I ask if he wears it on steamy Tokyo workdays. He smiles broadly and, at that moment, the richest man in Japan unbuttons his shirt to show me his Uniqlo underwear.
Yanai is refreshingly open about his goals these days: making Uniqlo the number-one apparel retailer in the world. His target—$50 billion in yearly revenue by 2020—will require whiplash gains above Uniqlo's current revenue of $12 billion, driving the company ahead of front-runners Inditex (which owns Zara), H&M and Gap. This swaggering ambition might ring hollow if Yanai hadn't already turned heads among apparel-industry cognoscenti. He established a beachhead in the American market, opening three attention-getting stores in New York City—including a gargantuan flagship on Fifth Avenue, the second-biggest store in the Uniqlo empire. He lured designer Jil Sander out of retirement for a wildly successful multi-season collaboration. And then there's the retail environment: Yanai's scripted sales techniques and sleek spaces are studied by Uniqlo managers in Japan before being spread to markets around the globe.
Uniqlo will open two new U.S. stores this fall—in San Francisco and New Jersey—while also launching an e-commerce site. The company hopes to add "hundreds and hundreds" of stores here, from coast to coast, at a rate of 20 to 30 a year. In short, Uniqlo is vowing to beat Gap at its own game, clothing all of America in basics at affordable prices. Can a brand rooted in Japan—one employing a distinctly minimalist aesthetic—become a mainstream U.S. retail force, invading malls in the Midwest and in Sunbelt suburbs?
Yanai thinks it can, largely because he sees zero difference between shoppers in Manhattan and in Milwaukee. In this sense, he draws inspiration from a noted American minimalist: Steve Jobs, another retail entrepreneur who had boundless confidence and a knack for turning simplicity into chic. It's become almost cliché to compare successful emerging brands to Apple, or to equate an iconoclastic business leader to Jobs. But this is precisely how Yanai views his mission and himself. To him, Uniqlo is less like other clothing companies and more like Jobs's high-tech corporate temple: on a constant quest for innovation, guided by a holistic vision that aims to do much more than simply move merchandise. Read the whole story at WSJ
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