Beyond the show — Uniqlo (Fast Retailing) · Tadashi Yanai · 1998

Your first Tokyo store opens in weeks. Do you launch it with the full range, with a premium fleece priced just below the outdoor brands, or with one fleece at ¥1,900 in every colour you can dye?

Uniqlo has around 350 stores, almost all of them on suburban roadsides in western Japan, and revenue of about ¥83 billion. The brand is known, when it is known at all, as cheap — there is a joke about people cutting the labels out. A year ago you stopped selling other people's brands and now make everything yourself in Chinese factories, with retired Japanese textile engineers living on site to hold the quality. You are about to open your first store in Tokyo, in Harajuku, on the street where the country's fashion happens. Fleece jackets from outdoor brands sell for ¥5,000 to ¥10,000; you can make a comparable one and sell it, at volume, for ¥1,900. Doing that at volume means committing most of your autumn production to a single item.

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