Japan’s YKK Group was still a young zipper manufacturer in the mid-1930s when a subcontractor produced a significant number of defective products. For founder Tadao Yoshida, that was unacceptable. He resolved that quality could not be left in someone else’s hands. Manufacturing for everything, from the components and screws to the finished product, was brought entirely in-house. “Insist on quality in everything,” he declared. That wasn’t the only time quality drove a major business decision. Decades later, after a surge in copper prices, YKK turned to aluminum for its zipper production in the late 1950s and purchased a Watson Stillman press, a masterpiece of U.S. engineering at the time.
There was just one problem. The press could not process the hard aluminum alloy with the speed and precision the company had achieved through its refined rolling techniques. Rather than abandon the investment, YKK engineers discovered the press excelled at extruding aluminum. That breakthrough ultimately led the company into the architectural products business.
YKK has been manufacturing architectural products globally since the early 1960s, but its American presence is much more recent. The company began importing architectural products into the U.S. in the mid-1980s and opened an Aluminum Products Division in Atlanta in 1986. In 1988, that division became part of YKK Corporation (now YKK Corporation of America), and in April 1991, it was incorporated as YKK AP America Inc.
Now, 35 years later, halfway around the world from YKK’s origins, Yoshida’s guiding principle, “Insist on quality in everything,” remains evident throughout YKK AP America, from manufacturing and product development to customer relationships.
Growth Expansion
The early 1990s were a pivotal time for YKK AP. Tetsuya Onodera, who today serves as the company’s senior vice president of international business, was in the U.S. as a trainee when he was tasked with managing a trade show booth on his own.
“A visitor asked me if [our windows] were made in the U.S. I told him they were made in the U.S., but the extrusions are from Japan. Then he walked away,” he recalls. “That showed us we have to produce in the U.S. to be successful in the U.S.”
By September 1992, the company opened its Dublin, Georgia, manufacturing plant.
“If we had kept importing the main profiles from Japan, we could never be like [we are today],” says Onodera. “YKK Group has a policy to produce products in the country in which they are sold. We sell different products in every country. We address their local issues in how we design and how we make their windows perform depending on their climate and building code requirements.”
The manufacturing facility wasn’t the only thing new in 1992. That was also the year Oliver Stepe, now president and CEO of YKK AP America, joined the company’s Baltimore sales branch. Onodera was also working at the Baltimore branch, and the two have worked closely together ever since.
“Because of that [relationship] we have always had [good] communication, and we openly talk and exchange ideas,” says Onodera. “I believe Oliver understands the context of Japanese culture very well, especially the YKK AP culture and background, so that makes our communication much easier.”
That ability to discuss, communicate and understand, despite cultural differences between Japan and the U.S., has played a key role in the company’s success. Stepe is the catalyst.
“Japan has a highly analytical business culture,” says Stepe. “Western-style leaders and companies tend to often make decisions from the gut, and a Japanese organization is much more analytical and facts- and data-based. I think taking either extreme is probably not the best approach. We’ve adapted fairly well in combining both approaches, which I believe makes us stronger.”
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