Can YKK's Zipper Empire Hold?

Bloomberg

5 days ago

Businessweek
YKK has spent decades mastering the global supply chain. Now it has to weather the Trump-tariff era.
July 21, 2025 at 12:01 AM EDT
In early February, executives from YKK, the world's largest zipper manufacturer, gathered in Kurobe, Japan, for annual budget meetings. Normally, these gatherings leave time for a bit of schmoozing—karaoke, dinner with old friends, that sort of thing. This year was less freewheeling as it became clear the meetings were an informal referendum on whether global trade was about to come undone. Scarcely two weeks into his second term, President Donald Trump had already announced 25% tariffs on goods entering the US from Colombia, only to rescind the measure. Next came tariffs amounting to 20% on goods from China, 25% on goods from Canada and Mexico, and 25% on all imported steel, aluminum and automobiles. Canada and Mexico got a one-month reprieve; the rest were set to go into effect.
Blizzard conditions made YKK's Kurobe campus look as if it were nested inside a freshly shaken snow globe. Situated on the opposite stretch of coastline from Tokyo, where YKK has its world headquarters, Kurobe remains the beating heart of the company: It's home to a secretive research and development facility, along with one of the more than 500 YKK factories around the world, which bind countless supply chains. The billions of zippers YKK makes each year are used by iconic brands such as Levi's and Adidas; fast-fashion giants like H&M, Zara and Shein; and gorpcore pioneers Patagonia, the North Face and Arc'teryx, along with niche competitors like Swedish outfitter Klättermusen. YKK supplies roughly 40% of the global apparel industry, and besides that, it makes zippers for purses, luggage, sleeping bags, tents and many other types of equipment and accessories. That's just the zippers. The company has spent decades developing anything that might qualify as a fastener (the original English word for 'zipper,' and the one still used in Japanese). Automakers use YKK's Velcro-like hook-and-loop system to keep upholstery attached to car seats. Makers of continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) machines use a similar YKK product to keep their devices' breathing apparatus in place while sleep apnea sufferers toss and turn in the night. A snap-on YKK 'medical stud' connects electrodes to the electrocardiography machines that monitor a patient's heartbeat in hospital rooms whose window fittings and sliding door mechanisms are also made, more often than not, by YKK.
YKK Global Net Sales
In Japanese yen
Strictly speaking, most of the executives visiting Kurobe in February were representatives of affiliate companies. YKK effectively operates as 112 separate branches doing business in 70 countries under the umbrella of YKK Group, a privately held corporation that raked in $6.9 billion in revenue during the 12-month period ended on March 31, according to company figures. This structure gives YKK's top leaders a unique view of where global manufacturing is headed; through the rise and fall of orders from the company's thousands of corporate customers worldwide, they can predict the outlook for entire industries and plan budgets and production accordingly. They also have long experience adapting to world events, including the North American Free Trade Agreement, China's accession to the World Trade Organization, the Covid-19 pandemic and more. But their accrued wisdom applies to a rulebook Trump routinely ignores.
By early February, it was clear to Jim Reed, president of YKK Corp. of America, that his colleagues in Japan were concerned things might be different this time. ' Colombia was certainly a curveball,' he told me near the tail end of the meetings. 'Before any of us even had time to write a report, it was over.' There wasn't much to be done in the short term had they wanted to: YKK's customers, particularly those in the apparel industry, would have little room to adjust production. 'Fall/winter '25 is underway,' Reed said of the industry's production schedule. 'So there's really not an opportunity to say: 'Instead of sending a zipper to this country, let's send it to that country in order to avoid the tariff.' No supply chains can really react to that kind of whipsawing adjustment.'
Reed said he'd cautioned his colleagues against any sudden response to Trump's first volley, even though his territory stood a good chance of being among those hardest hit. His sense was that Trump had targeted Canada and Mexico 'with the intention of making a lot of noise, impressing his base and then being able to move on, or maybe even make a big show of it for China to see.' Reed said he couldn't imagine why Trump would go against '10 out of 10 economists' and corporate executives at powerful retailers such as Walmart Inc. and Target Corp., all to risk being blamed for the inflation that was sure to result if the sort of wide-scale tariffs the president proposed actually went into effect.
