Onitsuka Tiger

Onitsuka Tiger was founded in 1949 in Kobe, Japan by Kihachiro Onitsuka as the original founding brand of what would later become Asics — Onitsuka Tiger is the historical predecessor brand to the modern Asics Corporation, and the original Onitsuka Tiger-branded shoes (1949-1977) anchor the broader Asics-and-Onitsuka-Tiger combined corporate heritage. The Onitsuka Tiger brand was relaunched as the deliberately-archive-research lifestyle-shoe sub-brand of Asics in 2001, with the broader Asics line serving as the contemporary athletic-performance-shoe brand. The Onitsuka Tiger vocabulary settled around several specific products: the iconic Onitsuka Tiger Mexico 66 (the brand's defining 1966-pattern leather-and-suede running-shoe — designed for the 1968 Mexico City Olympics and famously worn by Bruce Lee in Game of Death — still in production with the original construction), the Onitsuka Tiger Corsair (the original 1969 Asics-Onitsuka pattern that was later licensed to Nike as the Nike Cortez), various deliberately-1960s-Japanese-archive lifestyle running-shoe revival product, and a colour palette anchored to washed-white leather (the brand's defining colour for the iconic Mexico 66 product), washed-navy, oxblood, ecru, plus the brand's recurring use of saturated red, electric-blue, butter-yellow, and the iconic 1960s-Japanese-athletic-aesthetic accent combinations. The sub-brand is part of Asics Corporation (TYO: 7936), the publicly-listed Japanese athletic-and-outdoor parent company. Onitsuka Tiger operates approximately 100 retail flagship stores globally — anchored to Tokyo (Ginza, Aoyama — the brand's Tokyo flagships), Osaka, Kobe (the brand's historic home), plus extensive international flagship distribution across Asia, Europe, and the US. The brand has been one of the defining post-2001 Japanese-anchored 'archive-revival lifestyle-footwear' sub-brands.