A close up of a YKK zipper. (Photo: Chris 73/ WikiCommons CC BY-SA 3.0)
Posted on 09/01/2015 2:43:42 PM PDT by NYer
A close up of a YKK zipper. (Photo: Chris 73/ WikiCommons CC BY-SA 3.0)
There is not a groin in the world that the city of Kurobe has not touched.
It has done so through the auspices of YKK, the world’s largest manufacturer of zippers, producing roughly half the world’s supply—some 7 billion a year. Yet to understand how Kurobe became the zipper capital of the world, one must travel back to the very birth of the zipper, to a time when the zipper wasn’t even the zipper at all.
It was in the midst of the Victorian age that mankind suddenly grew disquieted with the button. Along with brooches, buckles and pins, the button had ruled supreme as a clothes-fastening device since ancient times. Yet now it would face its stiffest competition to date. Elias Howe, the magnificently coiffed inventor of the sewing machine, sounded the first warning shot to the button’s dominance when he patented an “automatic continuous clothing closure” in 1851. His invention was forgotten amidst all the hemming and darning, but ripples were already spreading out into the placid pond of fastener innovation.
Elias Howe, c. 1850. (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons)
They reached the obsessive Chicago inventor, Whitcomb Judson, towards the end of the 19th century. Judson abruptly felt the need to free people from the tyranny of high-button shoes. He intended to do so through the creation of what he termed were “clasp lockers”. But his invention was too bulky, and his fanatical redesigns grew ever more complex and impractical. Abetted by his financial backer, Colonel Lewis Walker, Judson founded the Universal Fastener Company even while the device had a fatal flaw—a propensity to burst open at inopportune moments.The pair’s most high profile sale was to the US Postal Service who tried them on their mail sacks. However they bought only twenty.
Perhaps Judson’s alarmingly wide array of interests—he designed both street railways and nose rings for hogs—prevented him from perfecting the device. It was left to Gideon Sundback, a Swedish inventor working for the Universal Fastener Company, to finalize the design with his own "separable fastener" in 1914, and at long last it seemed as if the world was ready to embrace the device. It was, after all, the era of the motor car, the tank, and the airplane. The natural was rapidly being supplanted by the manmade. So too in the world of fasteners. Out went the old organic forms—discoidal (circular) buttons and hook-and-eye fastenings—and in came a clothes conjoiner for a new mechanical age in which two rows of protruding metal teeth clamped together like some fearsome haberdasher dentata.
A close-up of Whitcomb Judson's 1893 patent for "clasp locker or unlocker for shoes". (Photo: Google Patents US504038 A)
The separable fastener was something out of a Futurist’s utopia. All it needed was a suitably modern name.
That would eventually come thanks to the B.F. Goodrich rubber company, who installed Sundback’s fastener on their boots in 1923. As recounted in Robert Friedel’s essential zipper tome, the boot was originally called the Mystik but it sold terribly. The inspiration for the new name came from the company president:
“What we need is an action word…something that will dramatize the way the thing zips…Why not call it a Zipper?”
It was a moment akin to Lennon meeting McCartney, Jobs meeting Wozniack, Kanye meeting Kim. The device’s onomatopoeic name sang of the modern, of speed and frivolity. Ziiiiip! The world of pants would never be the same again.
Patent for Gideon Sundback's "separable fastener". (Photo: Google Patents US1219881 A)
The Universal Fastener Company, now named Talon, set up home in Meadville, Pennsylvania, and began mass-producing its zippers. By 1930, 20 million Talon-made zippers were being sold a year, but mainly for unglamorous functions such as pencil cases, bun-huts and engine covers. However when the fashion designer Elsa Schiaperelli used them in her 1935 spring collection (which the New Yorker described as “dripping with zippers”), the humble zip entered the world of high fashion. Menswear followed. In 1937 Esquire magazine announced that the zipper had beaten the button in the "Battle of the Fly." By the end of World War II, Meadville was selling some 500 million zippers a year and was renowned as the zipper capital of the world. Even its radio station was named WZPR.
So how did a small rural town in Japan, half a world away, come to dethrone this zippering behemoth? Through the single-minded visionary purpose of Tadao Yoshida, the founder of Yoshida Kōgyō Kabushikigaisha (Yoshida Manufacturing Shareholding Company) from which YKK is necessarily abbreviated.
Yoshida had grown up in Kurobe the son of an itinerant bird collector. After a slew of business failures he moved to Tokyo and, seeing the growth of the zipper market, opened his own zipper firm in 1934. The success of Talon was known around the world and Yoshida shamelessly copied its products and machines, while adding some distinctive touches—like using aluminum instead of copper. When World War II began, he kept in business by supplying the Japanese Imperial Navy with zippers, and when his factory was burned to the ground during the firebombing of Tokyo in 1945 he relocated to his hometown of Kurobe and began all over again.
Yoshida’s remarkable stick–to–itiveness had been spurred on by reading Andrew Carnegie’s The Gospel of Wealth. Now, as if infused with the reciprocal force of the zipper, he too created a quasi-philosophy that he termed the Cycle of Goodness™. This stated that “no one prospers without rendering benefit to others.” It was a simple but enlightened creed that suggested that well-treated workers would create a better product, a better product would benefit customers, and satisfied customers would, in turn, benefit YKK. In short, Yoshida wanted to use his zippers to bind together not only clothes but also the very fabric of society.