To show how vulnerable US manufacturers would be in the event of an all-out trade war with Mexico and Canada, Reed explained the back-and-forth border crossings necessary for getting YKK's hook-and-loop system inside American car seats. 'The upholstery industry is in Mexico, so we sew the loop in Mexico,' he said. 'We sell the loop to vendors who sew it onto the upholstery in Mexico, then that upholstery gets shipped to Mexico, Canada and the United States, where it waits for the seats to arrive.' The seats themselves often come from China. Meanwhile, the hook portion—the nonfuzzy half of the Velcro-like system—is made by YKK in the US using raw materials procured from Indonesia, Brazil and elsewhere. From there the hook side goes to seat manufacturers in Canada and the US so it can be installed. 'Those naked seats get shipped to other factories in Canada and the United States, where the upholstery meets the naked seat and the hook meets the loop,' he continued. 'And then those finished seats go to Canada, the US and Mexico, where the automakers install the seats into the cars.' So, even in the best-case scenario, either the hook or the loop would incur at least one tariff charge before meeting inside a car seat whose other constituent parts could well be subject to separate tariffs of their own, along with the finished car seat itself, depending on where it was installed.
In an interview at YKK's headquarters a few weeks later, the company's then-chairman and chief executive officer, Masayuki Sarumaru, offered me his view. 'It is not predictable, that's the biggest concern,' he said. We were speaking in an atrium overlooking a freeway that cuts through the city's Akihabara neighborhood. Sarumaru was months away from retirement after a half-century career with YKK, which he joined straight out of college. Dressed in a crisp, dark suit and flanked by a half-dozen subordinates, he told me that in five decades he'd never seen a crisis so dire or destabilizing that top executives couldn't put their heads together and figure it out. In the past, 'through combined experience, you could foresee what's coming, somehow,' he said. 'But this time, I've no idea what's going to happen.'
Not long after we spoke, Trump's 30-day pause expired, and the North American tariffs went into effect, followed swiftly by the first volley of retaliatory tariffs from Canada. The reshuffling of global manufacturing hierarchies was starting to look real. And with that came an unprecedented threat to a key supply chain for the clothes we wear, the cars we drive, the houses we live in and the medical equipment doctors use to determine if we're alive or dead.
Yoshida Kōgyō Kabushikigaisha, or Yoshida Manufacturing Corp., was founded by Tadao Yoshida in Tokyo in 1934. Its signature product, the slide fastener, had first been produced by Universal Fastener Co. in New Jersey in 1893, as a means of closing up boots. The American company's initial design sold poorly, however, and didn't evolve into a modern zipper until 1913, when a Swedish American engineer improved on it. After the US entered World War I, the government placed large orders with the company, which eventually became Talon International Inc., for zippers to be used in aviation suits and life vests.
When Yoshida first came across the slide fastener in the early 1930s while working in the import and export business, it was still a novelty in the fashion world. He was convinced of its potential, however, given Japan's embrace of Western-style clothing in place of the belted kimono. For years he made YKK zippers by hand, hammering down the individual 'elements' (what most of us would call the teeth). In 1950 he imported four expensive chain machines to automate this part of the process. The shift improved the quality of YKK's zippers enough to distinguish them from others on the Japanese market, which were thought to be cheap and disposable.
Five years later, Yoshida packed up his machinery and moved the company to resource-rich Kurobe, which allowed him to build up YKK's production processes and start making everything in one place. He'd also begun traveling the world, looking in places as far-flung as Singapore and Caracas for products his fasteners could help bind together and for ways to improve his processes. When the Korean War caused the price of zinc and copper to soar, YKK developed a durable alloy called aluminum 56S, for use not just in zippers but also in window pane sashes like the ones Yoshida had seen coming off an assembly line during his visit to a US factory. Those sashes were behind his decision to open YKK's first architectural products factory, in Kurobe in 1959.
The following year, the company opened a US subsidiary in New York, which operated a small factory and warehouse in Manhattan's Garment District. 'We had many customers and many wholesalers there,' said Sarumaru. 'Now it's all fancy stores or offices … but in the late '70s, workers were sewing the garments, making the garments right there.' At the time roughly three-quarters of the apparel sold in the US was domestically produced, and YKK sought to capture as much market share as possible from its American rival Talon. The company opened branches in Philadelphia, Baltimore and Boston to pursue customers in the high-fashion sector. New facilities in Texas and Georgia focused on supplying jeans manufacturers, and ones in Chicago and Los Angeles targeted workwear and outerwear makers, respectively.
