[imagesource: Facebook / PUMA]

Since its establishment in 1948, PUMA has become one of the most recognisable and sought-after sports brands in the world.

The German company has recruited top-tier brand ambassadors and style influencers including Rihanna, Big Sean, and Selena Gomez.

It also boasts some of the world’s most impressive athletes like Usain Bolt, Neymar, Lewis Hamilton and others on the books.

These names will be rocking out in PUMA gear and sporting that iconic logo, which has been universally recognisable now for the best part of seven decades.

According to Highsnobiety, PUMA‘s original logo featuring a puma cat jumping through a capital “D”, was a nod to the founder of the brand, Rudolf Dassler.

Dassler originally wanted to call the brand ‘RUDA’, a combination of the first two letters of his first and last name. He changed his mind in 1957 because he wanted all of his products to embody the characteristics of a puma cat.

A year later, the words “Rudolf,” “Dassler,” and “Schuhfabrik” (shoe factory) were added to the design.

In 1968, the logo was stripped down to feature a leaping puma with no border or text, and two years later, the design was refined once again, this time by cartoonist Lutz Backes.

Following experiments with two different fonts in the mid-’70s, PUMA settled on the uppercase script that remains to this day, adding the silhouette of a puma leaping over the upper-right corner of the text.

This design from 1979 remains largely untouched to this day.

This video offers a slightly more detailed history:

It’s pretty hard to believe that PUMA was once just a single store in Germany, which has since grown to be one of the largest sportswear manufacturers in the world.

The Richest offers a trip down memory lane to the very beginning:

 In 1924, brothers Rudolf and Adolf Dassler established the Dassler Brothers Shoe Factory in Berlin and Austria… They had no notion that they were building the groundwork for the sports shoe at that time.

Their first plant opened in 1924, five years after they started out in a garage in 1912. In their mother’s laundry room, the two began their new business enterprise. A stationary bicycle with pedal power provided the brothers with an alternative method of powering their equipment because the town’s electrical supply was unstable at the time.

Sounds like load shedding before it had a name.

Get the bikes out, people.

With the European football season about to kick off, you’ll see plenty of the fabled logo in the weeks to come.

PUMA’s local site also features all of the collaborations and designs which have helped make it so much more than simple sportswear.

[sources:highsnobiety&richest]