Adidas Sued Puma For Failing, The Company Said It Would Continue Appeals

According to understanding, a court in Germany rejected a Adidas ban on Puma.

"Series of shoes request.

Although the details of the court decision were not disclosed, a spokesman for Adidas said on Tuesday that the company would continue to appeal, while Neil Narriman, Puma's intellectual property director, told the media: "we want to show in this case that although Puma is smaller than Adidas, we will not compromise in order to win the right."

Because of this lawsuit, Puma has postponed the listing schedule of several NRGY running shoes.

This is still a patent dispute.

Puma's NRGY shoe series last year used the midsole material very much like the popular Boost series of Adidas: like a harder white plastic foam, lighter and more elastic than rubber soles, providing good cushioning performance.

NRGY

Boost soles

Narriman believes that from a certain point of view, the existence of NRGY can promote rival Adidas to further improve itself.

Although the scale of Puma is much smaller than that of Adidas, the fierce competition between two German sports brands can be traced back to the competition of two founders in the southern German town in the 40s of last century.

At the beginning of last year, Puma, originally unpopular with female consumers, detonated women's clothing after signing Rihanna as creative director. In 2015, footwear revenue rose 11%. Not long ago, the company also announced the TV star Kylie Jenner.

Her sister Kardashian's boyfriend, Kanye, is just the spokesperson and designer of Adidas. Something like this is often happening between the two brands.

As for the soles that triggered the lawsuit, it originated from two German chemical giant BASF who had worked together. Boost shoes were developed by BASF as a new type of foam polyurethane, which is the ideal sole material for running shoes, providing excellent cushioning performance.

But in 2011, BASF reached an exclusive cooperation agreement with Adidas, and Adidas sold more than 10 million pairs of Boost Series in 2013 last year.

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With BASF's exclusivity agreement, Puma had to find suppliers again. In 2014, the company found Huntsman, an American Chemical Company. After a year, NRGY NRGY launched the market at a price of 100-125 US dollars, which is even cheaper than Boost.

With the popularity of sports equipment market, sports technology patents are becoming more and more important. Brands have found that high-tech, high-performance products are indeed attractive to consumers.

Adidas's Primeknit technology has lost the initiative because it has been released for some time later than Nike's Flyknit, which has become the biggest engine of revenue growth for Nike in recent years.

In the case of Boost and NRGY, strictly speaking, the research and development of this material has little to do with the brand itself, and the material supplier occupies a more dominant position.

This is why Adidas is also strengthening its R & D capability. At the end of last year, they announced that they could set up factories in Germany to devote their energies to truly grasping the future market demand.

Once they have succeeded in inventing something, they may not be so easily copied.