Look down at your zipper, now look back at me.

Did you see the YKK? There’s a reason for that. YKK makes most of the zippers for the entire world.

Imagine having the business savvy to say “hey, there’s a multi-billion dollar garment industry for jeans, pants, shorts and plenty of tops with zippers, why not just get into the zipper game?!

Tadao thought of that already, 80 years ago, and you’re never going to beat his company.

I just read an eleven year old blog post and thought, “Wow, I’m sharing this”. So, below is an article i found in Forbes. It tells you why the zipper game is locked down, forever.

How Japan’s YKK built a better fastener and caught its competition in the teeth.

Judging from its headquarters in a small nine-story building jammed in a row of similar buildings in an unfashionable part of Tokyo, it is hard to believe YKK makes close to half of all the zippers in the world. Part of its secret lies deep in the heart of zipper land, at YKK’s ultraefficient complex near Toyama, across the Japan Sea from China. Trucks bring in plastic materials and special metal alloys, the only ingredients YKK needs to churn out 7.2 billion zippers a year, enough to zip every fly in the world.

The Y in YKK stands for the founder, Tadao Yoshida, whose son Tadahiro Yoshida has run the company since his father died in 1993. Yoshida and his family own 31%, giving them a net worth of about $1.5 billion. In the latest fiscal year sales were up 30% to $4.3 billion and profits 31% to $190 million, despite global economic turbulence and a recession in Japan. Zipper sales boomed in China and eastern Europe, more than offsetting a decline in North America and the EU. The biggest boost, though, came from YKK’s aluminum building materials subsidiary, as construction of skyscrapers in Japan emerged from a long slump. Growth in demand from China for both zippers and aluminum window frames make continuing strong sales likely over coming years.

Tadao Yoshida came out of the ashes of World War II, having moved production during the war out of Tokyo to avoid the bombing, to utterly dominate the $4.3 billion global zipper industry. Like many 20th-century founders of Japanese corporations, he started his career as a young apprentice. When he was 20 he worked for a trading company that imported ceramics from China. When the company went bankrupt in 1934, the owner gave him the remains of his business, including a small subsidiary that produced handmade zippers. Tadao, an inquisitive, detail-obsessed man, tried to modernize the manufacturing methods. But machine tool makers weren’t interested in his design for a custom-made zipper machine, so he made his own. When knots on large spools of thread kept interrupting his automatic zipper machines, the threadmakers refused to provide him thread without knots. Soon Yoshida had to start making his own thread, too. By the late 1950s the only ingredients YKK needed to buy from outside were plastic chips and its own blend of metal alloys.

By the 1960s YKK had gained 95% of the Japanese zipper business, but attempts to export its products brought on tariffs and other trade barriers. Rather than fight his own personal trade war, Yoshida decided to start operating overseas. This was a big step for a small Japanese enterprise. Today YKK has 132 subsidiaries in 60 countries, but 40 years ago few Japanese companies ventured outside of Japan.

Yoshida told the employees he sent abroad to melt into the local population as much as possible. In one incident an employee sent to Holland spent months studying Dutch so that he could make an opening day speech to his employees in their own language. After his speech the workers are reported to have said, “Wow, Japanese sure sounds a lot like Dutch.”

By extending overseas postings of Japanese managers to a 10-to-15-year length, subsidiaries eventually became successfully localized while still maintaining the ability to communicate with headquarters. Local employees are rarely promoted to run the subsidiaries, however, because of their inability to communicate with Japan. Partly to avert nationalist pressures, as much as possible all inputs, except for YKK’s special manufacturing equipment, are bought locally.

In 1969 Yoshida sent his son, Tadahiro, to get an M.B.A. in the U.S. He got it in 1972 from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University in Illinois. “There is no way you could run an Asian company just based on what you learn at a U.S. M.B.A. course,” he says.

That’s because many Japanese companies, including YKK, have a sense of mission based on a set of well-defined principles. Yoshida the elder ran the company in ways that resembled a religious cult, with him at its head, his son says. His father’s philosophy was based on what he called a “virtuous cycle,” or rendering of benefits to others so that benefits would return to YKK.

He wrote books outlining his philosophy. In practice, Yoshida’s virtuous cycle means constantly increasing the quality and lowering the price of his products. He also vowed never to go public but to share ownership with employees and key business partners, instead of distant and anonymous stock market investors who don’t share the same affinity with YKK.

Nonetheless, Yoshida the younger came to appreciate the understanding of the global marketplace that came with his M.B.A., especially after his father put him in charge of YKK’s U.S. business.

When YKK set up shop in New York’s garment district in 1960, the only orders Yoshida received were for rare zipper models or colors that nobody else bothered to produce. The industry was dominated by two giants, Talon of the U.S., the inventors and pioneers of the zipper, and Optilon of Germany. But Tadahiro persisted. YKK’s motto: “Delivery yesterday.” His father’s focus on manufacturing efficiency meant Tadahiro could turn around orders so that, for example, spring zippers always arrived in time for spring clothing, autumn zippers for autumn clothing. Gradually, “as we filled the minor orders quickly and efficiently, we got bigger ones,” Tadahiro says.

“They waited until all our patents expired and then made their own improvements and modifications,” says Jonathan Markiles, an executive at Tag-It Pacific, the company that now owns Talon. To make matters worse for itself, Talon failed to follow the U.S. clothing industry as it moved overseas, giving up market share to YKK. YKK started its move overseas with a plant in New Zealand in 1959, followed in successive years by the U.S., Malaysia, Thailand, Costa Rica and other textile-producing countries.

