December 15, 2024, 2:01 pm | Read time: 2 minutes
This year marks the 55th anniversary of the Puma logo. Since its inception, millions of sports articles have been printed with the leaping feline silhouette. STYLEBOOK reveals the story behind the famous trademark.
The history of Puma begins with a dispute. The brothers Adolf and Rudolf Dassler, who had run a sports shoe factory in Herzogenaurach since the 1920s, suddenly couldn’t stand each other anymore. So, at the end of 1948, Adolf Dassler went his own way and renamed his company Adidas.
Rudolf also wanted to continue on his own, but he quickly rejected his first idea of calling the company “Ruda.” It just didn’t sound dynamic enough. So he pondered a little, and suddenly, the scales fell from his eyes: Puma. That sounds like drive, energy, and fighting spirit. The new brand name was born. The logo for Puma, however, was not yet. It would be another 20 years before the elegant predator took its spot next to the lettering.
Puma Logo Is the Work of a Cartoonist
Adorning clothing brands with logos first came into fashion in the 1960s. As a trendy sports brand, Puma naturally wanted to keep up with the times and commissioned the development of a Puma logo. It was obvious that it should be the eponymous big cat. The famous Nuremberg caricaturist Lutz Backes, who is actually known for drawing rather funny characters, immediately convinced Dassler with his logo idea.
His personal reply letter from 1967, quoted by the Handelsblatt, reads: “Dear Mr. Backes, thank you very much for your Puma designs. We only used your first design, but that doesn’t stop us from laughing heartily at some of your other drawings.” Initially, 5000 bags were printed with the fresh logo, but it soon adorned all bags, shoes, and tracksuits and still does today.
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Design Experts Consider the Puma Logo to be a Prime Example
The science of logo design was not particularly sophisticated at the time, but Backes proved to have an intuitive talent. The elegant and slender feline predator, which leaps above the lettering with seemingly effortless power, is considered by experts to be a prime example of logo art. The image has become so well engraved that it has remained virtually unchanged for 55 years. The silhouette of the big cat has thus written a piece of German design history.
Source
- The big cat turns 50, Handelsblatt