What is the secret of Onitsuka Tiger’s worldwide popularity?

Onitsuka Tiger” is very popular not only in Japan and other Asian countries, but also in European countries, and it would not be an exaggeration to say that not a day goes by without seeing a foreign tourist strolling around the Meiji Jingumae and Shibuya areas where the OTOKOMAE editorial office is located, carrying a shopper from one of the directly-managed stores. Recently, the popularity of the brand among young people in their teens and twenties has also been increasing. In this article, I would like to introduce the secret behind Onitsuka Tiger’s growing popularity.

Onitsuka Tiger is a leading Japanese shoe brand that has contributed greatly to the rush to win Olympic medals

Onitsuka Tiger is a sports shoe brand founded by Kihachiro Onizuka in 1949. Since its founding, Onitsuka Tiger has expanded its sales of basketball shoes, running shoes, and other products to high school athletic teams, and has even produced shoes for the Japanese Olympic team. The rush of Olympic medals won by athletes wearing Onitsuka Tiger shoes has also had an impact, and the brand has established a firm position as a globally recognized brand.

Onitsuka Tiger had temporarily disappeared due to a name change!

In the 1960s, BRS, the predecessor of Nike, was attracted by the high performance and low price of Onitsuka Tiger and became the exclusive sales agent in the U.S. “Cortez” (now Corsair) and wrestling shoes became a hit in the U.S. during the jogging boom and were particularly popular on the West Coast. Later, the company went public as Onitsuka Co., Ltd. but its performance deteriorated with the end of the Olympic economy, and in 1977, the company and brand name were changed to the current ” ASICS ” through a business merger with another company. Here, the Onitsuka Tiger brand temporarily disappeared.