According to Forbes , Tadashi Yanai is the richest man in Japan. The 66 year-old is the founder and owner of the clothing store Uniqlo and its parent group, Fast Retailing. A Time 100 nominee in 2013, he has ruffled some feathers this year by declaring his intention to make his umbrella company the biggest apparel retailer in the world by 2020, with a revenue of 5 trillion yen (about £27 billion).
Uniqlo is the star of Fast Retailing's show. It has 836 stores in Japan, 416 in Greater China, 39 in America and 27 in Europe. One Uniqlo store opens every week somewhere in the world. In London, where all of its 10 UK stores are based, the Japanese brand has filled the gap that, well, Gap once inhabited as the go-to store for quality basics.
To the modern, informed dresser, "basics" now encompass luxury fabrics such as cashmere, silk and premium linen, all of which Uniqlo sells like sweets to children on a school trip. Its Ultra Light Down jackets, which slip nicely between an overcoat and a knit or look slick on their own with denim, are functional necessities by way of great design for the thousands of shoppers who snap them up - including the French model Inès de La Fressange, who declared her love for Uniqlo in her 2011 style handbook and was promptly signed up by Yanai to do her own line for the brand, which continues for a fourth season this autumn.
Perhaps a piece of thermal underwear is more traditionally basic, but Heattech - Uniqlo's own brand of winter-warming vests, T-shirts and leggings, created with the product innovation giant Toray - has a futuristic feel that carries no grannyish connotations. Likewise Airism, a range of garments to keep you cool, which sells particularly well in the warmer climes of Asia. This melding of quintessential Japanese components - functionality, technological innovation and design - has created something new in high street apparel. Uniqlo calls it Lifewear. And there's clearly an appetite for it.
"We are about to cross the border of luxury being only for the small [percentage] of rich," says Yanai, bespectacled, besuited, sitting in the centre of an enormous boardroom on the 31st floor of Tokyo Midtown Tower, the second tallest building in the city. "We want to sell good clothes to all people, not just a few. With our cashmere sweaters and linen shirts there is no one that sells them in the same massive amount. And with Heattech and Airism, this is a new type of clothing with a new application for how it can be utilised and worn."
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Next to Yanai sits John Jay, the American-born global creative director and something of a marketing legend, who joined Uniqlo last year having formerly done great things for the likes of Nike. Further along the table is a translator who interprets Mr Yanai's answers to my questions through a headphone in my ear. (Yanai speaks good English but prefers to do interviews in Japanese.) It is a disconcerting way to interview someone but even with the language barrier Yanai, who talks in a booming voice, is engaging and relaxed. It seems you don't get to be the richest man in Japan without a little charisma.
He certainly has a sense of humour (these days) about the company's first foray, back in 2001, into the UK. Uniqlo opened 20 stores across Britain, all of which had to be closed down, as none of us knew what this peculiar, cut-price Japanese clothing brand was all about - or wanted to buy it. After a rethink of some three years and a new marketing strategy featuring hip fashion insiders, it re-opened five stores in London, including the flagship at 311 Oxford Street, which is currently being renovated for a grand reopening in the autumn. "We had a devastating debut," says Yanai. "So comparing that time to this we are very successful now." He laughs deeply.
Yanai, who is married with two sons - one of whom works for Uniqlo - was the child of a roadside tailor. He was born above his father's shop in Yamaguchi Prefecture, rural Japan and lived alongside the store's assistants. He opened his own shop, the Unique Clothing Warehouse - later shortened - in Hiroshima in 1984 and changing the name of his father's company to Fast Retailing some years later. From the off, he knew he had "struck a gold mine".
"When I first opened the store I thought, probably I can go anywhere in Japan to open another store, one after another." He remained in the middle-class suburbs, pursuing a policy of low prices and convenience, opening his first shop in central Tokyo in 1988. The same year, the company launched affordable fleeces. "It took off like crazy," he remembers, "and I felt there was another gold mine I had discovered."
In September 2004, the company took out adverts in the Japanese press to announce a change of direction. They called it the Declaration on Global Quality, a decision to prioritise quality over price. "We were pitching for absolute quality, not the quality vis-à-vis price tag," he says. "Regardless of the price I wanted to make sure that we intrigued people with the high quality." That same year, its cashmere and Heattech categories were born.
Uniqlo's collaborations with designer names has been a key part of its success and have included Orla Kiely, Cath Kidston and Laura Ashley, but the game-changer was +J, a low-key collection created by the minimalist German designer Jil Sander in 2009. "It was very important for us," says Yanai - who, like Jay, is wearing a +J shirt. They produced the line again recently in Japan. "Again, it was a gold mine. Because it was the answer to [the question]: What will come next after luxury?" The answer? "Luxury to all people."
The company continues to choose its collaborations very carefully. This autumn it will launch collections from the former French Vogue editor Carine Roitfeld, as well as one by the ex-Hermès creative director, Christophe Lemaire.
"I don't want to ravish their names. That's not my intent. It's not about trends," Yanai says. "Clothing apparel is a tool box. Inès, for example, is responsible for creating a tool for us. She is one of the Paris bourgeois and has a very high sense of fashionable people. What do they wear? It's really the lifestyle I'm interested in.
"Likewise, Carine is the queen of fashion, or of luxury brands. Or maybe she is seen as the top, the peak, of the career woman. What does she wear? I have high expectations that she will come up with a wonderful design."
On Lemaire: "His is very delicate and I think sophisticated clothing. At the same time it is a world of minimalism and has the same ideas as the Japanese mindset. It's the function of logic or maths but as the former creative director of Hermès and of Lacoste, he is also a bridge between luxury and sportwear."
Both Yanai and Jay are Anglophiles, fascinated by English history and culture, and Uniqlo's next big move, Yanai tells me, will reflect that. Plans for a London-based research and development centre are under way so the company can tune in and react directly to what is happening in the city. "We want to develop an R&D arm in London because of the counterculture or street culture, because of the designers. It really is a hub of creativity and that is even more important now for us than it was years ago."
"You have something old and new coexisting together and they are having a debate. This is unlike any other place in the world," he says, getting suddenly romantic. "When I get older my dream is to take a walk every day on the streets of London."
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