PUMA has spent its entire life as the other brother. It was born across a river from adidas, founded by the man who fell out with the man who founded adidas, and for more than seventy five years it has lived more lives in the culture than almost any brand in footwear while never quite winning the business. Right now it is living the hardest chapter of that long story.
The other side of the river
PUMA and adidas are the same family fight. Rudolf and Adolf Dassler built a shoe company together in Herzogenaurach, Bavaria, and after the Second World War they fell out so badly, over their wives, over suspicion and resentment nobody has ever fully explained, that in 1948 they split it in two. Rudolf took his half to the north bank of the Aurach and called it PUMA. Adi took the south bank and called it adidas. The town spent the next half century looking down at strangers’ feet before deciding whether to say hello.
The brand culture kept choosing
Here is what PUMA has always had, even when the spreadsheet was ugly. People keep choosing it on their own. In 1968 the sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos set their PUMA Suedes on the medal stand in Mexico City before they raised their fists, and the Suede became a shoe about more than running. In the early 1970s the Knicks guard Walt Frazier wanted something flashier than everyone else, and PUMA put his nickname on a suede basketball shoe, the Clyde, which then spent the 1980s on the feet of every B-boy in New York. Pele stopped to tie his PUMA boots before a 1970 World Cup match, on camera, because the brand asked him to. Usain Bolt ran the fastest the species has ever moved in PUMA spikes. Rihanna’s Creeper sold out in hours and was named shoe of the year. The list of moments is longer than almost any brand can claim, and it is all people, never the gear.
Right but rarely first
PUMA was also an inventor that kept getting the timing wrong. It built a running shoe with a computer chip in the heel in 1986, decades before anyone wanted one. It tried to kill the shoelace with the Disc System. It made the Trinomic and the Speedcat. The ideas were good. The market was usually somewhere else. By the 1990s PUMA was losing money and nearly went under in North America, until a thirty year old named Jochen Zeitz took over in 1993, rebuilt the whole company around sport lifestyle, and ran it through eighteen years of growth.
The hardest chapter
Which makes the present so stark. In early 2023 the CEO who had spent a decade growing PUMA, Bjorn Gulden, walked across the river to run adidas, the literal embodiment of the old family fight. PUMA lost momentum to On, Hoka, and a resurgent adidas, cycled through executives, and in 2025 posted a loss of more than six hundred million euros, one of the worst years in its history, with around fourteen hundred jobs cut. The new CEO, Arthur Hoeld, came from, of all places, adidas. And in early 2026 the Chinese sportswear giant Anta agreed to buy the Pinault family’s twenty nine percent stake, becoming PUMA’s largest shareholder.
It is tempting to write PUMA off in a stretch like this, and plenty of people are. But betting against PUMA has never paid, because its real asset was never the quarter. It was the long, strange list of people who picked it without being told to, from a sprinter on a podium to a guard who wanted something fresh to a pop star with a platform sole. The business has been left for dead before. The culture keeps handing it another life.