I received this question from a few readers recently, so I thought I’d share it with others who may be wondering as well.
Tug,
Do you have any connections with Uniqlo buyers?
About six months ago I discovered the Uniqlo airism t-shirt while living in Shanghai.
Back in the States now, I don’t have any Uniqlo near me so decided to go online to order several large v-necks in white. But they didn’t have that size in either white or grey.
So I waited a month to see if they would restock and now see they are down to only black ones, no white or grey in any size.
If they are discontinuing, do you know of anyone else making a tight fitting, mesh, wicking v neck?
-Jim
Are AIRsim Undershirts Being Discontinued?
good to hear from you buddy and thanks for your question!
i don’t have any buyer connects at uniqlo, but i do have one connection through reddit that i can ask.
my guess is that they stock airism (and airism mesh) on uniqlo.com and in usa-stores primarily in spring/summer months and basically let stock completely run out, so they can focus on heattech in the winter. this is just a guess, but airism is a rather popular item, so i would not expect them to be discontinuing them.
a friend of mine was recently in new york city and visited two the big uniqlo stores — said there was a good amount of airism stock left.
have you thought about calling an actual physical store to see if they have the items you want and if they’d sell any to you? or maybe have someone near that store pick them up and send them to you?
let me see if i can find something out from the uniqlo person i can reach. will let you know what i find out.
I reached out to my contact at Uniqlo, and she responded with the following:
With regards to the inventory, yes we are winding down on AIRism.
The brick and mortar stores are sending all their remaining inventory back to the main warehouse until Spring.
E-commerce will continue to sell the units we have and hopefully steal inventory from the stuff the stores shipback.
As soon as the new inventory arrives in the USA for Spring/Summer 2016 we will get it up on the website. That generally happens around January.
We don’t do buy online ship from store, but we are going to launch a buy online pick up in store in the next few weeks (though I know that won’t help many of your fans).
Let me know if you have any other questions I can help with.
Cheers!
What To Do?
So, if you’re trying to get in an AIRism purchase and can’t find your size, you’ve got a couple of options:
- Keep checking back at uniqlo.com to see if any of that store inventory made it to the online store inventory
- Wait until early 2016
For those of you that don’t want to wait to restock your undershirt drawer, and looking for an alternative lightweight undershirt, check out my Thin Lightweight Undershirts article.
Just some information from my experience since I have been to both New York and China uniqlo stores in 2015 and a huge fan of Airism products in general.
I use it as summer baselayer performance shirt (running, hiking etc) since I consider it pretty much as good as Nike DriFit shirts and Patagonia C1 shirts.
US stores may not even sell the mesh version of the Airism. I brought a bunch of mesh tee/mesh singlet in China’s Uniqlo stores in Aug 2015. I didn’t see any mesh Airism (any style) or regular V-neck Airism shirts in New York stores in summer 2015. I don’t think they stock them regularly.
Regarding mesh vs regular. Regular Airism tee is more silk like and more acrylic like. The mesh is more comfortable IMO. On my scale the mesh is 20% lighter so it has less material. However I found the mesh hold less sweat than the regular so I don’t use it as a running shirt. I usually wear it under a C3 performance long sleeve. Both version of Airism shirt dry very fast after wash.
So if you are a huge fan of Airism products you might want to find a way to buy it outside US.
hey tino — thanks for stopping by and sharing that uniqlo airim information!
i do know that uniqlo was carrying some of the mesh items in their nyc stores because a colleague of mine did pick some up there.
but, as mentioned in this article, they’re waiting until the beginning of next year to restock the product and are selling off any existing inventory.
everything else you mentioned about the comparison between the airism and airism mesh, i totally agree with. if i were to reach for one of the airisms, i’d likely reach for the mesh one first, but it would also depend on what i was planning to do.