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If you don’t know Japanese brand Onitsuka Tiger by name, you know its shoes. Notably, the Mexico 66, a thin-soled, often brightly coloured sneaker with crossover stripes, which has gained popularity at various points in history, from Uma Thurman’s yellow pair in Kill Bill to more modern iterations, worn by stars like Bella Hadid and Michael B Jordan in recent years amid the thin-sole sneaker boom.
Like Adidas, which credited its thin-soled shoes the Samba and the Gazelle with sales uplifts over the last year, and Puma, who entered the Lyst Index’s hottest items for Q1 2025 line-up for its thin-soled Speedcat ballet flat; Onitsuka Tiger is scaling off the back of the retro sneaker craze that’s captured fashion since late 2023.
Today, the brand will open a store in London’s Covent Garden, as part of an international expansion strategy that has seen the brand open 28 stores over the last 18 months, from Shanghai to Barcelona. The London opening celebration will take place at the ‘Onitsuka Tiger Tavern’ on Tuesday evening, at the Crown Anchor pub, just by the new store space (albeit with Japanese Toki whiskey on offer). The event will be the first of many, says Ryoji Shoda, head of Onitsuka Tiger and executive VP of Asics Corp, speaking on Zoom via an interpreter from the brand’s Tokyo HQ.
“This store goes beyond simple product sales. At Seven Dials in Covent Garden, a hub where diversity and generations and cultures converge, we will continue to celebrate Japanese design and craftsmanship, alongside art and entertainment, with a commitment to further developing this area,” he says. “With this opening, we will regularly feature Onitsuka Tiger Tavern, in collaboration with the beloved Crown Anchor pub as well as Suntory’s acclaimed Toki [Japanese] whisky. We aspire for this store to become a distinctive cultural crossroads.”
Onitsuka Tiger was founded in 1949, shortly after WWII, by Kihachiro Onitsuka, who innovated thin, rubber-soled basketball shoes with better grip. The brand merged with athletic uniform maker Jelenk as well as fishing and sporting goods company GTO to form Asics Corporation in 1977. While today Asics and Onitsuka Tiger operate separately under Asics Corp, the two brands have one thing in common: the stripe, which was launched by Onitsuka Tiger in 1968 at the Olympic Games in Mexico (hence the Mexico 66, which was initially designed as a track shoe for the games).
Interestingly, Onitsuka Tiger was a precursor to sport’s biggest brand: Nike. Nike founders Phil Knight and Bill Bowerman started distributing Onitsuka Tiger shoes in the US in the ’60s, under the name Blue Ribbon Sports, before rebranding to Nike in 1971.
While it started out as a brand for “people who love to play sports”, Onitsuka Tiger was “rebranded as a fashion brand” in 2002, Shoda says. Now, he’s taking this further, launching fragrance and investing in accessories to become a “luxury lifestyle brand”. “We’re not trying to just follow trends or buzz, we’re trying to incorporate and mix fashion elements with the functionalities that we’ve been accumulating for many years,” Shoda tells me.
The strategy is taking hold. After pandemic losses (down 26 per cent in 2020), Onitsuka Tiger has rebounded strongly in recent years. Net sales grew 58.3 per cent from 2023 to 2024, with operating profit up 111 per cent in the same period.
Pivoting to fashion
In practice, this luxury lifestyle slant means more apparel, a cross-category product mix in stores and crucially, putting on a fashion show. Onitsuka Tiger began showing at Milan Fashion Week for Spring/Summer 2021 and is now a mainstay on the schedule, which Shoda believes is a worthy investment for brand awareness on a global scale.
“I think participating in fashion week is a must in order for us to really succeed. Fashion week is not really about expanding the business [via sales], per se, but rather that we believe it’s going to really help us enhance the brand awareness of Onitsuka Tiger as a fashion [label],” Shoda says. “[The idea is that] Gen Zs see our brand at fashion week, and then search our brand and learn about our brand, and see how good we are. They would then be encouraged to visit our stores, perhaps. So that is part of our strategy. Joining fashion week is very important to us.”
With a long history in sports, shifting to fashion and lifestyle requires a lot of consumer education, and that the brand is increasingly experimental with fresh, more functional products and colourways, which it can show on the runway. “Traditionally, our main target was consumers in their 30s and above, and those consumers really love classic products,” Shoda says. “However, we’ve seen an increase in the audience who are in the Gen Z generation, and they like functional items. We’ve been able to build resonance and brand recognition with them.”
The Mexico 66 has contributed to a sales uplift in the last two years, Shoda says. Like the Adidas Samba and the Puma Speedcat, it benefitted from the shift to slimmer, thinner soled shoes. “In recent years, there has been a boom around low-profile products, which pushed sales up more than we expected,” he says. “We believe it’s important to continue to evolve this product and pursue comfort so that people can enjoy wearing these shoes, not just being caught up with trends. And we believe that Mexico 66 will continue to be our core product heading into the future.” It’s also not the first time the Mexico 66 has seen a boost, Shoda explains that Thurman’s character in Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill (2000) wore the style as part of her iconic, all-yellow look, which caused a major sales uplift in the early noughties, but “disappeared in 2010”. “On the whole, our sales weren’t really affected,” he continues, “we were able to always offer fresh products to our customers while keeping Mexico 66 as our core.”
Following the playbook of many sportswear giants like Nike, Onitsuka Tiger shifted its strategy to focus on direct-to-consumer (DTC) during the last decade. But while other labels have met challenges with this strategy, it’s been a boon to Onitsuka Tiger’s performance.
“We were able to complete that strategy right before Covid. Then post-Covid, we’ve seen a growing number of consumers coming to our stores, because we’ve been focusing more on DTC and that’s where we would be able to really establish our brands, but also our worldview,” he says. “The customers who visit our stores really spread the word through social media and digital channels. That really boosts business.” Onitsuka Tiger has been building a lot of stores in major cities, which has helped establish the global brand image.
