The Adidas Logo: How Three Stripes Became a Global Brand
Adidas started with stripes that had a job. Adi Dassler stitched leather bands along the sides of his running shoes to hold the foot steady, and only later did anyone think of them as a logo. Seventy-odd years on, three parallel stripes are enough to tell you whose shoe, shirt or tracksuit you are looking at, with no name needed.
The brand now runs three different logos at once, which breaks most of the rules designers are taught. Looking at how it gets away with that is a good lesson in what makes a mark hold together.
Two Brothers, Two Brands
The story begins in Herzogenaurach, a small town in Bavaria, where Adolf “Adi” Dassler and his brother Rudolf ran the Gebrüder Dassler shoe factory from 1924. Their spikes were on Jesse Owens’s feet at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. In 1948 the brothers fell out for good. Rudolf set up across the river and named his company Puma; Adi registered his in 1949 as adidas, built from his nickname and the first three letters of his surname.
From the first day the name was written in lowercase, and it still is. That small decision makes the wordmark feel approachable rather than corporate, and it is one reason the brand has always sat comfortably on the street as well as the track.
Stripes Bought for Whisky
Adidas did not invent the three stripes. The Finnish sports company Karhu used them first, and around 1952 Dassler bought the rights. The price usually quoted is about €1,600 in today’s money and two bottles of whisky. Whatever the exact figure, it may be the best value any brand has ever had from a design purchase.
The stripes worked because they were visible from a distance. On a football boot in a black-and-white newspaper photo, or on a runner crossing the line, three white bands on a dark shoe were impossible to miss. When West Germany won the 1954 World Cup in Adidas boots with screw-in studs, those stripes were in every picture. The lesson is that a mark designed to be seen from far away will usually work up close too, while the reverse is rarely true.
The Trefoil, 1971
By the late 1960s Adidas was selling far more than shoes, and the stripes alone did not sit well on a label or a bag. In 1971 the company introduced the Trefoil: three leaves cut through by three horizontal lines, with the lowercase wordmark underneath. It appeared in time for the 1972 Munich Olympics. The company has said the leaves stand for the three continents where its products were sold; plenty of people simply see a flower, which does no harm.
The clever part is that the Trefoil keeps the stripes inside it. Even on a new symbol, the number three and the parallel lines carry the old identity forward. When you add a new mark to an existing brand, give it something the old one already owned.
Hip-Hop Adopts the Trefoil
In 1986 Run-DMC released “My Adidas”, and at a concert in Madison Square Garden the group asked the crowd to hold up their shoes. Adidas signed them to an endorsement deal, one of the first between a sportswear company and a music act. The Trefoil went from the running track to the record shop, and it has stayed there. Today it is the logo of Adidas Originals, the line built on that heritage.
No designer can plan a moment like that, but a logo can be ready for it. The Trefoil was simple enough to print on anything and distinctive enough that fans wanted to be seen wearing it.
The Badge of Sport
In 1990 the designer Peter Moore, who had earlier worked on the Air Jordan identity at Nike, drew a new mark for Adidas’s Equipment range: three slanted bars that rise like a mountain, a climb towards a goal. It became the Performance logo, known inside the company as the Badge of Sport, and since the mid-2000s it has been the main logo on football kits, running shoes and corporate material.
Notice that Moore did not throw the stripes away. He tilted them, cut them and stacked them. The idea of three parallel bars survives intact, which is why the newer logo reads as Adidas even to people who have never seen it before.
Three Logos, One Brand
Today Adidas uses the Trefoil for Originals, the Badge of Sport for Performance, and a circular logo made of three curved stripes for its fashion-led lines. Most brands would be told to pick one. Adidas can run all three because each of them is built from the same idea, three parallel stripes, and the lowercase wordmark appears with all of them.
If you ever need sub-brands, this is the model. Decide on the one element that is fixed, and let everything else move around it. Without that shared element, three logos look like three companies.
Defending a Simple Shape
The danger with a very simple mark is that it is hard to own. Adidas has spent decades in court over other people’s stripes. It has not always won. In 2019 the EU General Court ruled that one of its broad three-stripe trademark registrations was not distinctive enough, and in 2023 a New York jury found that Thom Browne’s four-stripe designs did not infringe. Simple logos are easy to remember and easy to imitate, so the more basic your mark, the more it relies on consistent use over time to stay yours.
Black and White First
Almost every Adidas logo works in a single colour. The stripes are white on a black shoe or black on a white one; the Trefoil and the Badge of Sport are flat shapes with no gradients. Colour comes from the product, not the mark. That is why the logo can sit on a red Bayern shirt, a cream Samba or a neon running vest without clashing. Our guide to colour in logos covers when it is worth fixing a colour, and when, as here, it is better to leave it free.
Adidas and Nike
The obvious comparison is the Nike swoosh. The swoosh is a single gesture, all movement; the stripes are a pattern, closer to a uniform. Nike’s mark says speed, Adidas’s says belonging. Both are simple enough to draw from memory, and both have outlived dozens of campaigns that were built around them.
What to Take From the Stripes
Adidas shows that a logo can start as something practical and grow into an identity, that one idea can carry several logos, and that lowercase type and plain shapes age well. If you are designing your own mark, look for the equivalent of those stripes: a single, repeatable element that would still identify you if the name were taken away. You can try ideas quickly in our free logo maker and see which ones still work at the size of a shoe tag.
