Adidas

Adidas AG is a German multinational corporation that designs and manufactures sports shoes, clothing and accessories.

The company is based in Herzogenaurach, Bavaria, Germany. It is the holding company for the Adidas Group, which consists of the Reebok sportswear company, TaylorMade-Adidas golf company (including Ashworth), Rockport, and 9.1% of FC Bayern Munich. Besides sports footwear, Adidas also produces other products such as bags, shirts, watches, eyewear and other sports and clothing-related goods. Adidas is the largest sportswear manufacturer in Europe and the second biggest in the world, after Nike.

Adidas was founded on 18 August 1949 by Adolf Dassler, following a family feud at the Gebrüder Dassler Schuhfabrik company between him and his older brother Rudolf.

Rudolf had earlier established Puma, which quickly became the business rival of Adidas. Both the Adidas and Puma companies still remain based in Herzogenaurach, Germany to this day.

The company's clothing and shoe designs typically feature three parallel bars, and the same motif is incorporated into Adidas's current official logo.

Adidas has been a longtime basketball shoe manufacturer and is one of the leading basketball brands in the world. They are most famous for their late 1960s iconic Superstar and Pro Model shoes, affectionately known as "shelltoes" for their stylized hard rubber toe box.

Fueled by, among others, coaches such as UCLA's John Wooden,  Adidas drew about even with Converse in basketball by the mid 1970s before both started to fall behind then-upstart Nike in the early 1980s.

Subsequently Adidas Superstar became very popular in the 1980s hip hop streetwear scene alongside Adidas's stripe-sided polyester suits.

Adidas is also the current outfitter of all 30 franchises in the National Basketball Association (replacing the Reebok brand after the merger) and sponsors numerous players past and present like Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Tracy McGrady, as well asChauncey Billups, Derrick Rose, Brandon Knight, Eric Gordon, Josh Smith, Damian Lillard, Andrew Wiggins, Tim Duncan, Jeremy Lin, Iman Shumpert, and John Wall. Adidas endorsed Kobe Bryant with the Adidas Equipment KB8 as his first signature shoe until July 2002.

The company also endorsed Kevin Garnett until he opted out of his contract in 2010. Gilbert Arenas was an Adidas endorser until 2010.

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