Shifting focus to Japan
Over the last decade, Onitsuka Tiger has become a “big hit in Europe”, with more modest growth in its native Japan. “But recently, we’ve seen the reverse, where the business is centred in Japan, and continues to spread around the world,” says Shoda. “The shift started to take place last year. We were always hoping that we could be more successful in the Japanese market originally, but finally we were able to achieve that.”
It’s due, in part, to the brand storytelling, establishing Onitsuka Tiger as a Japanese heritage label. “Now, people see us as a Japanese brand. That kind of perception has really been enhanced in recent years, which means that there are many customers from other countries, including the US, who come to Japan to buy Onitsuka Tiger products.”
Of course, there are other factors at play. Japan emerged as a key shopping destination globally, when the yen’s value crashed in 2024, making premium and luxury increasingly affordable. This likely contributed to Onitsuka Tiger’s domestic upswing, Shoda acknowledges. “It is true that the depreciation of the yen has been a favourable factor. However, an even more significant factor is our global channel strategy of not selling in multi-brand stores, our pricing strategy of maintaining prices and the establishment of an environment where customers can fully experience the brand’s worldview in our Tokyo stores. Because they perceive value beyond mere price competition, this trend has not diminished, even now that the value of the yen has risen.”
The brand has also invested in marketing and communication (like the London launch event), to underline Onitsuka Tiger’s Japanese roots. “In some ways, it’s been a challenge to communicate the label’s Japanese modernity,” says Shoda. “We want to really spread our brand as a Japanese, modern brand, not as a classic, traditional Japanese product — and communicating that is not easy.” For the brand’s 75th anniversary, it mounted a month-long exhibition in Tokyo, showcasing 75 pairs of Onitsuka Tiger shoes; a world premiere exhibit of Japanese art pieces inspired by the brand; and a short movie tour of Onitsuka Tiger stores around the world, created using computer graphics, extended reality technology and motion capture.
The brand continued the celebrations in Paris, overtaking an opulent 18th century hôtel particulier (a grand mansion) on the Champs Élysées, renamed the Onitsuka Tiger Hotel. (A second Paris store will be opened in July.) It invited painters, musicians, artists and chefs, each admired by the brand, to stay. In the hotel, there was an Onitsuka Tiger café and an archival exhibition celebrating the brand’s heritage. “While temporary, this activation created a lot of buzz,” says Shoda, and has inspired further marketing activities, like the Onitsuka Tavern in London.
Targeted retail expansion and collaborations
After this temporary stint, the brand will open a permanent store on the Champs-Élysées this July. “I heard there are no Japanese brands with a store on the Champs-Élysées in Paris so far,” Shoda says. “Our European team found this bright location on the street that was available. So when I heard the news, I made the decision on the spot and decided to open the store there.”
The Onitsuka Tiger stores, now across London, Milan and Paris, are set up like communal spaces with large sofas so people can relax. “Our store clerks do not force selling products to our customers, that’s part of our philosophy, so people do not necessarily have to buy products, but they can still enjoy the space. That’s the environment we want to really create.” However, in recent years, the stores have become really packed with customers due to the brand’s rising popularity. “So maybe people are not really able to relax so much anymore,” he laughs.
While the expansion strategy is ambitious, Shoda doesn’t plan to just “open as many stores as possible”. Instead, it’s a targeted approach with a flagship (or two) in one specific geography, in key tourist cities.
The brand closed its New York store, the only US outpost, in 2023. “While the significance of New York as a city remains unchanged, the store’s location and role at that time did not allow us to fully express the services and worldview of Japan,” Shoda says. “Moreover, we assessed that the conditions of the US market did not align with the brand’s evolution nor its current luxury direction.”
So for now, it is minimally exposed in the US via its e-commerce site, meaning Shoda isn’t too worried about the tariffs — despite Onitsuka Tiger being manufactured in Japan and across Southeast Asia (Japan is yet to strike a deal with the US to reduce its 24 per cent tariff ahead of the July deadline). “While we do not disclose specific percentages, cross-border e-commerce sales to the US account for a small share of our overall e-commerce sales in Japan,” he explains. “We are actively monitoring trends in the US market and exploring opportunities to re-enter in a more sophisticated manner in the future.”
Like its retail strategy, the brand has taken a targeted approach to collaborations. Over the last year, Onitsuka Tiger has collaborated with several brands, including anime series Astro Boy and LVMH-owned luxury label Patou. But they’re selected strategically. “Collaborations come naturally, we don’t say we’re going to do 10 times a year; we don’t make those kinds of decisions,” Shoda says. “We look for the brands that have good affinity with us. And then, if we have a chance to talk to them and agree on collaboration, we go.”
The Patou collaboration drove “a lot of attention”, Shoda says. Patou started out as a tennis label and has since pivoted to fashion, so Shoda saw similarities between the two. “The designer [Guillaume Henry] was a fan of Onitsuka Tiger, so that was another reason why I decided to work with them,” he explains. “We really value our brand identity and also the brand value, and that’s what we really focus on when we engage in any collaboration. It’s not really to sell as many products as possible through the collaboration. Having that kind of focus really helped us succeed.”
Looking ahead, the focus remains on creating IRL experiences for potential and existing Onitsuka Tiger customers, which means more stores. “The world is becoming more digitised. We want to really cherish and value our brand philosophy, which is to really make people happy through our brands. And how we can do this is to really offer experiences where people can enjoy our brand using their five senses. So anyone who looks at our brands, who buys our brands, we want to ensure that they are really touched by really enjoying our experiences — and that’s what we always want to offer.”
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