A logo for a wider company
In 1971 adidas introduced the Trefoil, the three-leaf mark that would become one of the most recognised logos in sportswear. The company had built its reputation on athletic footwear since Adolf Dassler registered the business in 1949, but by the early 1970s it was preparing to expand into apparel. The three stripes alone identified the shoes; a broader identity was needed for a company that now intended to dress athletes from head to toe. The Trefoil answered that need, and it appeared on apparel from 1972.
The design kept the three stripes at its core. The mark set three leaf-shaped forms above a base crossed by the familiar bars, so that the new symbol grew directly out of the old one. This continuity mattered. adidas did not abandon the visual equity of the stripes; it extended it into a self-contained emblem that could sit on a label, a hangtag or a chest panel without depending on the shape of a shoe.
What the three leaves stood for
The Trefoil was widely read as a symbol of breadth. Its three leaves were interpreted as the landmasses of the world, or as the diversity of the athletes and disciplines adidas served. The reading was less a fixed corporate statement than a flexible idea that suited a company positioning itself as global. What the mark communicated with certainty was scale: this was no longer a specialist shoemaker but a broad sporting-goods brand.
Visually, the logo belonged to its era. Its symmetry and botanical shapes reflected the graphic taste of the early 1970s, and that period feel is precisely what later gave the Trefoil its value. As tastes changed, the mark aged into a signifier of authenticity, the sign that a product connected to adidas history rather than its latest technology.
From corporate mark to heritage emblem
For roughly two decades the Trefoil served as the primary adidas logo, appearing across footwear, apparel and advertising. That changed in the 1990s. As the company modernised its performance identity, it adopted the three-bar Performance mark, which took over as the corporate and competition logo. The Trefoil could have been retired. Instead, adidas kept it in reserve, and the decision proved commercially significant.
By the late 1990s the vintage adidas aesthetic had returned to fashion, carried by music and street culture that prized the brand's older designs. The Trefoil, no longer the corporate mark, was free to represent exactly that heritage. In 2001 adidas formalised the arrangement by launching the Originals division, using the Trefoil as its emblem. The split gave the company two clear identities: the three-bar mark for sport and progress, the Trefoil for heritage and lifestyle.
A durable piece of brand architecture
The Trefoil's second life is a case study in how a retired logo can become an asset. Rather than letting an old mark fade, adidas assigned it a defined role within a two-mark system. That structure let each logo carry a distinct message without competing with the other, and it gave the company a ready-made symbol of authenticity at the moment the market began to reward heritage.
The commercial logic proved sound. adidas Originals grew into a substantial business built largely on reissued designs carrying the Trefoil, and the mark now appears across footwear, apparel and accessories that reference the brand's past. Because the logo signals provenance rather than any single product, it can move freely between categories and collaborations without losing meaning, giving the division a flexible emblem that ties an ever-changing range back to a single, familiar source.
The mark's longevity also rests on its restraint. Because the Trefoil was built from the three stripes, it never strayed from the brand's core equity, and successive design refreshes could leave it essentially untouched. Consumers who had known the logo in the 1970s recognised it decades later, and younger buyers encountered it as a badge of the brand's past. Few sportswear marks have carried a single visual idea across half a century with so little alteration.
Today the Trefoil ranks among the most reproduced logos in apparel, worn as often for its cultural associations as for any connection to sport. Its introduction in 1971 marked the moment adidas grew from a shoemaker into a full sporting-goods brand, and its later reassignment to Originals turned a period logo into a permanent part of the company's identity. The three leaves that once signalled expansion now signal memory, and the brand has built a substantial business on that meaning.
Written with AI assistance, edited by a human. Find out more about our Use of AI.
