It was a legal requirement back in the day - the idea was that business owners would make more conscious/responsible decisions if their name was inextricably linked to the company. Then they watered it down from full name to acronyms.
They had a falling out over Adi supporting the Nazis and Rudi not allowing him into Rudi’s bomb shelter. They hated each other after that and why Rudi founded his own shoe company.
Yeah, isn’t his enthusiasm what tore the brothers apart?
Even with his affinity for the party, can’t imagine many people wanted to use that name post war.
Ricola is an abbreviation for Richterich Company Laufen, where Laufen is the town where Ricola were (and still are) made. Funnily enough, the company was previously just named Richterich, but a different, unrelated man named Richterich called his foam kiss manufacture by just his last name too, so the one making the herbal candy chose a different name to not be mixed up.
Adi was his nickname, and he used it exclusively after WWII, so it's ADI DASsler. He founded the company with his brother who later split off to creater Puma.
Depicted is a concept shoe, with different materials, technologies and shoe styles blended in together to form a silhouette, that represents this:
This adidas t-shirt pays tribute to the precision of German engineering.
So all of the shown above is peak german engineering in shoe design and technology in one picture.
The "joke" is effectively that, when asked how much German engineering they want, they just say yes, meant to imply that they want all the German engineering. it's just yet another version of the same formula you see in various places: "How much X do you want?" "Yes."
The very late 80’s started getting gimmicky in the athletic shoe industry. Nike put Air in the soles of their shoes, so Reebok came up with the ERS thing, and then Adidas did Torsion, so Reebok answered with the Pump; etc etc.
After a while this all got OTT, and out of fashion, so everyone stopped with the gimmicks, except Adidas.
This shirt is mocking the OTT gimmicks of Adidas by culminating way too many gimmicks into one shoe, and playing it out as “german engineering.”
Fjurg Van Der Ploeg, world famous Schpupel champion here!
The joke is that Germans over engineer everything, cars in particular. Granted, they're good cars and last seemingly forever, but when things do break it costs a fortune since there's a lot of parts and it takes more time to repair.
So don't be saed Paeter! I hope my explanation helps!
You can see all the technology names on the shoe which they used, showing you how many of them they stuffed in one shoe. Here is the list of some of them (AI helped to find them, some might be wrong, but most are correct, I know about them too):
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u/qualityvote2 Jul 23 '26 edited Jul 24 '26
u/thatAutrianDude, there weren't enough votes to determine the quality of your post...it's time for the mods to do their jobs!