YKK. Three letters on your zipper. What do they mean?
Yoshida Kōgyō Kabushiki gaisha (吉田工業株式会社) - which roughly translates to Yoshida
Manufacturing Company - is one of the world's dominant zipper manufacturers.
They did not invent the modern zipper. Yet somehow,
YKK now owns some 90% of the Japan market and 40% of the world market by value.
In this video, we are going to look at the Japanese king of zippers - YKK.
## Beginnings
A zipper - it can also be called a slide fastener,
but I will stick to zipper - is a device used to join and bind the edges of two fabrics.
Whitcomb Judson - awesome name - invented the modern slide fastener
in 1891. Ostensibly to remove the tedium of buttoning and unbuttoning high button boots.
Judson was apparently an engineer who spent much of his life focused on
pneumatic systems for public transit. The zipper was essentially his side project.
Imagine that, something you do on the side becoming the thing you're most remembered for.
His business partners quickly saw the product's potential and developed a
company to sell it. This company eventually went through a series of ownership changes
and transformations to become Talon Inc, the original zipper company.
## Sundback
Twenty years later, Talon hired a Swedish-American electrical engineer named Gideon Sundback.
Sundback became their head engineer and eventually
married the daughter of Talon's plant manager. He spent years working on the
fastener design in order to improve both its reliability and manufacturability.
In 1917 he patented a device called the "Hookless No.2". This fastener had all
the characteristics of the modern zipper with the interlocking teeth structure we see today.
Just as critically, Sundback invented a machine capable of efficiently producing
this fastener design. Being able to actually produce the fastener at
scale was a critical factor in helping it become the dominant design today.
## The Boot
At the start, Talon struggled to get textile companies to adopt their product.
The zipper was used in soldiers' belts, life vests,
and sleeping bags during World War I. It also found a little niche in tobacco bags.
We did not start calling these fasteners zippers
until 1923 - when B. F. Goodrich used it for a rubber boot product of theirs.
This boot changed the course of fashion history. Less than 20,000 zippers were
made between July 1918 and March 1919. After the boot, hundreds of thousands. The factory
had to stop making its other products and concentrate production on zippers alone.
Goodrich apparently meant the term to refer to the boot as a whole,
but people quickly linked it to its hookless fastener - produced by Talon Inc.
Talon was not super pleased by this new moniker. "Zipper" was a generic trademark
they could not control. In the 1930s, they ran ads saying "Call this Slide Fastener
TALON" in an ultimately fruitless attempt to dissuade people from using the term.
## Popularization
The rise of the zipper happened slowly and over time.
Even with the success of the zipper boot, Talon struggled
at first to get garment manufacturers to put zippers into their clothing.
Zippers cost more than buttons. They lacked the same color options. And manufacturers were
worried that they would be too heavy and difficult to integrate into the workflow.
Talon started with girdles for women and work clothing for men. They included zippers
into home sewing kits, hired a sales force to push sales to trouser-makers,
and held zipper-themed fashion shows for women.
Slowly over time, these efforts paid off. Talon grew steadily through the Great Depression.
And by 1939, they produced over 200 million zippers - up from 80 million just 3 years
earlier. Now, our story travels across the Pacific Ocean to a small city in Japan.
## Tadao Yoshida
Tadao Yoshida (吉田忠雄) was born in 1908 in Uozu City (魚津市) in the Toyama Prefecture.
It is a beautiful city surrounded by stunning mountains. It borders Toyama bay,
a spawning ground for thousands of glowing firefly squid. Apparently a pretty cool tourist thing.
Tower Semiconductor - guess Intel now - also runs
a 65 nanometer and 45 nanometer fab there producing analog and CMOS chips.
Also a tourist destination for those of you who are into that sort of thing.
Anyway. Yoshida was the youngest of four children. He grew up in
a happy family. But like many others of their time, they was quite poor.
In order to help with expenses, young Tadao would set up little
businesses for pocket money. One time, he sold little birds and fishes so that
he could buy a fishing net. He used the net to catch even more fishes.
Tadao did well in school but could not afford to continue his studies after the age of 15. So
over the next five years he worked at a rubber boot shop and spent his spare time studying.
## Tokyo
In 1928 at the age of 20, Tadao moved to Tokyo.
He had just 70 yen in his pocket, a gift from his brother. He remembers saying, "I want to
go to Tokyo and do big business ... I am sure that I will be successful if I go to Tokyo".
