(2025-09-22) Inside Uniqlos Quest For Global Dominance

Inside Uniqlo’s Quest for Global Dominance. The brand conceives of itself as a distribution system for utopian values as much as a clothing company. Can it become the world’s biggest clothing manufacturer?

Uniqlo is a clothing company based in Tokyo. It was founded, in 1984, by Tadashi Yanai, who still serves as its C.E.O., and who is now the second-richest man in Japan. Last year, Fast Retailing—the holding company that controls Uniqlo—had its best year ever, generating close to twenty billion dollars in revenue and three billion dollars in profit. It has become the world’s third-largest apparel manufacturer and retailer, trailing only H&M and Inditex, the parent company of Zara.

Uniqlo is the universal donor of fashion, intended to go with any life style or aesthetic. “You can kind of project your own reality onto Uniqlo,” Laura Reilly, who writes the newsletter Magasin, said. The clothes are not exactly forgettable, but they possess a simplicity that can verge on self-effacement

You will never see a logo on a Uniqlo garment. Nor a sequin or a ruffle. “No lace,” Uniqlo’s creative director, Clare Waight Keller, told me. “Not even an asymmetrical neckline.” Waight Keller joined Uniqlo last year, after leading European luxury houses including Chloé and Givenchy.

In our conversations, Waight Keller sounded almost giddy to be designing clothing for sweaty humans rather than climate-controlled closets—to be creating for the masses with their body masses and social, cultural, generational, geographical, and meteorological needs

Uniqlo has more than twenty-five hundred stores in Asia, Europe, and North America. One in four Japanese people is said to own a Uniqlo puffer jacket.

The ecological implications of manufacturing at this scale are staggering.

Executives strenuously object to the notion that Uniqlo is fast fashion, citing improvements in manufacturing and pointing out that their garments are “emotionally sustainable,” remaining desirable for years. Uniqlo offers far fewer styles than its competitors—around six thousand a year, compared with Zara’s nine thousand

The company insists that the more people who wear Uniqlo, the better the world will be. It calls its clothing LifeWear—“clothing that improves people’s lives,” “a link between our world and the next generation,”

Numerous people at Uniqlo attempted to explain the LifeWear concept to me, but the more they did the less I understood. What was clear is that Uniqlo conceives of itself as a distribution system for utopian values, replete with mantras and koans, as much as a clothing company. Uniqlo, Yanai told me, “is Made for All.

Uniqlo’s headquarters occupy a two-hundred-thousand-square-foot former warehouse in Ariake

The facility is known as Uniqlo City, both because of its size and because of its layout, which mimics an urban grid, with “neighborhoods” and “streets

The deliberate pace of Uniqlo’s design process makes it an outlier. Whereas a business model like Shein’s relies on rushing out the latest microtrends (sardine-print sundresses, fringed boots for Beyoncé concertgoers) in as few as five to seven days, Uniqlo begins planning its range up to a year in advance.

The company has mastered the “hero product,” churning out such hits as the Round Mini Shoulder Bag ($24.90), a nylon cross-body pack that went viral in April, 2022, when an Englishwoman named Caitlin Phillimore posted about the shocking number of things that she could fit inside

Mr. Yanai-isms rattled through my head: “I believe only companies that contribute to society will last,” “Change or die.” I asked Conway about Uniqlo’s philosophy, and why a clothing company should aspire to improve human existence. Couldn’t it just make nice clothes? “I think, even internally, we’ve asked ourselves, What is it that’s different about us?” Conway replied. “LifeWear is the main difference.”

People who know Uniqlo well are fond of noting the distinctively Japanese aspects of the company.

Michael Emmerich, a professor of Japanese literature at U.C.L.A. and a translator of the eleventh-century novel “The Tale of Genji,” co-authored the LifeWear messaging for Uniqlo. He admitted that it was deliberately enigmatic, saying that he wanted customers to “stop a moment and engage with language.”

Executives are proud of the way that Japanese principles influence the company’s practices, but they don’t consider Uniqlo a Japanese company per se. Yanai has likened Uniqlo to K-pop, an industry that is oriented toward “what will be popular worldwide, rather than focussing on uniquely Korean characteristics.” Uniqlo’s dream of total demographic penetration, the writer W. David Marx has observed, “means minimizing cultural codes” to create “nationless clothes” that are viable in every region.

