PUBLISHED 10/13/2006
The bullet train that travels west toward the coastal city of Kobe goes through a long tunnel, and the darkness only adds to the anticipation of what a visitor might find on the other side. After all, Kobe is best known for its utter destruction. Bombing in World War II devastated the city's ports, factories, and homes. Fifty years later, the Great Hanshin earthquake of 1995 wiped out Kobe again. But when the train emerges from darkness and the metropolis comes into view, with its bustling downtown and forest of construction cranes, it's clear that the people of Kobe don't back away from a challenge.
These same values are written into Asics's DNA. The company's story starts in 1949, when Kihachiro Onitsuka, a World War II veteran who was short on footwear knowledge but long on resolve, launched an athletic-shoe operation in Kobe. Onitsuka made primitive running shoes that sold well in war-torn Japan. But he wasn't satisfied assembling rudimentary products. He studied motorcycles for ways to air-cool shod feet and rode a bicycle alongside runners to discover why they got blisters. That Onitsuka himself wasn't an experienced runner didn't faze him.
Onitsuka's budding company prided itself on footwear that was lightweight and form-fitting. In the early 1960s, after merging with an apparel company called Tiger, Onitsuka's shoes caught the eye of a young American entrepreneur dabbling in the running-shoe business. Phil Knight liked Tigers because they felt fast and were reasonably affordable (from $20?$28). He imported the shoes to the United States and sold them from the back of his car in the years before launching Nike. In an era when Adidas and Puma dominated the athletic-shoe business, Onitsuka Tiger attracted running superstars like Frank Shorter, who won an Olympic gold medal in 1972 wearing its footwear. Soon after the running boom hit these shores, Tiger became Asics, and by 1985 the company firmly established itself in the U.S. market with its first true breakthrough: the X-Caliber GT running shoe.
The GT featured an innovative midsole with a wedge of stiff foam along the inside designed to correct overpronation--the excessive inward roll of the foot at footstrike, which affects 60 percent of runners. The next year, while working on an update of the GT, Asics developers came up with the technology that would mark the company's future: a semisolid, silicone-based cushioning unit, called simply Gel, that supplemented the foam in the midsole of the heel. The squishy Gel proved more durable than foam, and soon became the signature feature of all Asics running shoes.
Such innovations, combined with a strategy of tirelessly honing products, turned out to be a potent formula going forward, and one that constantly spurred on Asics designers and developers--like Shinji Senda. Twenty-six years ago, Senda started at Asics mixing rubber at a now defunct Kobe factory. Today, he's the company's manager of running footwear production and design--and is known around the company as a dogged perfectionist. In 1996, for instance, Senda wanted to better distinguish Asics from its competitors by making the Gel insert more visible (in most cases, it could only be spotted from the bottom of the shoe heel). He pushed Asics's factories to incorporate a Gel insert into the Gel-Zapata running shoe that would be large enough to be seen from the heel's outer edge. At first, the factory crew resisted, insisting that it was impossible to squeeze that much Gel into the shoe. But Senda persisted until the factory successfully fulfilled his demand. "I've been challenged on a lot of things," Senda says, "and in the end I've always found the necessary perspective or idea."
Senda, a former soccer standout who now spends much of his leisure time in karaoke bars, would need to call on all his experience for the making of the Kinsei, whose early years were marked by a series of false starts. The most notable one was Kayano's first attempt.
In some respects, Kayano seems miscast as a star running-shoe designer; for one thing, he rarely goes out for a run. Instead, he looks to science-fiction flicks and phony TV wrestlers for inspiration. When he was brought onto the Kinsei project in 2002, after an initial prototype had been deemed as lacking sufficient innovation, Kayano proceeded to mock up a design that was a silvery cross between running footwear and a futuristic loafer, with fade-style blue and red coloring and two gold securing straps that took the place of shoelaces. It would be shiny, light, and fast. His inspiration? "Did you see Back to the Future Part II?" he asks in clipped English.
The question is irrelevant because, like many movie sequels, Kayano's prototype got panned. His bosses thought the attempt fell short. Management wanted something that truly departed from what had existed in running shoes, and laceless uppers already had shown up in competitors' products. "This shoe," Senda says in a gravelly smoker's voice, "had to be totally different."
In the summer of 2003, eight months after Kayano's misstep, Senda was presented with another design, this one from the Asics R&D department: It landed on Senda's desk with a thud. Featuring a midsole made entirely of a single heel-to-toe Gel unit, this model weighed a hefty 20.5 ounces (the Gel-Kayano XII, by comparison, weighs 12.5 ounces) and was stiff as a board. Senda reluctantly showed this third design prototype to his bosses, expecting an immediate dismissal. They indeed shot it down--but in doing so they pointed out something that gave the project hope: For the past 20 years Gel had been used in the heel of the midsole and exclusively for cushioning purposes. This prototype suggested that Gel could help control overpronation in a way that foam had always provided. If this Gel-filled lump were rethought, it could potentially deliver an even smoother, more supportive ride than the Kayano. Plus, it offered a marketing opportunity. As Terry Schalow, Asics America product manager, puts it, "Whether or not it's always true, consumers associate foamless midsoles with performance."
After five years, and three failed prototypes, the key to a revolution suddenly was in sight.
