The Uniqlo story: from a single store to a global fashion empire, with ambitions to be world’s No 1 brand
- Uniqlo’s roots go back to a men’s clothing store in a far-flung Japanese city in 1949; influenced by US retail trends, it began expanding in Japan in the 1980s
- It took another cue, from US retailer The Gap, and a fortuitous name change to trigger global expansion. Now everyone, everywhere is a potential customer
Everything about the photograph taken to mark the opening of the store screams out the 1980s.
Its name – Unique Clothing Warehouse – is in a square font beloved of science-fiction movies of the time; hairstyles take us to the same decade; customers peering through the windows are wearing baggy jeans with turned-up bottoms or pleated skirts; and everyone is wearing white shoes, trainers for the men and flat slip-ons for the women.
The photo was taken on June 2, 1984, in the Fukuromachi district of Hiroshima and captures the opening of the very first outlet of a chain of clothing stores that now spans the world. Unique Clothing Warehouse has since been abbreviated to the more snappy Uniqlo, and that dated font has gone the same way. It’s likely there are many other things that even the founder of a company that can trace its lineage back a further three-and-a-half decades would barely recognise today.
But he surely would be delighted at its success. The predecessor of Uniqlo was set up in the provincial city of Ube, in Japan’s far southwestern prefecture of Yamaguchi, famous in the early decades of the last century for coal mining, chemicals, concrete and steel. Ogori Shoji was a gentleman’s clothing shop that added a splash of style to the local heavy industry when it was opened by the Yanai family in March 1949.
Other shops followed and the business thrived and expanded to the point that Hitoshi Yanai felt confident enough to establish Ogori Shoji Co. Ltd in the spring of 1963, with six million yen in capital. Growth was steady over the following 20 years, the clothier benefiting from Japan’s decades of economic growth and the disposable income that it put in the public’s pockets.
