New Yorker - "Inside Uniqlo’s Quest for Global Dominance"
"In 1972, having graduated from college, Yanai started working at the family’s shop. Two years later, he officially took over the business. Every night, he recorded the day’s sales in a handwritten ledger, poring over it until he could recognize trends. After he ordered the clerks at the store to discontinue the unprofitable practice of extending credit on suits, all but one of them quit. In 1984, he opened a larger store, in Hiroshima: Unique Clothing Warehouse. He may have lifted the name, without permission, from New York City’s beloved Unique Clothing Warehouse, which stood on Broadway and Eighth Street from 1973 to 1991 and is remembered for, among other things, employing Jean-Michel Basquiat before he became famous.
Uniclo, as the company was originally known, offered a multitude of brands at bargain prices. “NON SEX NON AGE NON SIZE” read a slogan that Yanai himself painted in colorful letters on the front of the company’s second store. Yanai soon switched to manufacturing his own products. Many of them drew from the ametora tradition—which by then had expanded to include other “American” styles such as outdoor wear—a heritage that continues to inform the company’s offerings. “It’s that reductive, nonchalant, unadorned basic,” Marx told me. “For instance, a Shetland sweater—what Uniqlo does is to take that spirit and then try to create a sweater that is technically the best, most sweaterlike sweater than can be worn by anyone in the world.”
By the nineteen-nineties, Uniclo had expanded to more than a hundred locations, many of them barnlike roadside emporiums where customers could pull in and grab a pack of underwear. (Uniqlo still operates this type of store in Japan and other countries.) In 1988, Yanai established a subsidiary in Hong Kong, where a clerk accidentally transcribed the name as Uniqlo. “Let’s keep it,” Yanai said, figuring that the spelling had a certain dynamism. Japan was in a deep recession, but Uniqlo kept growing, offering bargains for the struggling masses and discretion for better-off consumers in an era that frowned upon conspicuous consumption."
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"Lingering by one of its attenuated, knobby legs, I struck up a conversation with a quiet, conservatively dressed man. He was wearing a Uniqlo lapel pin, in the manner of an American politician’s flag. It was Koji Yanai, one of Yanai’s sons.
I told him that I was writing a story about Uniqlo and asked if there was anything about the company that he thought was misunderstood. “In the past, we haven’t always been good at telling our story,” he said. “But most apparel brands are not existing like us.” I had heard Uniqlo executives compare the company to Apple, releasing gradual updates each season, “like iPhone 4, iPhone 5,” or to a supermarket of clothing, serving daily needs. Koji preferred another, even further-reaching metaphor. “We want to be the infrastructure of clothing,” he said. “Water, gas, electricity, and Uniqlo.”"
