When I joined my manufacturing plant in Ludhiana, we began designing our Hoodies. I was told that we have to use only YKK zips as they are the best quality.
Obviously, there must be other brands out there who produce similar qualities I thought. But none existed.
I then came to know about a fact.
Out of every ten zips in the world, nine are from YKK.
What does YKK stand for though?
It stands for Yoshida Kōgyō, name of the parent Japanese company.
By the way, just a fact check, the company has an annual revenue of 6.1 Billion dollars. Well, truly now we should appreciate the fact that
“Whatever you make, make it the best” and “Quality matters!”.
YKK truly is a testament to vertically aligned manufacturing, manufacturing all its zips, its machines to manufacture zips and it even manufactures the boxes it packages the zips into, which is necessarily a billion dollar hack.
As a T-shirt manufacturer, I do understand the importance of vertically integrated plants. A vertically integrated company is able to use its resources to bring down prices of its products while increasing the quality to several notches higher having complete control on the quality of the product including raw materials.
We only use zips of YKK in all our products including Custom hoodies at Custombaba. It assures our clients of quality, even though the price is at a higher side of the spectrum. All companies that adhere to quality standards only use YKK zips.
Today the company has 109 manufacturing facilities in 71 countries of the world of ykk zips.
History: The company used automation in 1950 purchasing a chain machine from the United States and revolutionized production. First all zips used to be manufactured using manual methods. Even though the company has also been accused of working like a cartel with other giant companies to keep market share intact, what we should really appreciate is that big companies are not entirely built by manufacturing/trading hundreds of products.
Even if you work hard to get one product right, the world will treat you with luxury, money and riches to live your dream life. And that product can also be just a small zip!
