Adi Dassler had been putting stripes on shoes for years before it occurred to him to own them.
Back in the 1940s, the stripes were functional. He stitched lateral bands across the upper part of his athletic shoes because they reinforced the sides and kept the shoe from splaying under load. They weren't decoration. They were just the way the shoe was built. But at some point — hard to say exactly when — the stripes started looking like something. Like a mark. Like a thing people could recognize from across a track.
In 1949, Dassler split from his brother Rudolf and founded Adidas. Rudolf went on to start Puma. The two of them, operating shoe factories on opposite sides of a river in the same small German town, didn't speak for the rest of their lives. The workers in Herzogenaurach eventually divided along family lines — you either worked for the Adis or the Rudis, and you didn't switch. The whole town knew which brother you supported by looking at your feet.
That story is worth knowing because it explains something about how Adi approached the three stripes. This wasn't a man who took half-measures.
The Whiskey Deal
In 1951, a Finnish sporting goods company called Karhu Sports was using a three-stripe design on their own athletic shoes. Karhu — the word means "bear" in Finnish — had been around since the 1910s and had a legitimate claim to the stripes. The design was theirs.
Dassler wanted it anyway.
He approached Karhu and made an offer: roughly 1,600 Finnish marks and two bottles of whiskey in exchange for the rights to the three-stripe design. The exact figures vary depending on who's telling the story, and the whiskey detail gets embellished in some tellings, but the essential exchange is documented. Karhu took the deal. They thought they were selling a minor design element to a foreign shoe manufacturer. Adidas had other plans.
The three stripes were trademarked. They went on every Adidas shoe, every bag, every track jacket. Eventually they went on things that had nothing to do with sport at all. The stripes became the brand — not a feature of the product, but the thing itself. Today Adidas's three-stripe trademark registration covers apparel, footwear, and accessories across most of the world's major markets.
Karhu noticed: The Finnish company continued making excellent sports equipment without the stripes. They eventually settled on a boomerang-shaped design and built a loyal following in Nordic countries. During the 1952 Helsinki Olympics — held in Finland — Adidas shoes with the three stripes dominated the track. Karhu, the Finnish company that had sold those stripes, watched from home.
Seventy Years of Suing People Over Lines
Once Adidas understood what it had, the company became one of the most aggressive trademark enforcers in the apparel industry. Not occasionally aggressive — systematically, relentlessly aggressive. Four stripes: lawsuit. Two stripes that vaguely suggested three: lawsuit. Curved lines on a sneaker that somebody might theoretically associate with parallel stripes if they squinted: lawyers on the phone.
This is not unusual for a company with a valuable trademark. What made Adidas unusual was the breadth of what they were claiming. Three parallel stripes is, at some level, a description of a geometric arrangement that predates Adi Dassler by several thousand years. The company's position was essentially that any use of parallel stripe motifs in athletic wear infringed their mark. Courts didn't always agree.
In 2019, the EU General Court ruled against Adidas in a case involving the company's trademark registration for the three stripes as a general pattern. The court found that the mark lacked sufficient distinctiveness in that particular registration form — that three parallel lines as an abstract concept wasn't protectable, even for Adidas. The ruling was specific to that registration, not to all of Adidas's stripe marks. But it set a limit. You can own a mark. You can't own geometry.
What You Actually Bought
The interesting thing about the Adidas story isn't the whiskey. It's the question of what Adi Dassler was actually acquiring when he paid Karhu for the design rights.
In 1951, the three stripes were worth roughly two bottles of whiskey. That was the market's honest assessment. Karhu was a real company with real athletes wearing their products, and they thought 1,600 marks and a couple of bottles was a fair price. They weren't being naive. The stripes just weren't worth more than that yet.
What Dassler was buying wasn't the stripes as they existed in 1951. He was buying the right to make the stripes mean something. The value that would eventually make the three-stripe trademark worth protecting with armies of lawyers — that value came from decades of product quality, athlete sponsorships, and the kind of sustained, consistent presence that turns a design element into a cultural symbol. Jesse Owens had worn Dassler shoes at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. By the time Adidas trademarked the stripes formally, the groundwork was already there.
Karhu sold a design. Adidas built a trademark. Those are two different things, and the difference is about fifty years of work and a few thousand lawsuits.