In May, I visited YKK's 250-acre campus in Macon, the largest of its operations in Georgia. The roads connecting each of the seven massive buildings on the property were lined with cherry trees whose blossoms had grown full and pink in the spring sunshine. One of these buildings houses a foundry that makes brass for the zippers produced there. Another hosts an architectural products factory that makes door and window systems using aluminum alloys produced at a separate facility in Dublin, Georgia; executives expect it will insulate the company from some effects of Trump's aluminum tariff. And still another has a plant manufacturing enough zippers each year to encircle the Earth two-and-a-half times if laid end to end.
My tour guide was Tom Munns, who supervises a group of workers who maintain a fleet of custom-made machinery YKK leases out to its customers. (The company wouldn't grant me full access to production areas where zippers are actually made, citing a recent policy change inspired in part by concerns over corporate espionage.) I'd originally learned from Alex Gregory —who started at YKK's first Georgia factory in January 1974 and served as the first non-Japanese president and CEO of YKK Corp. of America from 2001 to 2004—how the leasing business works. 'We don't sell a company like Levi's individually cut zippers,' said Gregory, who's been retired since 2008 but still sits on the board of YKK of America's architectural products division. 'They will buy what's called a continuous chain, which is 300 feet of zippers that are continuous, and then they decide how long they want the zipper to be. It might be 5 ½ or 6 inches, or whatever, and then the machine cuts the zipper to the right length and installs it in the jeans.'
In a spacious concrete corridor at YKK's Field Technology Center in Macon, Munns showed me how this machinery works. He started with the first piece of equipment the company began leasing to apparel makers like Levi Strauss & Co. in 1978: a relatively small machine, roughly the size of a table saw in a suburban home wood shop, which is fed a length of continuous chain—basically a strip of cloth a bit wider than a thumb, with a solid strip of metal running down its center—and cuts the metal strip so the teeth are punched out; a second machine roughly the same size takes the cloth, which has already been cut to the appropriate length, and adds a slider and a bottom stop to complete the zipper so it can be sewed onto a garment. Next, Munns showed me the AutoLine, developed by YKK in 1984, which combined and streamlined the processes done by the first two machines. 'That's what got us 100% of Levi's business, and Lee's business, and other jeans manufacturers,' Munns said. Instead of nine skilled workers the AutoLine required just two unskilled workers to operate. 'They saw this, and the competition didn't have it.'
The focus on equipment was initially a cost-saving measure. YKK had long struggled to price its zippers competitively against rivals like Talon, before it realized that it would cut down on its labor costs to have customers buy continuous chains and turn them into individual zippers at their own factories. The machinery also only works with YKK products, Munns pointed out, so an apparel manufacturer 'couldn't switch to a competitor without changing the way they do things in a pretty significant way.' Apparel manufacturers, meanwhile, gained tremendous flexibility, allowing them to make what they needed when they needed it rather than stockpile precut zippers in every possible size and color.
In the decade after YKK began leasing out machinery, annual sales went from less than $100 million to about $450 million. Around this time, in the late '80s, according to Sarumaru, the company stopped 'playing catch-up games' and at last seized market dominance from Talon. When NAFTA went into force in 1994 and apparel manufacturers began migrating even more of their facilities out of the US, YKK of America was poised to adapt; the iconic brass zippers used for Levi's jeans, for example, started traveling from Macon to a factory in Mexico rather than to one in San Antonio. YKK also doubled down on investments in equipment, furthering its grip on apparel manufacturing to the south as maquiladora operators sought to increase automation and cut labor costs even further. According to Gregory, executives from one major clothing company told him they saw productivity increase by as much as 20% after switching to YKK's machinery.
The enduring importance of YKK's equipment-leasing business became obvious during my tour of a factory floor in Macon, where it seemed at a glance as though more workers were busy maintaining and refurbishing this machinery than producing the zippers they would use it to install. Whenever workers came and went from the zipper manufacturing line that I was forbidden from touring, I could see through the saloon-style doors just a few conductors for a mechanical orchestra emitting endless strands of zippers bound for Mexico or Central America.
