Fast Retailing History
Earlier company descriptions, brand line-ups, store counts and photographs from the history of Fast Retailing, kept for historical reference.
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The Company Description of Its Time
Fast Retailing is filed by its brand portfolio, and the portfolio is the fastest way to understand the company: Fast Retailing owns UNIQLO, GU, Theory, Comptoir des Cotonniers, Princesse tam.tam and J Brand. Six names across four countries and every price tier from value basics to premium denim - but the historical record's story belongs to the first of them. After opening their first UNIQLO store, in Japan in 1984, they built a chain of suburban roadside stores. In 1998, they began opening stores in urban locations and ran a fleece campaign that ignited a UNIQLO boom across Japan. Subsequently, they opened stores within prominent shopping malls, and also global flagship and hotspot stores in Ginza, Shinjuku and Osaka. One product - fleece - turned a roadside chain into a national phenomenon; the filing keeps that causality, and so does this page.
Global Growth and the GU Engine
Global markets are now their key drivers of growth - the filing's pivot sentence, with dated numbers behind it. The first UNIQLO International stores opened in the United Kingdom in 2001. By August 2014, UNIQLO International constituted approximately 37% of total UNIQLO sales, with 633 stores versus 852 stores in Japan. China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea and other parts of Asia were generating strong growth, and the company was developing a network of stores in the United States. The ratio is the story: a Japanese chain, thirty years after its first store, already more than a third international by sales and closing on two-fifths - with Asia, not the West, doing the growing.
The second engine is the low-priced GU fashion brand, launched in 2006, enjoying increasing success in Japan: in fiscal 2014, the number of GU stores reached 276, and sales topped 100 billion yen. GU operates under the same SPA business model as UNIQLO, able to develop unique, highly competitive products - the same vertical structure pointed at a younger, cheaper, faster fashion offer. Two SPA brands at two prices, plus a portfolio of acquired labels above them: that is the Fast Retailing shape the historical record files, and the routes lead to the Japan clothing industry page the historical record linked for the home-market context. The company's own history page is carried in the References, as the historical record invited readers to visit it.
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References & Further Reading
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