibility put on the creation of running groups through social media
Technical leaps in materials and designs around gear
To keep the focus on shoes, and Adidas in particular, we have a real-time arms race between different brands jockeying for podiums in performance, visibility, and sales, all of which show no sign of slowing.
With all of this in mind, Barbara Smit’s Sneaker Wars marked a particularly strong, enlightening, and fun read for me, diving as deep as it does into weeds that I have and continue to learn from and explore as a committed student of the sport and industry around running.
Clearly, Adidas’ history, presence, cultural significance, and recognizability set it apart entirely from any other brand.
Nike owns the lion’s-share of the fitness industry today, but the story behind the stripes is one that the swoosh needed to exist, and continues to spring-board off of, as Adidas remains an institutional leader and pioneer in the way of pushing the state of the art, athletic accomplishments, fashion, and commercial success.
I was and always will be a huge fan of the team, product, and efforts the label routinely turns in and keeps growing.
And, with all of this in mind, I figured I knew a fair amount about the company.
But, it turns out I had plenty to learn after reading the aptly-titled Wars.
Epic in the most literal sense, Smit’s talents for pacing and research give us a story that is at once family drama, historical document, masterclass in the economy around sports, and all-out thrill-ride.
As such, the hooks extend well past students of sport.
History buffs will find themselves enticed by the as-its-happening experiences of the family Dassler, split on nothing less than devotion or begrudged loyalty to the Third Reich as Hitler takes control of Germany.
As World War II begins, the brothers Adi and Rudolf and their families are forced to hole up during the onslaughts of enemy fire raining around their factories.
Family schisms and accounts of war this dramatic are worthy stories in themselves. The arc that comes for the Dasslers just happens to result in two of the most recognizable brands that have ever existed: Adidas and Puma.
In examining the details behind their story, Smit catalogs a stage-by-stage development of the running industry as we know it today, and how I got to experience it firsthand and behind-the-scenes working in field marketing at Adidas and HOKA.
Balancing equal parts approachability and complex detail, Smit puts light on modern product and marketing through the characters who breathed life into the strategies, materials, and warnings that have given us the industry as it stands in our time.
Case in point: the running world owns a market impossible to imagine without logos crowding the field.
As it turns out, this element is where the genre began.
Smit tells us how the first sports shoes wore no distinguishing features at all, black-on-black mostly, running shoes starting out as dark canvasses such that “even experts were unable to tell which brand of spikes the runners had on their feet.”
Nowadays, one cannot mistake Adidas’ three stripes for any other brand, which arrived after Adolf Dassler saw how, clearly, white stripes stand out on black shoes.
Two stripes had been used already when Adi was working with his brother Rudolf before their falling out.
Four was “somewhat too busy,” so three checked the right clarity and recognizability boxes.
The now-unmissable logo was registered in March 1949 and christened with a name like a novel: “Adolf Dassler adidas Schuhfabrik.”
From here, sports marketing grew legs and territory through warm, personable approaches, thanks in large part to Adi’s wife, Käthe Dassler, owning “diplomatic charm” from the beginning and creating atmospheres that made “guests (feel) instantly at ease,” further insuring a lasting relationship by getting hot meals in the mix, too.
Sharpening the marketing spear further, Käthe and Adi’s eldest son, Horst, went on to invent one of the cornerstones of effective brand representation: seeding.
This leap in field marketing comes in a scene where Horst meets an Adidas retailer and “unveiled a startling project: instead of selling Adidas shoes, Horst would hand them out for free.”
Seeding, the cheat-code for brand loyalty among reps, was an obvious home run out of the gate.
Give someone branded swag, they’ll be grateful.
Give someone shoes, they’ll light up and never forget you, or the brand that hooked them up, gratis (so long as they’re good shoes, another topic for another piece).
Indeed, it’s bizarre to read that Olympians were once expected to buy their own shoes.
Which, of course, makes the gap filled by seeding an even more ingenious move.
We also find the emergence of the now-pervasive demo run, a practice I was surprised to learn came, out of all places, from a post-World War II cultural trend to “buy American” that saw retailers denying spots to Adidas and its German roots.
Undaunted, Clifford Severn, half of the American-importing Severn brothers who first brought Adidas to the states, would “drive from one college to another,” turning in the necessary grind of sparking familiarity with new athletes as the “friendly Adidas man toting his large holdall.”
By “demoing” shoes, Severn would invite runners into the essential, subjective experience of what a brand brings to the table by having try them out their products in practice.
Horst would go on to deepen the love with athletes at the Melbourne Olympics in 1956, where he went out of his way to make “sure that they would remember him as the easygoing twenty-year-old who gave them free Adidas spikes.”
To read this is to see the ideal template for any brand rep sealed from the start.
Puma made essential strides in the field as well, especially so in the realm of brand ambassadors, arguably the first being decathlete Werner von Moltke.
A loyal fan of Puma since 1958, Von Moltke was recognized by the brand and received “some free Puma shoes and agreed to act as an intermediary for the brand at international track meets.”
Other cornerstones that raise their heads in Smit’s story include the origin of sports agents in the 1960s, as well as Nike inventing “futures” for their retailers: orders for product made on the promise of income later on, in effect giving brands leeway to order more product from manufacturers, with retailers taking on the increased risk of product that has to be sold or land business in the red.
On the product side of the history laid out in War, iconic gets overused quite a bit, but the Adidas Superstar by Chris Severn wears it better than most.
Smit takes us on a tour of the “weird-looking shell toe” and its checklist of hallmarks so common today: protection for the toes, a supportive upper (leather selected over the dominant, flimsy canvas of the time), and a textured outsole to increase traction and balance by way of the “herringbone” pattern that is part and parcel of the Superstar.
All of these are features that, today, feel like opting for injury if one were to go without them.
Severn would be a legend for the Superstar on its own, and what it has given to the culture and sport. But the man became a monument to faith in one’s work when he went out, on his own, to market the Superstar.
With his shell-toes and a few introductions in hand, buoyed by “no budget at all,” Severn as a marketer faced an age of athletes skeptical of anything besides their beloved Converse All-Stars.
And he stomped it.
Severn’s approach and product reshaped the genre, and in a scant four years, 85% of all American basketball players were in his stripes.
Sneaker Wars brims over with more stories and takeaways like this, including pitfalls of the industry, and some of the most severe and long-lasting conflicts I’ve heard of, non-fiction or otherwise, spanning continents and generations, involving siblings, Nazis, entire governments, and Bond-villain-level individuals one truly has to read about to believe.
Adi Dassler himself lived by the motto: “Business is about relationships,” and Smit is masterful in dredging up how thoroughly and brutally the man lived by this code and, in effect, put his name on the base code of an industry that has and continues to drive much of what sports and culture are today.
I came away from the book like finding my feet after a roller-coaster, absorbing a family drama plumbing depths I didn’t see coming and relished beginning to end, as well as an evolutionary history of my favorite industry and sport.
The quality and enticement Smit brings to non-fiction is welcome and gets laid on thick in Wars, her excavation of the layers beneath the commercial landscape of the sports world we see today is critical for for anyone seeking a deeper understanding of where it came from, all of which just reads as a great story regardless, since I’d open Adi’s core philosophy to say everything is about relationships, and there’s something here for everybody.