Story mfg. has put its check pattern on an ASICS once before, and the follow-up lands on a shoe ASICS only started selling in October. The GEL-TRANSCEND FJ “Trees Are Poems” pack arrives in brown and black, with the London label’s plaid run across the overlays and the mesh underneath left alone. It reaches Story mfg.’s own site November 11 and ASICS.com November 20. The name on the box is the strangest thing about the whole project.
The GEL-TRANSCEND FJ is not a retro, which is the easy assumption to make from the shape. ASICS put it out this autumn as a new model assembled from its own 1990s hiking and walking catalogue, and the brand has been unhelpfully vague about which parts came from where. Gear Patrol’s reporting on the general release names the 1990s Transcend series, the GEL-Odyssey and the GEL-Radius as the sources for the upper, and notes that ASICS never broke the borrowing down any further than that.
The bottom half is easier to trace, because ASICS put the answer in the name. The wave-profiled midsole and the angular lugged outsole are carried over from the GEL-FujiTrabuco 7, a 2019 trail runner, and that is where the FJ comes from. The suffix is a tooling credit. It is not a line being revived, not a material, not a fit code. Almost nothing else in the catalogue is named that way. GEL-Kayano 14 names a shoe that existed. GEL-TRANSCEND FJ names a shoe that never did, bolted onto the part number of one that did.
What Story mfg. did with it is more restrained than the fabric suggests. The check is printed onto a textured synthetic and kept to the overlays, so the open mesh sitting underneath stays plain brown or plain black. That is the decision that makes the shoe work. The ASICS stripe is cut as a solid panel laid over the pattern rather than being filled with it, so it still reads as a stripe from across a room instead of dissolving into the grid behind it. Sneaker Freaker reports the plaid as a nod to travellers’ vintage blankets.
The branding stays quiet. “Story mfg.” sits low on the lateral heel in a silver script with a small flourish after it, and ASICSGRIP is moulded into the outsole sidewall in raised letters, the same rubber the general release runs. The brown pair takes a dusty mauve midsole and a purple plate across the arch. The black pair goes fully dark underfoot with a blue plate and a pale mint lining at the collar. Contrast stitching in a deeper tone outlines every overlay on both, which is the kind of detail that only shows up once the pattern has been kept off everything else.
The promotion is the real story. Sneaker Freaker places the pair’s first ASICS collaboration, a gingham GEL-VENTURE 6, last year, on a budget trail runner that has spent most of a decade as the brand’s entry-level outdoor shoe. The second one is a model ASICS launched barely a month ago, which is placement normally reserved for a partner who moves volume. Story mfg. does not. It is a husband-and-wife operation working in small runs out of a London studio, and the route into the launch event involves an application form and a hand-drawn self-portrait. ASICS is spending a new silhouette on credibility rather than reach, the same calculation behind putting a GEL-Nimbus in front of FP Movement, and it says the GEL-TRANSCEND FJ is being set up as a culture shoe rather than an outdoor one.
Neither brand has published a price. The general release GEL-TRANSCEND FJ is listed at $150 on ASICS.com, which is the number this pack will be measured against, and a collaboration built on a new model rarely lands under the shoe it sits on. Story mfg.’s own storefront sets expectations in the other direction, with jackets above five hundred dollars and long-sleeve tees above a hundred, because hand-work and small batches cost what they cost. ASICS has priced its recent collaborations close to the base shoe rather than far above it, as the VandyThePink GEL-Kayano 12.1 did. Anything circulating before November 11 is an estimate.
The Story mfg. x ASICS GEL-TRANSCEND FJ “Trees Are Poems” pack comes in Rich Brown, style code 1203B194-200, and Black/Grey, style code 1203B194-001. Story mfg. runs a Rambling Club event at its London studio on November 7 and 8, with a New York stop on November 10. Both colorways go up at storymfg.com on November 11, then reach ASICS.com and select stockists on November 20. No retail price has been announced by either brand, and ASICS has been running its own US store as the first stop on its recent launches.
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