Jakarta, CNBC Indonesia – This is the story of Tadashi Yanai, Japan’s richest person who has assets of IDR 585 trillion. Even though he has trillions in assets, his life is far from arrogance. In fact, he only has 2 clothes in the wardrobe.
Please note, Tadashi Yanai is a conglomerate owner of the clothing store chain, Uniqlo. Actually, since childhood he has lived more than enough. His father owns a men’s clothing shop called Ogori Shoji, in Ube, Yamaguchi Japan. Thanks to that, he was able to go to university level.
Even though he is the heir to the family business, the man who was born on February 7 1949 does not directly manage the Ogori Shoji shop. Instead, he worked as a salesperson at Jusco Supermarket for a year before finally leaving at the urging of his father. It was only then that he came down from the mountains to raise his father’s clothing shop in 1984.
Yanai’s descent from the mountain was accompanied by the opening of a clothing shop called Unique Clothing Warehouse, abbreviated as Uniclo. Uniclo specializes in selling well-known sportswear manufacturers from the United States (US) such as Nike and Adidas. As a result of Japanese citizens being infatuated with US products at that time, Uniclo, which sold goods at low prices, practically sold well.
As a result, in Japan, Uniclo is already available throughout the country. Long story short, the Uniclo outlet changed its name to Uniqlo due to a staff error in writing the name of the shop in Hong Kong.
Unexpectedly, the name change actually turned out to be a blessing. Uniqlo outlets are like viruses. It spreads very quickly in a fairly short time. Until 1998 alone, Uniqlo already had 300 stores.
However, Yanai was not satisfied. He doesn’t want Uniqlo to only sell products from other companies. He wants Uniqlo to be like H&M, Marks & Spencer, Esprit and other European products that produce their own clothes. Then, citing the site A B CYanai consulted John Jay, an advertising expert.
Jay said, Uniqlo should make clothes aimed at Asian people. If the European brands mentioned previously sell goods for Europeans, then Uniqlo must make clothes according to Asian characteristics. Apart from that, the company is also required to make clothes using technology that makes users feel comfortable.
As written by Fast Company, it is from this advice that Uniqlo makes three types of clothing products, including very light clothing (lightweight), clothing for cold weather that keeps the temperature hot (heat tech), and cool clothing (airism). Unexpectedly, all three types of products sold well in the Asian market.
For Asian people who often do activities, they buy the lightweight category. For tropical residents like Indonesia, they buy Airism products. Likewise, people in Asia have cold climates, so they buy heat tech.
These three categories are the key to Uniqlo’s sales success. Thanks to this innovation, on its official website, Uniqlo has 2,394 outlets throughout the world. In Indonesia alone there are 63 shops. All of them are united under the banner of Yanai’s Fast Retailing.Co.
Due to the size of Uniqlo’s business, Yanai has now been named by Forbes as the number one richest person in Japan. Meanwhile, the Bloomberg International Index places him at number 35 as the richest person in the world. It is recorded that his assets reached US$ 38.6 billion or the equivalent of Rp. 585 trillion.
Interestingly, wrote CEO Magazine, Tadashi Yanai also follows the trend of simplicity in dressing like Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg or Microsoft boss Bill Gates. It is known that during his daily activities, he only has 2 clothes in his wardrobe.
The two shirts were dark blue Merino wool worth US$15. +J blue jumper and suit from Uniqlo’s collaboration with German designer Jil Sander.
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