Here is a fact that should rearrange how you think about the whole industry. Nike does not exist without ASICS. Before there was a swoosh, Phil Knight’s company was just the American importer for a Japanese brand called Onitsuka Tiger, selling its running shoes out of a car trunk. The company that birthed Nike is still here, still making some of the best running shoes on earth, and right now it is having the best stretch of its life.
An octopus and a war
ASICS begins with Kihachiro Onitsuka, who founded a shoe company in Kobe, Japan, in 1949, in a country flattened by war, on the belief that sport could rebuild the health and confidence of young people. His first real product was a basketball shoe, and the breakthrough is one of the great origin stories in footwear. He could not get the sole to grip on the stop and start of the court until he watched the suction cups on an octopus in a seafood dish and built an outsole that worked the same way. That idea is the root of everything. The company name came later, in 1977, when Onitsuka merged with two others and took an acronym of a Latin phrase he lived by, anima sana in corpore sano, a sound mind in a sound body.
The company that made Nike
The part most sneaker fans do not know is the Nike one. When Phil Knight started Blue Ribbon Sports in 1964, the entire business was importing Onitsuka Tiger shoes and selling them to American runners. Bill Bowerman’s early ideas were built on Tiger shoes. The relationship broke down, the two sides went to court, and Nike emerged as its own brand in the early 1970s. ASICS rarely gets told as the company that lost Nike, but it is the company Nike grew out of, and it kept doing the one thing it had always done while Nike went off to conquer the world. It kept making runners’ shoes.
Quietly serious, then suddenly cool
For decades ASICS was the runner’s runner brand, the one serious marathoners trusted while the culture looked elsewhere. It invented GEL cushioning in 1986. The GEL-Lyte III arrived in 1990 with its split tongue and became a quiet design icon. The GEL-Kayano, named for its designer Toshikazu Kayano, has been a stability staple for thirty years. None of it was loud. All of it was good.
Then the Y2K wave hit, and the culture went looking for exactly what ASICS had been making the whole time, technical running shoes with real history and no hype tax. The GEL-Kayano 14, an old stability runner, became a fashion object. The GEL-1130 took off. Kiko Kostadinov turned the GT-2160 into a grail. And unlike a lot of revived heritage brands, ASICS had never stopped being legitimate, so the lifestyle boom landed on top of real credibility.
The best stretch of its life
The result is a genuine turnaround, not just hype. In 2025 ASICS posted record sales and record profit, its fourth straight record year, and announced it would spin off Onitsuka Tiger into its own high-end company. The brand that gave the world Nike is, three quarters of a century later, one of the healthiest names in the sport.
There is a quiet lesson in ASICS the louder brands keep having to relearn. It never chased a trend, never had a Jordan, never bet the company on a celebrity. It just kept making excellent running shoes for the people who actually run, decade after decade, and waited for the culture to come back around. It always does. The brand that started Nike is proof that you can lose the race for attention and still be standing, healthy, at the finish.