THE VENTURE THIS GUY TURNED A $1 ZIPPER INTO A $6 BILLION GLOBAL EMPIRE!

This guy turned a $1 zipper into a $6 billion global empire! In 1934, Tadao Yoshida starts a zipper company in Tokyo with leftover inventory from a store that just went bankrupt. His crew makes every zipper by hand, twelve women at a table pressing each metal tooth into fabric one at a time. Then in 1950 an American buyer walks in and pulls out a US-made zipper: machine-produced, half the price, and far better quality. Yoshida realizes his whole business is already obsolete. So he goes to the Ministry of International Trade alone and gets permission to import an American chain machine, which earns YKK their first patent in 1953. Then he starts building his own machines from scratch. ✓ Owns the best zipper machine on earth by 1964, guarding the design like a state secret ✓ Makes everything that goes into the product: the brass, the thread, the tape ✓ Builds the machines that produce all of it, while every competitor outsources parts ✓ Overtakes Talon, the American company that invented the modern zipper, by the 1970s Hand-pressing zippers at a table → an American zipper makes him obsolete → imports one machine → builds his own instead → owns the entire chain end to end → 10 billion zippers a year and $6 billion. Sometimes owning every piece of how it's made is the edge no competitor can copy. #Business #YKK #Manufacturing #Success #Entrepreneur