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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, Rudolf returned to Herzogenaurach in 1924 to join his younger brother Adolf, nicknamed "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.

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.

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