As YKK continued to grow, European and U.S. competitors tried antidumping suits, patent lawsuits and lobbied for restrictions on visas for Japanese technicians. By the 1980s YKK had become the industry giant. Today Talon and Optilon each have about a 7% or 8% share of the world market to YKK’s 45%. Much of the rest is in the hands of what YKK estimates to be more than 1,000 Chinese companies.

“YKK has so many factories and such a rich array of products that they’re overwhelming–there is no comparison between them and us,” says Hiroyuki Kawai of Amagasaki Seikan, one of YKK’s only competitors in Japan. “We have no plans for expansion. We just fill emergency orders for a few leather-goods makers,” he says.

A visit to a YKK factory shows just why the competition has been ground down so successfully. The closely guarded machines automatically turn raw materials into zippers of thousands of colors and sizes. Each part is tested mechanically and defective ones are ejected, all without human intervention. Competitors have machines that resemble those made by YKK, but lack the company’s custom-made software and other tricks YKK keeps close to the chest.

YKK’s homemade production equipment is so vital that it’s kept hidden, even from visiting journalists. In 1966 a Korean resident of Japan, a former YKK employee, brought a YKK machine to Korea and started a company, Hankook, that thrived until defaulting during the Asian currency crisis in 1997. Another Korean company, Jungwoo, used the YPP brand until a long running lawsuit finally forced them to drop that brand in 2002.

Despite the success of YKK, as Tadahiro got older and more senior in the company, conflicts with his father began to emerge. For one thing, he felt employee worship of the founder went too far. At one point his father said, “Golf will ruin Japan.” He meant that people spending company money on trips to golf courses was bad. Employees interpreted it to mean a ban on golfing. Everyone started denying that they played the game. After Tadao died in 1993, at the age of 84, Tadahiro took over and one day announced he was going to play golf. “Suddenly all of these golf-loving employees came out of the closet,” he says.

Another problem with his father, according to Tadahiro, was something he had in common with his close friend Jimmy Carter, the former U.S. President. The elder Yoshida got to know Carter when he was governor of Georgia and YKK built a plant there. Both were both brilliant leaders of small groups, but managing every detail becomes impossible beyond a certain size, Tadahiro says.

When negotiating with other companies, his father refused to bring along a team of lawyers and other experts, comparing them to a trail of droppings hanging on to a goldfish. Outside of Japan, having an M.B.A. and using lawyers was necessary, his son argued. He won his point when a company that YKK was negotiating to buy backed out at the last minute and merged with a competitor. The son successfully sued for breach of contract. The father did not know such an option existed.

A more serious conflict with his father involved an aluminum building materials subsidiary started by the founder’s now-deceased elder brother. Yoshida senior insisted on running the subsidiary the same way as the zipper business, with a greater focus on manufacturing technology than on customers. It didn’t work. Aluminum window frames need to be custom built since windows come in all sizes. They can’t be sold off the shelf.

For a while chaos ensued as dozens of small YKK building materials subsidiaries spent hours phoning one another in search of specific parts. Having a small zipper factory near the clothing factory it supplies was a good policy for zippers, but having a small aluminum building parts shop near a construction site was pointless. The parts needed were not standardized enough. And making parts to order was not profitable on the small scale needed for individual building sites.

In 1990 Tadahiro was put in charge of the business. He set up a few regional distribution centers and a computerized inventory control system. Now parts can be made to order and delivered promptly to construction sites. The aluminum building materials business today accounts for more than half of YKK’s sales and profits.

Despite the strength of the building materials subsidiary, operating mainly in Japan, Singapore and Hong Kong, YKK’s heart is still clearly in its zipper business.

These days the biggest threat comes from China. About 1% of manufacturers there are using a reverse-engineered version of YKK’s automation technology, vintage 1980. The quality is good enough for most garment uses, and YKK can compete only on price. To do this, YKK did something it’s never done before: It created a new brand aimed at the Chinese domestic market, where low price has a higher priority than quality. But what it’s losing in margins on cheap zippers, it’s gaining in China’s building boom. As skyscrapers rise in places like Shanghai and Chengdu, YKK’s aluminum window sales are soaring. Some of the best and most modern of these buildings require quality the Chinese competition still cannot produce, says Yoshida.

For now, though, the Chinese pose no threat to YKK’s stranglehold on multinational clothing companies like Levi Strauss, Adidas and Nike. The move to serve global clients started in late 1990s, when the president of Adidas asked for a meeting with Tadahiro. He flew all the way to YKK’s Kurobe plant to ask YKK to supply the sportswear giant with zippers worldwide. This was not an easy choice for YKK because it meant promising identical zippers in more than 40 countries where Adidas operated. To do this YKK had to modernize all of its 88 plants overseas and a few in Japan and standardize things like dies and metal alloys so they could meet Adidas’ requirements.

While Tadahiro Yoshida, 56, clearly plans to run the company for many more years, he expects YKK will not be a family-run firm forever. None of his four daughters is involved with the company, and onerous inheritance taxes are sure to dilute their ownership. Since the Yoshidas consider all employees to be members of the family, ownership will pass to them, Tadahiro says.

When a Yoshida is no longer running the company, many may forget what the Y stands for. But Yoshida expects the company will always be like a big family.

Isn’t that cool? Today YKK has more than 40 thousand employees (you saw that right) – regardless of the automation process YKK is SO big that it employs 40,306 people today in 2014. Mainly because it was said that YKK smelts its own brass, concocts its own polyester, spins and twists its own thread, weaves and color-dyes cloth for its zipper tapes, forges and molds its scooped zipper teeth. Simply incredible.