'Who knows the market?
Who knows the customers?
Who knows the society?
Not headquarters'
Soon after Gregory became CEO of YKK of America, he realized the company was heading for a crisis: Revenue from the US apparel industry that it had wrested away from Talon was suddenly evaporating. China's accession to the WTO in 2001 had established a framework for other member states to take advantage of the country's low labor costs without worrying about what might become of their investments. The Chinese government's incentives and assurances helped make it the preferred place to outsource clothes manufacturing. 'In 1999 we were providing zippers to 99 jeans manufacturing companies, primarily in the Southeast,' Gregory told me. 'By 2004 or 2005 they were all gone.'
His arm of YKK was unprofitable by 2003, he said. 'And here I am, the first non-Japanese president of a region, and we were in trouble, and the company depended on us to fix it somehow.'
YKK's management philosophy gives local executives an unusual degree of autonomy in finding solutions for major issues. Treating affiliates as, in a sense, independent local operators helps YKK adapt whenever conditions change. This both helps keep it rooted in the places where it operates and minimizes disruptions to the other links in its worldwide supply chain. As Sarumaru said to me: 'Who knows the market? Who knows the customers? Who knows the society? Not headquarters.'
Gregory's solution to YKK of America's ills was to tap some of the significant resources its parent company dedicates to R&D: Each year, Sarumaru told me, this expenditure comes to roughly 5% of its total operating budget. In normal times, that money has fueled innovations such as watertight and airtight zippers, initially for divers and astronauts, then deployed commercially in raincoats and ski jackets. Gregory decided to go broad, dedicating vast sums, for one unprofitable year after another, to figuring out how factories that had spent decades producing zippers for jeans and apparel might be rededicated to making fasteners for other products that were still being made in the Americas. Sales and marketing people were paired with product development engineers and assigned to explore specific industries. One team, Gregory told me, 'we sent to Novi, Michigan, and we said: 'Go become experts in the automotive industry.' And now a typical car in Atlanta, Georgia, will have 15 or 20 products made by YKK in Macon, Georgia. We work with every automobile manufacturer.'
HQ was doing its part too. The decimation of America's apparel manufacturing industry inspired YKK to create a new global marketing team whose job is to constantly connect the dots between events, trends and existing infrastructure, so that whatever forces dent earnings in one region can be harnessed for profit in another. Its work has become increasingly important as supply chains have grown simultaneously more complicated and more vulnerable.
Teppei Fujimaki, who worked in the sales department for YKK in Bangladesh from 2017 until 2020, during Trump's first term, told me the company's global marketing team was able to project for him in advance, based on how far orders had slipped in China, just how much his team would need to increase capacity to prepare for Bangladesh's subsequent boom in apparel manufacturing. The transition was painless, and from an accounting perspective, it amounted to little more than the shifting of profits from one column in YKK's Asia ledger to another.
Brian La Plante, a senior sustainability manager for YKK, suggested to me that Trump's first term, which accelerated trends like ' friendshoring ' manufacturing out of China and into markets like Vietnam and Bangladesh, showed how the breadth of the company's operations made it especially adaptable. 'Everybody's talking about tariffs, but all that is just moving around the different cones from one place to another place,' La Plante said. 'We're not talking about reducing apparel production. We're not talking about reducing the number of units that people are creating. We're just talking about where they're going to come from in the future. It doesn't matter whether it's Bangladesh, Vietnam, South America, we have facilities that will perhaps gain some business because of those shifts, and some that may lose some business because of those shifts. But it's not going to impact us overall.'
YKK of America's director of supply chain management, Kozue Childress, said the pandemic, too, had offered lessons for the company. Previously, it tended to stockpile inventory that was already painted and branded for specific clients, which then couldn't be repurposed for others who needed fasteners when their regular supply chains were disrupted. 'We learned that it is important to carry what we call natural material, without any painting or branding, so anytime a customer needs to have a certain color we can paint it and ship it,' Childress said.
