Children tend to like bright, vibrant tones. Tadashi Yanai (Ube, Japan, 1949), however, was horrified by the colorful children's clothes that his father brought home after a trip. “I hated attention,” he told The Times. Years later he built an empire around simple and functional fashion that, not without a certain irony, made him one of the best-known figures in the sector and the richest man in the country. Fast Retailing, Uniqlo's parent company, closed its last fiscal year in August with record results and its sights set on its main competitor.
Yanai has never hidden his ambition: “It may be difficult, we may not achieve it, but my dream is to surpass Inditex in the future,” he said in an interview in El País in 2017 about the market leader. “It doesn't matter how long it takes,” he said. The company had a turnover of around 22.4 billion euros, according to the numbers presented last week, almost 17% more than the previous year, and its attributable net profit grew by 25% to 3 billion. Although the growth rate of the Galician house is more modest, it still has a considerable advantage: in six months it earned practically what the Japanese house did in the entire year. H&M, until now the second largest group in the sector, however, is a different story.
In the first nine months of its fiscal cycle, which ends on November 30, the Swedish company earned about 14.5 billion euros, 4.4% less year-on-year. In order not to lose the money, it would have to increase the total turnover for 2025 by 10% and, to do so, spend close to 8,000 million euros in cash in this last quarter, compared to 5,600 in the same period of the previous year. With these numbers, Yanai is on track to be just one step, albeit a high one, below Inditex.
A few steps were all that separated his house from the family business. His father's men's suit store occupied the ground floor and the family and employees lived upstairs. Yanai was born in Ube, a mining town in Yamaguchi Prefecture, on the western edge of Honshū, Japan's main island. He was the second child of the marriage and the only boy, with an older sister and two little ones. He was a shy child who feared a father with a difficult and rough character and whom he tried to avoid. “I worked hard, but I also often made contacts after closing time and rarely got home before it got late,” he told Japan Forward. “Maybe that's where my habit of going to bed early comes from.”
He entered the prestigious Waseda University in Tokyo to study economics and political sciences, which earned him one of the few praises he received from his father. His time at the university coincided with an intense period of student protests about which he wanted nothing to do, so he killed time between the movie screenings and the noise of the pachinko and mahjong halls. He took advantage of a long university closure to take a trip of just over three months that ended up taking him to London, where he found a new style of clothing.
After his graduation in the early seventies, his father recommended him for a job in the fashion department of a department store. After nine months he resigned and joined the family business. At the age of 25, he took control of the company, which already had twenty stores, and opened a new one in Hiroshima, focused on more informal fashion, Unique Clothing Warehouse. At first they sold clothes from different brands, but Yanai soon saw the potential of a brand that combined minimalist design, quality and price and that gained weight on the shelves and racks.
The Uniqlo revolution came in 1998 with the opening in Tokyo and the launch of its lightweight and affordable fleece that, according to Time magazine, ended up in the closet of one in four Japanese. At the beginning of the new millennium they launched internationalization, which did not start in the best way. "When we were expanding overseas, we failed in Britain. We failed in China. We failed again in the United States," he told Singaporean outlet CNA. “I understand failure perfectly,” he added. But you learn from everything. Fast Retailing, which includes other brands such as GU and Theory, today has some 3,500 stores in 25 countries, including those where it stumbled when it was taking its first steps.
He has been described as an inspiring leader and a humble, down-to-earth person. Also that he attracts people with his brilliance, leadership and vision. “All elements of a successful dictatorship,” a former employee of the company told GQ in 2011, something that delves into the centralized and demanding management style that has sometimes been attributed to him. The richest man in Japan, with a fortune valued at around 58 billion, once said that he was not interested in money. In a later interview he commented that he did not dislike the title, but that he did not believe he was cut out to earn so much and that he prioritized doing something good for society. He then showed the Swatch watch on his wrist to the Financial Times journalist in front of him to back up his words. Maybe he's not one of those billionaires who owns a Rolex, but he is passionate about golf with two courses of his own in Hawaii.
Yanai is married and has two children. None will be his successor. Despite having praised his talent, the current president and CEO does not believe that seeking replacement among the branches of the family tree is the most convenient thing for the company, of which he still maintains close to 14% and whose stock market value is around 136,000 million. At the moment, the name of any candidate for the position has not been revealed and Yanai remains, at 77 years old, on the bridge pursuing the white whale of Arteixo.