Yoshida found a job at an import store named Furuya Shoten selling Chinese
ceramics - operated by someone from his hometown. He impressed everyone with his diligence.
But then in 1931, Japan and China entered into war after the Manchurian false flag incident.
Importing Chinese ceramics was no longer possible so the store switched to selling slide-fasteners.
Unfortunately this failed to save the store and they still closed down. Furuya's owner - the
eponymous Furuya - told Yoshida to consider doing something with their remaining zipper inventory.
## First Try
Thus in January 1934, the 25-year old Yoshida started a store called San-S Shokai.
He took over Furuya's zipper inventory, struck a deal with another zipper maker in Osaka,
and opened shop. Back then, most zippers were very poor quality. Over half of them were defective.
So this became one of the first things Yoshida focused on. It was not uncommon for him to
hit the zipper with a hammer to test its workmanship. For better quality control,
Yoshida's shop started producing their own zippers, building a metal factory to do it.
But unfortunately in March 1945, Allied bombing burned the factory down - forcing
Yoshida to dismiss his employees and close the business for a while.
After Japan's defeat, Yoshida returned from Uozu City where he had evacuated to. There,
he met an American who was considering exporting Japan-made products to the United States.
Yoshida showed the American a sample of his best produced
zippers and quoted a price of 9 cents per piece. But the American replied:
> "The quality is not as good as our fasteners,
and the price is very high. We can't trade with this."
## The Zipper
Let me take a pause to discuss the zipper's parts and how they work together.
Zippers have three major components: the tape, the teeth, and the slider.
The teeth - a more technical term sometimes used is “elements” - are the parts of
the zipper that mesh together to open and close the whole zipper.
When the elements are all meshed together, they create a "chain" - called as such because it
resembles a bicycle chain. But sometimes people call it just "teeth" too and that is fine.
The slider is the part of the zipper that moves up and down,
engaging with the elements to lock or unlock them.
Sometimes the zipper will have stops at its top and bottom to keep the slider from falling off.
The tape is the fabric part of the zipper. It is what the teeth are attached to.
A zipper might cost a few cents. 88% of that cost comes from the main materials and labor - which is
a bit unusual for a product. Linings, fastenings, and other accessories make up the rest.
## The Process
To create a metal zipper, you start with wire.
The metal wire is pre-made in a Y-shape. It is often
made from copper zinc alloy for rust reasons.
Copper shortages during World War II gave Talon a lot of grief. They introduced "Victory zippers",
which ironically often deteriorated quite quickly.
Anyway, we then shear a tiny chip off the wire's end. This will eventually be our element.
After that, we make a tiny, hook-like protrusion into the element.
This process is known as "forging".
So does this mean that we can call the guy who does this a "forgemaster"?
Anyway. We need the protrusion - I’ve heard people call it a scoop - because it catches
the teeth as we zip up the zipper, helping keep the teeth together while the zipper is closed.
Finally, we attach the tooth to the tape by bending the
element's two legs. This process is known as "attaching" or "bending".
## The Machine
Obviously, mechanical automation is necessary
for this process to be done economically and effectively.
A zipper that is too tough to zip up or breaks
its teeth can ruin the usefulness of an otherwise perfectly good garment.
So we use a chain machine to automatically
and accurately attach the teeth to the tape. Yoshida saw these American-made,
$30-40,000 machines as essential to achieving the zipper quality he desired.
No other company was willing to share the costs with him. So after a great struggle,
he managed to get an import license and a 12 million yen foreign exchange loan
from the Industrial bank for four chain machines in 1949.
The imported chain machines - which arrived in 1950 - granted YKK an
incredible competitive advantage. You can now do the work of 160 workers with just
6. Yoshida immediately commissioned a Japanese machine company to produce a
hundred replicas. Delivery of this massive order would take 2 years.
However, these chain machines had limits. The most
notable of which was that they attached at a continuous rate,
necessitating the use of "spacers" on the tape to ensure a consistent spacing.
These spacers had to be taken out afterwards, slowing down manufacturing. So in 1953,
YKK improved the machine so to have it attach at regular time intervals,
obsoleting the spacers and greatly speeding up the process.
The new design was rolled out to the 100 domestic chain machines over the
next two years. Further improvements were made to make the machine easier
to run for a single person as well as to increase each machine's production volume.
## Vertical Integration
Yoshida and YKK strongly believed in vertical integration.
In 1954, Yoshida started work on an integrated campus - Kurobe Factory - for
producing everything from the metal for the wires to the textiles for the tapes.