A YKK zipper. (Photo: JD Hancock/flickr)
YKK was unusual in that it produced everything used to make its zippers in-house. Brass, aluminum, polyester, yarn, were smelted and woven in Kurobe. Workers lived in dormitories opposite the factory and a leadership cult quickly grew up around Yoshida and his Cycle of GoodnessTM. Gripped by zippering inspiration, YKK’s designers began churning thousands of different types of zippers aimed at specific industries and individual customers. It made the world’s smallest zipper, the concealed zipper, the first nylon and polyester zippers and the world’s thinnest zipper. A pantheon of patented fastenings rolled off the factory line—Beulon! Eflon! Zaglan! Ziplon! Minifa! Kensin! Natulon! Excella!—each one seeking to create a more perfect union. Soon YKK was opening factories across the world the better to offer their services to local manufacturers and by 1974, YKK was making one quarter of the world’s zippers, enough in one year to stretch from the earth to the moon and back again.
By contrast Talon, which in the late 1960s was producing 70 percent of the United States’ zippers, was now barely producing half that. Its decline was rapid. By 1993 Meadville no longer had any zipper factories within its town limits at all.
(Photo: cursedthing/flickr)
Meanwhile Kurobe and YKK goes from strength to strength. It now makes silent zippers for soldiers on the battlefield, fire-retardant zippers for firemen, airtight zippers for astronauts. It makes zips for drainage ditches, zips for rockets, and zips for fishing nets. Occasionally there are snags, such as when an exporter in the Deep South of the United States began importing zips with KKK on them to appeal to local markets, or when YKK was accused of operating a zippering cartel. Similarly market share is constantly being eroded by thousands of tiny Chinese zipper concerns that have managed to reverse-engineer YKK’s closely guarded zipper-making machines, as YKK once did itself.
Nevertheless YKK remains a universal brand. Its zippers sit like tiny symbiotic aphids on our clothes, offering immediate access or exclusion to our bodies. From its headquarters in Kurobe, YKK has become the gatekeeper to the world.
Bookmark
I had a YKK zipper. It stopped working after midnight of December 31, 1999.
i see what you did there...
>.>
It’s a shame, too, ‘cause I was partying like it was 1999!
LOL
This guy's never been to DC.
Thanks for the post and ping! What a beautiful setting. Fascinating culture and fabulous cuisine. A friend used to work for Canon and often entertained his Japanese coworkers. They would occasionally reciprocate. One of them was descended from the samurai. He was always treated with greater respect by the other Japanese. Do you plan to return some day?
“Do you plan to return some day?”
Construction of our new home in Kumamoto city begins next month ... ^_^
I see you are a New Yorker . My family all still live out on eastern LI .
Odd, no mention of their rapacious dumping of product in Europe in the 70s driving the (albeit old fashioned) local producers under.
Wow - they make a lot more than zippers ! In fact , they made all the sliding doors and windows of our current home .
Fastening products
Fastening products are the first and still the most important product of YKK. Within YKK, the company distinguishes between the Slide Fastener Division, the Textile and Plastic Products Division, and the Snap Fastener and Button Division.
Zippers Standard Metal
YZiP: Metal zipper, extra durable for jeans
EverBright: Metal zipper, polished for visual appeal and corrosion resistant
Excella: Metal zipper, polished and plated for visual appeal, also in different colors. [Available in silver, gold and antique finish.]
Standard Coil
Conceal: Plastic coil zipper with concealed elements (no visible teeth)
Vislon: Standard - rugged plastic zipper
Hook and loop products, more commonly known under the Velcro brand name of a competitor.
Plastic parts, including various types of clips and buckles
Snaps and buttons, including snap fasteners and jeans buttons
Architectural products
Architectural Aluminium products include fenestration systems for glass exteriors; entrances for commercial and institutional structures; Aluminium sunshades and residential windows. It is based in Austell, Georgia, USA.
YKK AP America Inc. manufactures entrances, storefronts, curtain wall, window wall, sunshades, windows and sliding doors for office buildings, residential high-rises, schools, stadiums, shopping centers and institutional structures.
Machinery and engineering
The Machinery and Engineering Group focuses on the development and production of machines, equipment, and dyes, serving YKK Group with the Exclusive Machinery Division, Industrial Machinery Division, and Dye Division.
They learned from us ;-) Guess we did a good job of rebuilding their economy post WWII.
Born and raised on LI. Moved upstate 25 years ago but still consider myself a Long Islander. Still miss the sound of the surf, the seagulls and the air traffic crossing mid island, headed towards JFK. (Used to work for Air France). Good luck with your new home!
” Still miss the sound of the surf, the seagulls and the air traffic crossing mid island, headed towards JFK “
^_^ Besides my Ma , those are the only things I miss about Long Island ! I vividly remember when the Concord began flying to NY from Europe . I’d wake up just after dawn and hear it coming in the distance ( unique sound ) so get out of bed , run downstairs , go outside and look up to see it heading for JFK .
Ma’s house is a minute’s walk from Peconic Bay .
I’ve read articles on this company before, and it’s not a ‘company’; it’s nearly a religion. Toyota is pretty good about developing a team spirit among employees, but it is woefully lacking compared to YKK. It must work, though; how could an obscure company in a remote part of Japan bury their competition worldwide with a “seemingly” commodity product (that in reality is extremely difficult to make)?
Whatever it takes. I went to school in Meadville, PA from 1977 to 1981 and Talon Zippers was a huge employer (along with Channelock tools) there, during a very bad economic time in Western PA. Obviously, the YKK approach worked, and Talon’s didn’t.
That was a good read. Just think of all the little gadgets and doodads amd ordinary things that probably have interesting stories behind them.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.