When talk turned to how all this might play out in Trump's second term, Childress optimistically cast it as an 'opportunity' for a company as resilient as YKK. She cited as one example the possibility that the company might leverage its brass wire manufacturing plant in Macon. This was months before Trump's recent announcement of a 50% tariff on copper, which could make YKK an attractive option for North American buyers looking to avoid extra costs imposed on imported brass.
Others I spoke with weren't quite so focused on the potential upside of Trump's tariffs. One concern raised by Reed, the current YKK Corp. of America president, was that long-term investment would dry up in markets deemed vulnerable to tariffs. 'When you create instability, it stops capital investment,' he said. 'So I'm not sure it has a huge impact on day-to-day orders or even month-to-month orders. It may not even have that big of an impact on quarterly orders. But it will have a huge impact on somebody who says, 'I was just about to break ground on a factory.' '
'Our global supply chains are extremely interconnected, and you're pulling on strings, you don't even know what they're connected to'
Another concern is that Trump damages consumer confidence badly enough to cut demand for the products YKK helps make. In some divisions, there are signs this is already happening. 'The tariff initiatives from the new administration have most certainly had an impact on our business,' Oliver Stepe, CEO of YKK of America's architectural products division, told me in March, citing the aluminum, steel and Canada tariffs in particular. 'We are already seeing a slowdown in business activity in our building materials markets.'
Reed's view was ultimately that Trump's tariffs would prove less consequential to YKK's business than the creation of the European Union, the implementation of NAFTA and China's inclusion in the WTO were. 'The global supply chains are established, and no nation has the ability to make everything it needs by itself—not even China,' he said.
Even so, he was watching the machinations with China, in particular. The Chinese government, he cautioned, has a number of options for crippling manufacturing capacity in the US and elsewhere. 'Our global supply chains are extremely interconnected, and you're pulling on strings, you don't even know what they're connected to,' he said. 'Then there's retaliations.'
Reed invited me to imagine a scenario dire enough to threaten even a company as ostensibly adaptable to tariffs as YKK. 'For a modern manufacturing facility in the United States to have been successful, it will have taken advantage of more sophisticated Chinese manufacturing equipment that has been developed over the last 10 years,' he said. 'So let's say we put a 200% tariff on Chinese stuff, and China can say, 'OK, I know this part goes into 80% of all US manufacturing equipment, so we're just going to no longer provide that part.' '
The result, he concluded, could be devastating: 'All of a sudden, you have hamstrung US manufacturing.'
Reed's words proved prescient in April, when China suspended exports of rare-earth minerals and magnets crucial for the aerospace, semiconductor and automobile industries. Soon after, Chinese fast-fashion behemoth Shein announced it would raise prices for US customers starting on April 25 to reflect 'recent changes in global trade rules and tariffs.' Both moves are likely to reverberate at opposite ends of YKK's bottom line, affecting its high-margin products as well as the low-margin trade in fast-fashion zippers. Meanwhile, as Trump wins minor concessions, such as nonbinding oil and gas deals whose economic fundamentals are undermined by tariff-induced price volatility, the rest of the world has signaled through op-eds and political speeches and trade talks a willingness to consider some kind of ex-America globalization.
During my visit to Macon, I'd seen how YKK had taken five-decade-old factories built to make zippers for clothes and repurposed them to produce fasteners for automobiles and medical equipment. The company's reach in modern American life is so deep that I could connect this arc to my own. In all likelihood, I realized, someone in Macon had made the zipper for the first pair of jeans I owned as a boy growing up in Alaska. Maybe they'll help make pieces for the monitor that might sit beside my hospital bed someday.
Products like zippers blow into and out of our lives so easily that they seem almost like natural phenomena. But the supply chains bringing them in are fickle and dependent on a miraculous degree of insight, sensitivity and cooperation. Alex Gregory told me a statistic I found shocking: From 1974 to 2000, some 1 million apparel manufacturing jobs were lost in the US. No one in the industry sincerely believes they'll come back; the numbers don't add up and probably never will, because globalization has conditioned the average American consumer to want what the average American worker cannot provide. Trump's refusal to accept this seems less likely to bring back US apparel manufacturing jobs than to diminish the US auto industry as well—and with it, one more part of YKK's empire, unless its executives can once again adapt. What might get made in Macon instead is, for the moment, difficult to imagine.
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