Search: reebok name
Why: Joel posted this fun video, which features Garth Algar as a Reebok man:
I have always felt like Reeboks are kind of geeky.
Answer: It comes from the name rhebok, which is a type of antelope or gazelle that lives in Southern Africa!
Legend has it that:
In 1960, two of the [shoe company's] founder's grandsons, Joe and Jeff Foster renamed the company Reebok, having found the name in a dictionary won in a race by Joe Foster as a boy; the dictionary was South African edition, hence the spelling.It's Afrikaans. I bet that animal is pretty fast.
Source: Yahoo! Answers
The More You Know: Also, in case you didn't learn this as a toddler because your brother wore head-to-toe adidas whenever possible:
- The name adidas comes from the name of German founder Adolf "Adi" Dassler.
- In 1924, Adi (24) and his brother Rudolph (26) - whose father worked in a shoe factory - had their own track shoe-making business called Gebrüder Dassler Schuhfabrik (Dassler Brothers Shoe Factory)
- Adi and Rudi both became members of the Nazi Party in the 1930s, but Rudy was closer to the movement.
During the war, Rudolf was drafted while Adi stayed behind to produce boots for the Wehrmacht. A growing rift between the pair reached a breaking point after an Allied bomb attack in 1943. Adi and his wife climbed into a bomb shelter that Rudolf and his family were already in. "The dirty bastards are back again," Adi said, apparently referring to the Allied war planes, but Rudolf was convinced his brother meant him and his family.
After Rudolf was later picked up by American soldiers and accused of being a member of the Waffen SS, he was convinced that his brother had turned him in.
- In 1948, after the rift between the brothers, Rudolph left the company to found his own shoe company - first called Ruda (get it?), but later, he changed it to Puma. A year later, Adi changed the other company name to adidas. The division split their town Herzogenaurach in two :(
If you want to know more, you can read this book Sneaker Wars, though I hear it is just OK. Or you can read this post on this blog, since it's way shorter.
