Uniqlo

Uniqlo grew out of a men's clothing shop, Men's Shop Ogori Shoji, founded in Ube, in Japan's Yamaguchi Prefecture, in 1949 by Hitoshi Yanai. His son Tadashi joined the family business in 1972 and opened a new kind of store in Hiroshima in June 1984: a large, self-service warehouse of inexpensive everyday clothes, called Unique Clothing Warehouse. The name was shortened to Uni-Clo, and when a clerk registering the trademark in Hong Kong in 1988 misread the "C" as a "Q", Yanai liked the result and adopted Uniqlo across Japan.

The company, renamed Fast Retailing in 1991, listed its shares in 1994 and adopted the specialty-store model of controlling everything from product planning and fabric sourcing to manufacturing and retail. Its breakthrough came in 1998 with a campaign for fleece jackets sold in dozens of colours at a fraction of the usual price, and an urban store in Tokyo's Harajuku. The fleece became a national phenomenon, and Uniqlo became a household name.

Rather than chasing catwalk trends, Uniqlo has built its business on core products refined season after season, an approach it calls LifeWear. A long partnership with the Japanese materials company Toray produced Heattech thermal innerwear in 2003 and later the cooling fabric Airism.

International expansion began in London in 2001, where the first stores struggled and most closed in 2003. Uniqlo regrouped and opened a global flagship in SoHo, New York, in 2006, followed by flagships in Paris, Shanghai, Seoul and elsewhere. It expanded rapidly across Asia, which became its largest market outside Japan, and arrived in Australia in 2014 with a store at Emporium Melbourne.

Design collaborations gave the brand fashion credibility. Jil Sander created the +J line from 2009, and Christophe Lemaire, after a collaboration in 2015, became artistic director of the new Uniqlo Paris R&D Center in 2016, launching Uniqlo U. In September 2024 the British designer Clare Waight Keller, formerly of Chloé and Givenchy, was appointed Uniqlo's creative director, having previously designed its Uniqlo:C line.

Tadashi Yanai remains chairman and chief executive of Fast Retailing, which has become one of the largest clothing companies in the world. Four decades after the Hiroshima warehouse, Uniqlo is defined less by fashion than by the promise that its basics will be good, cheap and a little better every year.