They would later carry this philosophy overseas. A trip to the YKK USA factory found the company
melting its own brass, creating its own polyester, and weaving its own zipper tapes.
Yoshida received pushback for doing all of this in-house, but reasoned that having
control over raw material production gave the company advantages in producing new products.
YKK's automation prowess, their ability to produce the machines that produce the zippers,
and finally their control over the whole supply chain gave them market leadership. By 1958,
YKK was producing enough zippers to encircle the entire earth.
## Clipping the Talons
The proximate cause of Talon's decline and YKK's rise happened in 1975.
That year, the company and its trade association - the Slide Fastener Association - failed to get
the American government to restrict foreign zipper imports. Talon's share
started declining in the late 1960s, but it accelerated throughout the 1970s.
They had 70% of the market in 1971.
And that went to just 35% ten years later in 1981.
But it would be a mistake to entirely blame the American government for this decline.
For one thing, YKK was already producing zippers in the United States by then. They
requested entry into the US market as early as 1955, but failed. So in 1960,
they began importing zipper parts into the US - assembling the final product on American soil.
Finally in 1974, a year before Talon's failed petition, YKK opened a factory in Macon,
Georgia. A vertically integrated plant that took in raw materials like cotton,
polyester chips, and metal and spat out zippers.
This factory remains still in operation and actually saw a recent expansion,
which is nice. YKK zippers since then have been marked as being "Made in the US".
YKK has followed textile manufacturers as they traveled out of America to
various low-cost labor locations around the world. Today they have
factories in 71 countries - building locally to overcome tariff barriers.
## The Fall of Talon
YKK's control of the entire supply chain gave
it the nimbleness and versatility to bring down the American giant.
But Talon itself helped things along too. In 1968,
the industrial conglomerate Textron acquired Talon for $200 million.
Talon's new owners were not textile experts. They were brand managers and lacked the
on-the-ground experience needed to keep the company ahead of its foreign competitors.
Starting in the late 1960s, Talon lost share in industrial garments. Increasingly,
their only profitable business was their traditional home sewing kit niche,
which declined as more women entered the workforce and bought their own clothes.
They also failed to adapt to new fashion styles emphasizing freer
and more colorful clothes made from stretchier synthetic fibers.
YKK on the other hand offered new zippers that took advantage of these trends. The
first was the concealed zipper, which hides the teeth by blending into the garment.
This "invisibility" feature has long been asked for by garment manufacturers.
Second was the introduction of plastic injection mold zippers, which can be dyed into flashy,
vibrant colors that appealed to the flashy, vibrant fashions of the day.
Why am I suddenly thinking of disco?
Anyway, Textron eventually sold Talon after destroying a lot of shareholder value. The
company has since then bounced around between various private equity owners.
A Hong Kong company called Tag-it Pacific Inc owns them now and they mostly produce in Asia.
## Rise of SBS
Today, the zipper market is split into three sections - high, middle and low end.
The ultra-high luxury zipper markets are largely occupied by European brands like
Switzerland's Riri and Italy's Lampo. The low end is dominated
by random manufacturers in China or India competing exclusively on price.
So YKK makes its bones in the middle to high-end fashion markets. About 80%
of the company's $6 billion or so annual revenue is made here. But in recent years,
YKK has seen a substantial competitor in this neighborhood from China.
Fujian SBS Zipper (福建浔兴拉链科技股份有限公司) was founded in 1984 as a zipper
factory in the city of Jinjiang (晋江) in China's Fujian Province.
Founder and chairman Shi Nengkeng (施能坑) started off - much like Yoshida himself - as a middleman,
hitting other people’s zippers with a hammer to test their
quality. But he quickly expanded into production.
And from there, the company has aggressively charged into selling cheap but high quality
zippers to mid-fashion garment manufacturers like Zara, Target, and Michael Kors.
They make about 2.2 billion RMB today or about $300 million USD. Far less than the
Japanese giant, but they also present a direct challenge and YKK knows it.
In response, YKK has sought to produce higher quality luxury zippers while
also building aggressively in China, hitting back at SBS on their home turf.
## Conclusion
One might look down on the humble zipper.
But the product's evolution over a hundred plus years is a demonstration that
manufacturing can be as technologically sophisticated as any slick web app.
Immense work and R&D had to be done to produce advancements in the field,
which we often take for granted. I for one certainly did. And after doing this video,
it will be harder for me to see the zipper as a trifle anymore.