The pride of Ariake is its on-site Customer Center. “It looks like a call center, but we don’t call it a call center,” Conway said, stopping next to a closed door. “We don’t outsource.”

Call centers typically enforce strict time limits, but Uniqlo encourages its operators to keep engaging for as long as a customer wants.

It was one such conversation, with a Japanese housewife, that alerted Uniqlo to the fact that customers often wore the brand’s Ultra Light Down Jackets indoors, to save on heating, and that they wanted the sleeves to be snug enough that, when pushed up to the elbows, they wouldn’t slip down while washing dishes. The company applies a sociological attention to the gestures and dilemmas of people’s daily routines; once harvested, these insights are quickly incorporated into product designs

Waight Keller told me that Uniqlo’s “favorite term is V.O.C., which means ‘voice of customer.’ ”

This practice dates back to the nineteen-nineties, when Uniqlo ran an ad in Japanese newspapers called “One Million Yen for Bad-mouthing Uniqlo,” inviting customers to bitch and gripe. No issue is too minor

In 1949, when Tadashi Yanai was born in the small coal-mining city of Ube, Japan was still an occupied country

kimono remained the norm for most people well until World War II.”

The Second World War left Japan devastated, but the seven-year occupation that followed inevitably fostered exposure and, for some, a certain attraction to American culture. “In those years of acute hunger and scarcity, the material comfort of the Americans was simply staggering to behold,”

Yanai’s parents owned a run-of-the-mill men’s-clothing store. The family lived above the shop. Eventually, they opened a second, more casual store. It stocked a brand called VAN Jacket, which, alongside such magazines as Otoko no Fukushoku and Heibon Punch, helped to launch a craze for ametora—an abbreviation for “American traditional,” a mode of preppy dressing that became influential in postwar Japan. In “Ametora: How Japan Saved American Style,” W. David Marx writes that such styles “arrived in Japan over the course of several decades, transformed the look of Japanese society, and boomeranged back to influence global style.”

In the United States, the Ivy League look was synonymous with conservatism, but in Japan it represented a rebellion against traditional mores. In advance of the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, police swept the streets of Ginza, a fashionable neighborhood in Tokyo, for members of a group of style-conscious students known as the Miyuki Tribe. Their offense was hanging around the neighborhood dressed like Princeton sophomores.

Yanai, undeterred, was the first kid at his high school to wear a white button-down and Converse sneakers.

Yanai enrolled at Waseda University, in Tokyo, majoring in economics and politics, but student protests cancelled classes for more than a year. In 1968, with his education at a standstill, he set off on a trip funded by his parents. “I wanted to travel abroad because I was curious about the way the world outside of Japan worked and what kind of lifestyles people had,”

In 1972, having graduated from college, Yanai started working at the family’s shop. Two years later, he officially took over the business

In 1984, he opened a larger store, in Hiroshima: Unique Clothing Warehouse. He may have lifted the name, without permission, from New York City’s beloved Unique Clothing Warehouse, which stood on Broadway and Eighth Street from 1973 to 1991 and is remembered for, among other things, employing Jean-Michel Basquiat before he became famous.

Uniclo, as the company was originally known, offered a multitude of brands at bargain prices.

Yanai soon switched to manufacturing his own products. Many of them drew from the ametora tradition—which by then had expanded to include other “American” styles such as outdoor wear—a heritage that continues to inform the company’s offerings

By the nineteen-nineties, Uniclo had expanded to more than a hundred locations, many of them barnlike roadside emporiums where customers could pull in and grab a pack of underwear.

In 1988, Yanai established a subsidiary in Hong Kong, where a clerk accidentally transcribed the name as Uniqlo. “Let’s keep it,” Yanai said, figuring that the spelling had a certain dynamism.

For the company, 1998 was a turning point: the Year of the Fleece. “At that point, fleece was kind of seen as a male, countryside thing,”

Uniqlo saw an opportunity to transform fleece jackets from frumpy technical gear into a stylish, affordable basic by manufacturing at scale. In Japan, people still remember television commercials featuring an overhead conveyor belt bearing vivid jackets in fifty colors: mint, lavender, cornflower blue, clementine orange, lime green. In 2000, the company sold twenty-six million of these eighteen-dollar fleeces in Japan, enough to clothe more than twenty per cent of the country’s population.

