ASICS ran two heritage brands and quietly retired one

A third pillar, by the company's own description

In January 2015 ASICS launched ASICS Tiger. The company later described it in its own words as "the third pillar brand launched in January 2015", combining elements of both ASICS and Onitsuka Tiger, and its corporate history records the year as the moment the brand "is re-issued and a full product lineup is rolled out to meet the expanding 'sports lifestyle' market demand".^1,2

The architecture on paper was tidy. ASICS would be the performance brand. Onitsuka Tiger would be the heritage brand of the 1950s to the 1970s, sold through lifestyle and concept stores. ASICS Tiger would take the 1990s, the decade of the company's own technical archive, and sell it through sports and sneaker retailers to a younger, sportier customer.³

The logic, as management stated it

Alistair Cameron, then CEO at ASICS in Europe, gave the reasoning at the launch: "We have noticed that our performance-oriented brand Asics is actually making good business in the lifestyle segment. The new Asics Tiger brand shall make the lifestyle products more clearly identifiable."⁴

The condition he describes is one a separate label puts a boundary around: lifestyle demand arriving on a performance product, in retailers the performance business does not plan for. Mike Jenson, then Director of Lifestyle at ASICS America, gave the brand its intended register: "Asics Tiger will always stand for rare quality, rare style, rare craftsmanship, and a rare era in Japan's history."⁵

The company invested accordingly. An identity system was developed by Bruce Mau Design with Kontrapunkt and Alan Peckolick, covering a custom typeface, retail environments and packaging.⁶ A first European campaign, "Made of Japan", ran from September 2015 across six markets.⁷ Directly managed stores followed.

Two heritage brands, one heritage

The difficulty was structural rather than executional. Both new brands were built from the same archive, both carried the same stripe, and both were named Tiger. The distinction between them was a decade, the 1960s against the 1990s.

ASICS still publishes a page headed "Are you looking for Onitsuka Tiger or Asics Tiger?", live across several European market sites.⁸ The page has outlasted one of the two brands it disambiguates.

The naming made the boundary harder to hold than the positioning did. Onitsuka Tiger and ASICS Tiger share a word, and the word is the one with the heritage attached to it.

The disappearance, which was never announced

What happened next is not on the record as an event. There is no press release, no investor notice and no executive statement retiring the ASICS Tiger label. The evidence is structural, and it is all in ASICS' own reporting.

By the financial statement for the quarter ended 31 March 2019, ASICS reported five product categories: Performance Running, Sports Style, Core Performance Sports, Apparel and Equipment, and Onitsuka Tiger. ASICS Tiger appears only as a brand used inside the Sports Style category, not as a category of its own.⁹ In the Integrated Report 2020 the five categories are the same and the name ASICS Tiger does not appear anywhere in the document.¹⁰ On the consumer side, the legacy URL slug for ASICS Tiger still resolves, and the page it serves is headed Sportstyle, with no ASICS Tiger copy left on it.

So the brand was not withdrawn in public. It was reported out of existence, and the category name absorbed the products. For a company that had introduced it as a third pillar four years earlier, that is a quiet correction, and it is one the record does not explain.

Nothing in the record explains the choice not to announce it. What the record does show is the sequence: the category name was already in the reporting in 2019, the brand name was gone from the reporting by 2020, and the consumer-facing URL was serving the category by 2026.

What the correction was worth

The two surviving lines are now the fastest growing parts of the company. For the year ended 31 December 2025 SportStyle reported net sales of 141.3 billion yen, up 43.6 per cent, at a category profit margin of 29.3 per cent, and Onitsuka Tiger 136.5 billion yen at 37.7 per cent. ASICS noted that both exceeded 100 billion yen for the first time.¹¹

ASICS describes SportStyle in investor language as products that "refine the sports technology cultivated by ASICS over many years into a sophisticated style".¹² One is a category of the parent brand. The other is a separate brand, and from 1 January 2027 a separate company. That is the structure ASICS arrived at after running a third one in between.