How Uniqlo made Yanai rich
Tadashi Yanai built his fortune by reinventing a provincial clothing business. In 1972 he joined Ogori Shoji, his father's men's clothing company in Ube, Yamaguchi prefecture, which ran a few tailoring and menswear shops. Most of the staff left after he arrived and began changing the way things were done. He took charge of the company in 1984 and that year opened a new kind of store in Hiroshima under the name Unique Clothing Warehouse, soon shortened to Uniqlo.
The idea was to sell well made basic clothing at low prices in a self service format. Yanai studied American casual retailers and later adopted the model of a specialty retailer that controls design, production and sales. Uniqlo began working closely with factories, mainly in China, ordering large volumes of a limited range of items to keep quality high and costs low.
The company was renamed Fast Retailing in 1991 and listed its shares in 1994. A breakthrough came in 1998 when Uniqlo opened a store in Tokyo's Harajuku district and promoted colorful fleece jackets at low prices, which became a national craze. Fast Retailing grew into the largest apparel company in Asia, and Yanai's large stake in it is the source of his wealth.
Fast Retailing and its brands
Fast Retailing's businesses include:
- Uniqlo: the main brand, with stores across Japan, Greater China, Southeast Asia, Europe and North America
- GU: a lower priced fashion brand launched in 2006
- Theory: a contemporary fashion brand based in New York, in which Fast Retailing took a controlling stake
- Comptoir des Cotonniers and Princesse tam.tam: French brands acquired in the 2000s
Uniqlo has become known for its functional products developed with material partners, especially HeatTech thermal underwear created with the Japanese fiber maker Toray, as well as Ultra Light Down jackets and AIRism. It also runs collaborations with designers and artists.
International expansion started with London in 2001, followed by flagship stores in New York, Paris, Shanghai and other cities. Overseas sales have overtaken those in Japan. Yanai holds a large stake in Fast Retailing, and his two sons, Kazumi and Koji Yanai, sit on the board and hold senior roles in the group. He has said he intends for professional managers to lead the company in the future rather than making his sons successors as chief executive.
Early life and first years in business
Tadashi Yanai was born in February 1949 in Ube, a coastal industrial city in Yamaguchi prefecture. His father ran a men's clothing store on the ground floor of the house where the family lived.
He studied economics and political science at Waseda University in Tokyo, graduating in 1971. After university he worked for a short time at Jusco, a supermarket chain, selling kitchen goods and men's clothing, but he left within a year and went home to join his father's company.
Yanai has said he learned from failures. In the early years of Fast Retailing several ventures did not work, including a brief attempt to sell food products and an early expansion in London that led to store closures before the overseas business was rebuilt. He wrote about his approach in a book whose title translates as One Win, Nine Losses, arguing that a company must tolerate many failures to find a few successes. He has also been known as a demanding executive who expects rapid change from his staff and has repeatedly set ambitious global targets for Uniqlo.
Philanthropy and public views
Yanai has made several large gifts to education and research. In 2014 he funded the Yanai Initiative for Globalizing Japanese Humanities, a joint program between the University of California, Los Angeles and Waseda University. Through the Tadashi Yanai Foundation, he offers scholarships for Japanese students to study at universities in the United States and Europe.
In 2020 he donated large sums to Kyoto University to support research by the Nobel laureates Shinya Yamanaka, known for work on induced pluripotent stem cells, and Tasuku Honjo, known for cancer immunotherapy. He also funded the renovation of a building at Waseda University into the Waseda International House of Literature, which opened in 2021 and is linked with the novelist Haruki Murakami, a fellow Waseda graduate.
Through Fast Retailing, Uniqlo has partnered with the United Nations refugee agency, donating clothing to refugees and supporting employment programs. Yanai is known for speaking openly about Japan's economic stagnation, criticizing what he sees as complacency in Japanese business and politics, and calling for the country to open up to the world and to immigration.