Uniqlo opened its first U.S. store in 2005, at a regional mall in Edison, New Jersey. A thirty-six-thousand-square-foot flagship store, in SoHo—the largest single-brand fashion outpost in the neighborhood—followed the next year.

Fixated on cracking the American market, Yanai tried unsuccessfully to buy the high-end retailer Barneys; two years later, rumors abounded that he was trying to acquire Gap. (No such deal ever materialized, but Fast Retailing did end up buying American companies such as Theory and J Brand.)

By 2010, Uniqlo was so popular in the city that New York proclaimed it the “hottest retailer,” labelling its customers “Uniqlones.”

Elsewhere in America, the company’s strategy wasn’t working.

With losses mounting, Uniqlo closed some of its U.S. stores. In the early twenty-tens, it shifted its focus in the U.S. to building flagship stores in high-traffic urban locations.

Uniqlo has adjusted its sizing for the U.S. market—an American small is closest to a Japanese medium—but frustrations still arise

Even so, the company finally seems to be making serious inroads: last year, revenues in the North American market increased by more than thirty per cent.

The store is the palace of the Uniqlo kingdom. “We call our head offices ‘store-support centers,’ ” Conway told me

At a customization and repair counter, people flipped through binders of motifs—penguins, sushi, cherry blossoms, a special Asakusa logo recalling a votive slip—that they could have embroidered on a bag or a cardigan. “We don’t want to be a chain store,” Conway said of the local touches

Other shoppers perused a display of traditional sake casks or purchased T-shirts celebrating neighborhood artisans—paper-makers; a bakery specializing in melonpan, a crispy sweet bun—as drum-and-flute music from Asakusa’s annual festival played over the sound system.

The shirts, available only at the Asakusa store, were part of a program that Uniqlo calls UT, which issues graphic T-shirts enabled by a dizzying array of licensing deals: Studio Ghibli, Picasso, Disney, Peanuts, Sylvanian Families, Coca-Cola, Hello Kitty, Andy Warhol, manga heroes, adorable kittens poking their heads through pieces of toast

the line is wildly popular—the launch of a collaboration with the street artist KAWS sparked a frenzy in China in 2019, with shoppers crawling under shutters, removing clothes from mannequins, and putting one another in headlocks to get the shirts before they were gone.

Under normal circumstances, the Uniqlo shopper should walk into a store and feel a sense of overwhelming abundance. Such is the logic behind Uniqlo’s power walls of thousands of sweaters on shelves that reach so high you fear that they might bust right through the ceiling, like Willy Wonka’s elevator.

Uniqlo believes that volume is the catalyst of consumer desire. Conway explained, “We want everything to appear fully stocked all the time.”

Customer service at Uniqlo is unobtrusive, whether because of omotenashi principles or because of a desire to save on labor.

Apparently, one of Yanai’s inspirations for this hands-off style of service was a visit that he made to a university co-op during a trip to the U.S.; Uniqlo now trains employees to sell clothes like they are selling books, letting customers browse freely.

At one point, Uniqlo was said to have a rule that obliged cashiers to complete every transaction in a minute or less. Now many Uniqlo stores use R.F.I.D. technology for checkout, allowing customers to simply chuck their items into a bin and pay within seconds, no scanning required

Last year, e-commerce accounted for only fifteen per cent of sales.

Customers complain that Uniqlo’s website is difficult to navigate, that it’s cluttered, that it requires too much scrolling. Coveted collaborations are hard to locate.

Clare Waight Keller travels to Tokyo eight times a year, but the rest of the time she works from London, where she lives

“I’m working on some color adds,” she explained. In the past, she told me, a lot of Uniqlo’s colors “were either a little too vivid and maybe a bit too hot or too sad.”

Uniqlo brought on Waight Keller, who famously designed Meghan Markle’s wedding dress, in part to improve its offerings for women.

