Tadashi Yanai

Yanai was born in 1949 in Ube, an industrial town in Yamaguchi at the western end of Honshu, in the same year his father opened the men's clothing shop above which he grew up. He read economics and politics at Waseda, spent a year selling kitchenware and men's clothes at a supermarket chain, and joined the family firm in 1972, by his own account with no particular enthusiasm. He became president in 1984 and the same year opened a casual-wear store in Hiroshima called Unique Clothing Warehouse, self-service, with the doors open at six in the morning. The name shortened to Uniqlo. He has said that his ambition then was to be as big as the Gap; the model he actually built was closer to Toyota's, with the same obsession with the process and the same belief that the supplier is part of the company.

The decisive stretch was 1997 to 2000. Uniqlo stopped selling other companies' brands and made everything under its own label, with retired Japanese textile engineers living in Chinese factories to hold the quality. Then, in 1998, Yanai opened the first Tokyo flagship in Harajuku and put the launch behind a single fleece jacket at ¥1,900. It sold 2 million that season, 8.5 million the next and 26 million in 2000, in fifty-one colours, and the company's revenue went from ¥83 billion to ¥418 billion in three years. Heattech followed in 2003, developed with the fibre company Toray, and the partnership that grew from it is the closest thing Uniqlo has to a moat. The Inditex case on this site describes the model Uniqlo is usually compared with; Yanai's version runs on fabric rather than fashion, and he has been explicit that he does not think of Zara as a competitor so much as a different answer to the same question.

The contested parts are less about conduct than about judgement and control. He handed the presidency to Genichi Tamatsuka in 2002, took it back in 2005, and has held it since; he has said the next president will not be a family member, and has two sons on the board. In Japan around 2013 Uniqlo was named among the so-called black companies for its working hours, and Yanai responded partly by raising pay, including a 40% rise for Japanese staff in 2023. On Xinjiang the record is simply factual: in 2021 US customs detained a shipment of Uniqlo shirts under an order targeting cotton from the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps, Fast Retailing said it used no Xinjiang cotton and lost its appeal on the evidence, Yanai declined to comment on the politics, and in 2024 he told the BBC the company did not use the cotton and was briefly attacked on Chinese social media for it. The company makes a great deal of its product in China and earns about a fifth of its revenue there. He has stated the goal as ¥10 trillion of revenue and the largest apparel company in the world. He is 77 and the plan for who gets it there after him is not public.