ASICS Opens First Sabah Store at Imago Mall

ASICS Malaysia opened its first store in Sabah on November 14, 2026, at Imago Shopping Mall in Kota Kinabalu. The opening takes the brand's retail network in Malaysia to 16 outlets nationwide, and it gives runners in the East Malaysian state a physical ASICS store of their own for the first time.

The store carries the brand's three main lines under one roof. Running footwear anchors the offer, sports apparel fills the middle, and the SportStyle collections cover the lifestyle end. Shoppers can try products in person and get personalized assistance from staff, which is the part of shoe buying that a product page still can't replicate, especially for runners choosing between training and racing models.

The headline range on the shelves is the RISE & SHINE Collection. It features three of the brand's current running shoes: the NOVABLAST 6, the GEL-NIMBUS 28 and the GEL-KAYANO 33. Those three names cover the daily-training, maximum-cushion and stability shelves between them, so the store's opening range is built around the shoes ASICS sells in volume rather than a narrow launch capsule.

Sabah isn't a one-off experiment. ASICS also opened an outlet at Kuala Lumpur's 118 Mall on November 1, 2026, two weeks before the Kota Kinabalu debut. Two openings in the same month, one in the capital and one across the South China Sea in East Malaysia, reads as a network build-out rather than a single flagship bet.

The timing carries a promotion with it. Opening offers at both new locations include complimentary gifts with qualifying purchases, while stocks last. That's the standard mechanics of a store launch, but it matters here because the Sabah store has to convert shoppers who've bought the brand through multi-brand retailers, or online, into customers of an ASICS-only shop.

The physical-store logic is strongest in running. Fit, width and cushioning preference decide whether a shoe works across hundreds of miles, and they don't survive translation into a size chart. A first store in a state capital gives the brand a fitting room, a returns point and a local presence at races and run clubs that shipping from Kuala Lumpur can't match.

Geography is the quiet part of this opening. Sabah sits on the northern end of Borneo, separated from Peninsular Malaysia by the South China Sea, and its shoppers have historically been served last, or online only, by national retail networks. A first ASICS store in Kota Kinabalu closes that gap for one brand. It also gives Sabah's runners local stock of the three shoes in the launch range, in their sizes, without a cross-sea delivery wait.

Sixteen outlets is still a small network for a country of Malaysia's size, and the Sabah opening leaves the map uneven by design. ASICS is placing its stores where the running market already spends, then widening one state at a time. Kota Kinabalu's turn came on November 14, and the count that goes with it is 16 and rising.