The pitch, Waight Keller said, was “We want that element of fashion to come in.” Challenges abounded. “The skirts business was a disaster,” she recalled. “And the same with dresses. I think they’d always approached dresses as, like, T-shirts. And I just said, ‘You know, we need to do things with the waist.’ ”

At the same time that Waight Keller has been working to change some aspects of Uniqlo, Uniqlo has changed her way of working. “In luxury, we often look at putting on a lot of details to make something special,” she said. “Uniqlo is all about softness, it’s all about comfort and distilling the design down to the simplest, perfected form.”

The company is nonetheless fastidious about the fundamental details. For example, Waight Keller explained, Uniqlo finishes every zipper track with a small piece of fabric known as a “garage.” It keeps gunk out of the device and protects against abrasion. Other fixes are invisible. “You know our signature Ultra Light Down?” Yuki Katsuta, Uniqlo’s global head of research and design, asked me. “Every season, we spend months talking about how we can make it ten or twenty grams lighter.”

Recently, designers also made millimetric adjustments to the best-selling AIRism T-shirt, tweaking the shirt’s inner seams to insure that the neckline would lie flatter, with no bumps. “These are the sort of subtleties that an average customer would never detect,” Waight Keller said. “But the concept is that you walk into the shop, you take the T-shirt, you pull it over your head, and it just sits perfectly.”

Uniqlo sells the same products around the globe, but certain local considerations influence the design. “Plaid, for example, is difficult,” Waight Keller said. “Japan prefers small checks, while the rest of the world prefers big checks.” Sunglasses need to be somewhat transparent in Japan, she told me, since dark lenses are viewed with suspicion

When Waight Keller isn’t working, she travels: to Amsterdam, Shanghai, Kyoto, Nara. A colleague had told me that she was constantly snapping images of interestingly dressed people on the street. (streetwear)

A typical order at a Uniqlo factory is a million units. For this and other reasons, Uniqlo claims that its factories aren’t like other factories. “We don’t really do short runs and see you later,”

So is Uniqlo fast fashion or not? The company’s foundational secret, executives say, lies in its tightly focussed product line, which enables it to buy and develop fabric in enormous quantities. This puts the company in a uniquely advantageous negotiating position, allowing it to offer better quality at lower prices

The likelihood of Uniqlo fulfilling its global ambitions depends in large part on whether it is, at long last, able to conquer the American market. Will U.S. customers submit to the notion that dressing like everyone else has its benefits?

The company also has a cultural goal: “to democratize art for all.” For more than a decade, Uniqlo has sponsored free public programs at MOMA, the Tate Modern, the Louvre, and Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts. In exchange, the company burnishes its halo of high-mindedness, receives the right to feature famous works on its T-shirts, and gets to stage events in empty galleries or under an iconic glass pyramid, furthering the idea that its interests lie in Life as much as in Wear.

“We want to be the infrastructure of clothing,” he said. “Water, gas, electricity, and Uniqlo.”

I met Yanai in Paris, during Fashion Week, in the fall of 2024. Uniqlo had rented an exhibition space just off the prestigious Place Vendôme, and was staging a fortieth-anniversary retrospective called “The Art and Science of LifeWear.”

After the presentation, I was spirited away for a brief audience with Yanai at Uniqlo’s nearby offices. Diplomatic levels of protocol were in effect, implemented by a team of handlers. In a bright room, Yanai was seated on a low couch flanked by a formally dressed interpreter. Yanai had a crewcut and wire-rimmed glasses. He was wearing a dark-blue suit, with a pocket square and a polka-dot tie. “You don’t really see anyone dressed in a suit these days,” he said, laughing. “This is very outdated. But, as the host, we wanted to be polite.”

Outside the company, Yanai comes across as a game and almost impish corporate prophet. I asked if he could give me a concrete example of Uniqlo clothing making life better

He responded by pulling a laminated card from his jacket pocket:

• Uniqlo is the elements of style.
• Uniqlo is a toolbox for living.
• Uniqlo is clothes that suit your values.
• Uniqlo is how the future dresses.
• Uniqlo is beauty in hyperpracticality.
• Uniqlo is clothing in the absolute.

Later, I came across a 2012 article in Forbes in which the writer describes receiving a laminated card from Yanai in just the same fashion

In a sense, it was the perfect Uniqlo gesture—elegant, inexpensive, made for no one and everyone at the same time.