Uniqlo

Billionaire businessman Tadashi Yanai, Japan’s richest man, is the founder and president of Fast Retailing, of which Uniqlo is its primary subsidiary. Yanai’s father owned Ogori Shoji, a roadside tailor shop in Yamaguchi, which Yanai evetually took over. Yanai ventured out in 1984, opening his first store in Hiroshima under the name “Unique Clothing Warehouse”. The company was to be registered as a contraction of “unique clothing” but an administrative error – where the “c” was misread as a “q” – resulted in the name being misspelled as “Uniqlo”. However, the name stuck, and Uniqlo has become the brand we all know and love today.