Uniqlo

Uniqlo is a Japanese casual wear designer, manufacturer and retailer. The company is a wholly owned subsidiary of Fast Retailing Co., Ltd.

A Yamaguchi-based company, Ogori Shōji (which, until then, had been operating men's clothing shops called "Men's Shop OS") was founded in March 1949 in Ube, Yamaguchi.

On 2 June 1984, it opened a unisex casual wear store in Fukuro-machi, Naka-ku, Hiroshima, under the name "Unique Clothing Warehouse". Initially, the brand was going to be registered as a shortened contraction of "unique clothing". However, in 1988, during administration work in Hong Kong for registering the brand, staff in charge of registration misread the "C" as "Q", and that is how the brand name was born. Tadashi Yanai then changed the store name to "uniqlo" across Japan. In September 1991, the name of the company was changed from "Ogori Shōji" to "Fast Retailing", and by April 1994, there were over 100 Uniqlo stores operating throughout Japan.

In 1997, Fast Retailing adopted a set of strategies from American retailer The Gap, known as "SPA" (for specialty-store/retailer of private-label apparel), meaning that they would produce their own clothing and sell it exclusively. They engaged the retail brand consultancy, CIA, Inc./The Brand Architect Group, to guide the company through the realization of this strategy, including consulting on merchandise, visual merchandising and display, store design and a new logo designed by Richard Seireeni and Sy Chen of The Brand Architect Group's Los Angeles office. Uniqlo had begun outsourcing their clothing manufacturing to factories in China where labour was cheap, a well-established corporate practice. Japan was in the depths of a recession at the time, and the low-cost goods proved popular. Their advertising campaigns, clothing quality and new retail layouts also proved fruitful.