Uniqlo's first store closed in 1991, and its official timeline says so. The Shimonoseki prototype store shut the same year

It does. Right in its own timeline, in brackets.

Fast Retailing’s official website has a timeline running from 1949 to 2003.

The entry for June 1984 reads: opened the first “Uniqlo” store in Hiroshima. In brackets: closed in 1991.

The entry for June 1985 has the same shape.

The company opened its first roadside store in Shimonoseki, Yamaguchi, and it became the prototype for later Uniqlo stores. In brackets: closed in 1991.

The timeline the company presents as its own beginning says that both its first store and the store that served as the model for the format closed.

Among the 22 companies whose founding years we traced back to sources, Uniqlo was the only one whose official history adds the closure of its own stores.

This column reads that timeline alongside the words Tadashi Yanai later used to look back.

Listed companies fall outside the criteria for case articles, so it’s handled as a column rather than a case.

From a menswear shop in Ube to the exit from food

Four “closed” or “withdrawn” notes line up in the second column from the right.

The official history writes three of them itself. The Kokura closure appears in a compilation sourced from the company’s own securities report.

The store that became the prototype didn’t survive as one

The entry that catches most in this timeline is the Shimonoseki store.

The official history calls it the prototype for later Uniqlo stores. It was the first of the large boxes along suburban roads that became the pattern for openings afterwards.

That store closed in 1991, six years after opening. That’s the same year as the first store in Hiroshima.

The template survived. The store that served as the template didn’t.

Why did both stores close in 1991? The sources read don’t explain it.

In September that year the company changed its name, and the following April it made every store a Uniqlo. So the closures overlap with a period of reshaping the company.

What the desk can state firmly concerns how the timeline is written.

Adding the closing year in brackets to the opening entry records a store as a period, not a single point.

A timeline that lists only beginnings shows a company’s growth.

One that adds endings also shows what the company discarded.

Six of seven shop staff quit

Failure survives outside the timeline too.

According to a 2023 Forbes Japan article, when Yanai took over his father’s shop in 1973 at 24, it had seven staff.

After clashes of opinion, all but one left.

Yanai looks back on this as a major failure as a manager. He also says it mattered that he got to do everything himself: selling, managing people, buying, returns and accounting.

This is a recollection after success, not a document.

In the column tracing 22 legendary founding stories to their sources, we wrote that most scenes of hard times survive only in recollections made after success.

In Uniqlo’s case, failure appears in both documents and recollections. The two are different kinds, though.

The documents kept the year a store closed.

The recollection kept the scene of people leaving.

One Win, Nine Losses came out while SKIP was running

In November 2002, Fast Retailing launched the food business SKIP.

According to the official history it withdrew in April 2004. As a business, it lasted less than a year and a half.

The hardcover of Yanai’s book One Win, Nine Losses came out in November 2003.

Shinchosha’s description calls it a look back at a history of failures on the way from a family menswear shop to Uniqlo. Its tagline is “Don’t be afraid of failure.”

When it was published, SKIP hadn’t yet been withdrawn.

Five months after a book titled for failure reached the shelves, one more withdrawal joined the timeline.

In the Forbes Japan article, Yanai says he thought failure was fine “as long as it isn’t fatal.”

Laid against the timeline, those words read concretely.

1. March 1972: close the Kokura store

   The shop opened in Kitakyushu in March 1969.

2. 1991: close Fukuromachi and Shimonoseki

   The first store, and the one that became the prototype for later stores.

3. April 2004: withdraw from SKIP

   The food business launched in November 2002.

What closed were stores and a business, never the company.

Each was ended before it could take the whole company down with it.

Records of closed stores exist in small businesses too

Records in which a company or its owner wrote down closed stores and losses exist at much smaller scales.

The rental-space record was published by its operator down to sales and booking counts.

Uniqlo’s timeline wrote only the year each store closed. This one keeps the numbers up to the closing.

What could and couldn’t be confirmed

The limits need stating.

The figure of seven staff in 1973 comes from the Forbes Japan article.

The compilation based on securities reports puts Yanai’s joining in August 1972 and his appointment as senior managing director in August 1973.

Sometimes a timeline describes a company by what it closed

An official timeline is where a company writes its history for outsiders.

Uniqlo’s adds the closure of its first store, the closure of its prototype store and the exit from food.

One Win, Nine Losses is known as a book title. But the official timeline recorded the same thing earlier, and more concretely.

Putting the year of closing in brackets is a way of keeping failure as a period instead of erasing it.

Legends tend to be told backwards from success.

This timeline keeps, in the company’s own words, the fact that its first store didn’t survive.