YKK epitomizes why Japan, despite the recent decline, continues to be a major economy: manufacturing giants that continue to serve as the backbone of the global economy.
Another example is FANUC [1], a manufacturing device maker headquartered in Yamanashi, Japan's equivalent of Idaho (i.e., there are people there, and I'm sure it's nice to live, but few travel there for vacation).
There are countless such examples: Minebea [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minebea has 60% market share for miniature bearings (ex: the trackpoint for Thinkpads) and has been more than doubling their revenue YoY.
As long as Japan's high-end manufacturing sector stays healthy, they will be fine for a little while.
[1] FANUC stands for Factory Automation NUmerical Control. You've gotta love Japanese people's creativity when it comes to company names.
[2] Minebea stands for Miniature Bearing. Again, very creative.
An interesting thing about zippers (the post doesn't specify who's factory this is, maybe it's not part of the YKK group), is that you can fully automate their manufacture, but then you have to make them with a small notch at the top of the handle [0]. But customers perceive the notch as a manufacturing defect, so some guy in china has sit and feed zipper handles into a machine all day [1]
> There used to be a saying among corporate technology workers—or, as you might call them, I.T. guys—which held that “you’ll never get fired for using Microsoft.”
Before that, it was "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM."
It seems to me that pneumatic tires were the missing piece of the bicycle puzzle, and that required vulcanization to first be invented. The first bikes didn't have chains (rather they employed direct drive, ie pedals attached to the front wheel) so the author is pretty far off base in trying to draw that connection.
In the motorcycle apparel world, "YKK Zippers" is frequently on the bullet list of features that the jacket has. Though they will also advertise the cloth the jacket is made from as well such as "500 wt Cordura with 2000 wt Cordura at impact points". So motorcyclists can be a bit anal.
When people view things as "gear," they'll care about the components. And brands are the easiest way of recognizing quality.
After all, Gore-tex is just laminated PTFE, Cordura is nylon, Vibram are just rubber soles. Right? Except these brands have convinced us they're synonymous with quality.
(And yes, one could also point out that they built their reputations on exclusive patents.)
But even a quality zipper doesn't help much if the clothing itself has a design problem. I quit wearing Levi's jeans 30+ years ago because their zippers (I'd have to assume they were YKK) consistently failed near the top of their travel. After one failure too many, I switched to Wrangler/Rustler and never looked back, and never had another zipper go bad.
Sure enough, the Wranglers I'm wearing right now have a YKK zipper.
Living in Taiwan, married to a girl here. When going to visit their family in the sprawling between-cities urban area of Zhongli, the landmark for me to remember to turn off the main road to their house is the big building of a(?)/the(?) YKK factory. Big YKK lettering on the facade, and fills a few blocks. Was an interesting feeling seeing it for first time, instinctively checked which one of zippers was also marked with YKK at a time...
Weixing SAB[1] has a good brand reputation if you're sourcing your zippers from China. In my opinion, their quality is better than the lower-end YKK zippers for a similar price.
The zipper is a component. If the component works as functioned, there's little reason why you would risk trying someone new.
For new companies to figure how to perfect the component takes time. They could probably try to innovate the zipper but that depends on whether designers would be willing to pick up on it. Even then, it would probably cost a lot of money to set the process up and mass produce those new, untested zippers. The risk/reward is just not favourable to an investor.
For competitors, producing the perfect zipper is one thing but maintaining supply whenever is needed is another issue. Your logistics have to be in place. And then there's also the relationship. Reliability counts when it comes to being a supplier.
I used to be a product manager in the systems business when a lot of even smallish companies were still buying proprietary systems of one sort or another, I was constantly surprised by the number of customers who came through who had 80% share of US toilet seats (or whatever). The dynamic has probably changed somewhat with globalization. But, as others have said, it someone really has a stranglehold on some unsexy, low margin, low unit dollar component business, it's hard to get excited about unseating that 800# gorilla.
There is at least one other large zipper manufacturer (Ideal) who competes in many of the same markets as YKK. If you start checking your clothing, you'll see it quite a bit.
I don't know anything about YKK in particular, but a company that has large economies of scale can operate at a lower cost than a new firm could, allowing them to continue to dominate the market.
edit: this doesn't seem to be the case here after reading the article, because it states YKK zippers are generally more expensive.
It is possible that their zippers do cost less than if their competitors attempted to make zippers of similar quality - i.e. that their competitors can't make profit on quality zippers due to not having the same economies of scale.
I think this is a bit narrow minded of me but then again i do work with IT, not zippers:
“you’ll never get fired for using Microsoft.”
But if anything goes wrong your boss will wonder why you didn’t opt for old reliable.
That is not why people chose windows, it is cause they are uneducated(and get the only thing they know) or they dont have a choice for various reasons.
(I might not get fired but my boss sure ain't happy when we get new windows servers, just a major hassle to update and maintain)
I prefer Talon, even though it's just a resurrected brand with production in Asia. I got a jacket from the Real McCoy's in SOHO and immediately noticed the difference in zipper quality - which is pretty ridiculous for such a minor feature.
I've actually seen certain garments (usually one's meant for tougher situations) marketed with YKK zippers. Little did I know it's actually a pretty common zipper.
Why share that summary? It isn't just inadequate, it's actually wrong and misleading: "Likewise you almost certainly nix a garment purchase because the zipper YKK"
It's even worse in this case because for once it's probably not applicable, as the company is publicity shy and declined to participate in the article.
Another example is FANUC [1], a manufacturing device maker headquartered in Yamanashi, Japan's equivalent of Idaho (i.e., there are people there, and I'm sure it's nice to live, but few travel there for vacation).
There are countless such examples: Minebea [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minebea has 60% market share for miniature bearings (ex: the trackpoint for Thinkpads) and has been more than doubling their revenue YoY.
As long as Japan's high-end manufacturing sector stays healthy, they will be fine for a little while.
[1] FANUC stands for Factory Automation NUmerical Control. You've gotta love Japanese people's creativity when it comes to company names.
[2] Minebea stands for Miniature Bearing. Again, very creative.