People are only just realising the 'hidden message' in Adidas' iconic logo
You might have kitted yourself out in Adidas gear for a good few years, but have you ever stopped to think about what the brand's iconic logo actually meant?
Swanning around in tracksuits, trainers and sports gear emblazoned with the three stripes might work wonders for your street cred, but you really ought to know what the trio of lines signifies.
So, buckle up for a quick history lesson in branding.
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If you didn't know, Adidas first burst onto the scene in a post-First World War Germany when the company's founder, Adolf 'Adi' Dassler, started repairing footwear.
He then began cobbling together sports shoes in the laundry room of his mother's home in Herzogenaurach, Germany, alongside his sibling Rudolf, which is when the brothers business brains switched on.
They opened up a firm known as the Dassler Brothers Sports Shoe Factory, which ended up being rather successful, as by 1928, they were supplying international athletes with shoes.
Long story short, their shoe factory ended up producing military equipment when the Second World War began, before total mobilisation in 1943 turned it from a boot-makers into full-blown weapons plant.
Adi and Rudolf later ended up parting ways in 1948 after a disagreement, leading to his brother branching out to found the rival sportswear company Puma - but that's another story.
In 1949, Adi came up with the iconic three stripe logo and renamed the firm by using a combination of his first name and surname - Adi and Dassler, of course - to create Adidas.
The very first logo was made up of a track and field spiked shoe - sporting the three stripes - which sat between extended tails on the two d's in 'Adidas', while the word 'Sportschuhe' (meaning sports shoes in German) sat below it.
The sportswear giant's website explains: "This logo, along with the 3-Stripe trademark that began to appear on every shoe (and eventually apparel) is what started it all. Those tell-tale stripes, by the way, don’t hold numerological meaning.
"They ended up on the first pair of adidas shoes after Dassler had tested several versions and numbers of stripes and found that three simply showed up most prominently in photography—an important factor for a new-to-the-scene sports gear brand hoping to make a splash.
"Clearly it worked, as the 3-Stripes continues to be a world-famous trademark that symbolises adidas."
Longtime Adidas customers will know that a floral-inspired logo was also later released in 1972, which featured three leaf-shaped foils with three stripes running through it, as the firm branched out into sportswear apparel.
There is also the 'equipment logo' which came in 1989, which was created after the design team 'sketched those famous three stripes the way they’re seen from the inside of an Adidas shoe'.
But despite the chopping and changing, the 'hidden message' behind the three stripes has always stayed consistent.
As you have probably noticed, the lines are positioned in a triangular-like shape which resembles a mountain.
According to Hatchwise, this is supposed to represent the 'obstacles to overcome during your work to achieve your athletic goal' - as in the words of Miley Cyrus, 'it's the climb'.
In a similar vein, Tailor Brands says it represents 'the challenges athletes face and the goals to be achieved'.
Achieving greatness in the sporting world is obviously a mammoth mountain to climb, but apparently, you can do anything with a pair of Adidas treads on your tootsies.
Olivia Burke