People are only just beginning to realize the ‘hidden message’ behind Adidas’ iconic logo

You may have been kitting out your Adidas gear for a few years now, but have you ever stopped to think about what the brand’s iconic logo actually means?

Walking around in a tracksuit, sneakers and sportswear adorned with the three stripes can do wonders for your street cred, but you really need to know what that trio of lines means.

So, buckle up for a quick history lesson on branding.

If you didn’t know, Adidas first burst onto the German scene after World War I when the company’s founder, Adolf “Adi” Dassler, began repairing shoes.

He then started making sneakers in the laundry room of his mother’s house in Herzogenaurach, Germany, alongside his brother Rudolf, and that’s when the brothers’ business brains were sparked.

They opened a business known as Dassler Brothers Sports Shoe Factory, which proved to be quite successful, as by 1928 they were supplying shoes to international athletes.

Long story short, their shoe factory ended up producing military equipment at the start of World War II, before the full-scale mobilization of 1943 transformed it from a shoe manufacturing plant into a full-fledged arms factory.

Adi and Rudolf eventually split in 1948 after a disagreement, prompting his brother to found rival sportswear company Puma – but that’s another story.

In 1949, Adi came up with the iconic three-stripe logo and renamed the company using a combination of his first and last names – Adi and Dassler, of course – to create Adidas.

The very first logo consisted of a spiked athletic shoe – sporting the three stripes – which sat between the elongated tails of the two “d”s in “Adidas”, while the word “Sportschuhe” (which means sports shoes in German) sat below.

The sportswear giant’s website explains: “That logo, along with the 3-Stripes branding that began appearing on every shoe (and eventually every piece of clothing), is where it all started. Those telltale stripes, by the way, have no numerological significance.

“They eventually settled on the first pair of adidas shoes after Dassler tested several versions and numbers of stripes and discovered that three of them simply showed up more prominently in photography, an important factor for a new sportswear brand hoping to make a splash.

“Clearly it worked, as the 3 Stripes continue to be a world-renowned brand that symbolises adidas.”

Long-time Adidas customers will know that a floral-inspired logo was also released later in 1972, which featured three leaf-shaped leaves crossed by three stripes, as the company diversified into sportswear.

There is also the “gear logo” that appeared in 1989, which was created after the design team “sketched those famous three stripes as seen from the inside of an Adidas shoe.”

But despite the changes, the “hidden message” behind the three stripes has always remained consistent.

As you probably noticed, the lines are positioned in a triangular shape that resembles a mountain.

According to Hatchwise, this is meant to represent the “obstacles you have to overcome as you work towards your athletic goal” – as Miley Cyrus says, “it’s the climb.”

In the same vein, Tailor Brands says it represents “the challenges athletes face and the goals they need to achieve.”

Achieving greatness in the world of sport is obviously a gigantic mountain to climb, but apparently you can do it all with a pair of Adidas shoes on your feet.