Shadowing Practice: Uniqlo: The Clothes Designed to Be BORING but Brilliant - Learn English Speaking with Video
Creating lesson...
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Look at this t shirt.
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No logos, no graphics, no seasonal colorway.
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Just a blank t shirt.
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Now look at this jacket.
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This shelf.
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This entire brand.
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Nothing here is chasing a trend.
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Nothing here is trying to be cool.
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Nothing here even has a visible logo.
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And yet Uniqlo made over $22 billion last year.
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They have over 2500 stores across the world.
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And they have customers who don't just buy from them.
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They swear by them.
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There are people who own 15 versions of the same t shirt.
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Reddit communities discussing their fabric technologies, and Designers who left luxury houses just to work with Uniqlo.
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So How is it possible that while other brands spend millions chasing the next trend, Uniqlo sells the same basic T-shirt, Year after year and keeps winning?
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Is it because people are now tired of dressing for others and just want to dress for themselves?
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Or is it the case that now being neutral is the new trend?
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So in this video, we'll talk about how Uniqlo built one of the most valuable fashion brand on the planet by refusing to be fashionable.
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What's the philosophy behind their products, and how can you apply the same thinking to your own work?
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And to answer all this question, we first need to understand a concept called Life Wear Hiroshima, 1984.
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Japan is in the middle of an economic boom.
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Money is moving, consumer spending is up, and the fashion industry is doing what fashion always does in good times, going bigger, going louder and more expensive.
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at this time, 35 year old Tadashi yanai, who had just taken over his father's Tailoring business, wanted to bring a change in clothing.
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So He travel to US and Europe and saw brands like gap and UCB.
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He noticed that the designed, manufactured and sold their own products without any middlemen.
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that meant lower prices and more control over the quality.
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So he came back to Japan.
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with a simple thought of How to do the same thing in Japan?
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and with that thinking, in June 1984, He opened a new store in central Hiroshima.
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He called it Unique Clothing Warehouse.
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The idea was simple, good quality, casual clothing at prices that didn't require a second thought.
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no tailoring. No formal wear.
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Just the basics.
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Later, he shortened the name to Uniqlo.
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But when he went to register it, a staff member at the patent office misread the see as Q.
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Yanai noticed it, but he decided to keep it that way as he thought it might look better in marketing.
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But the early years were not easy.
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Through the late 80s, Uniqlo grew mostly in the smaller cities and suburban areas, but with a serious image problem.
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It was seen as a cheap or discount brand, *( It's GAP not CAP) something that you bought if you could not afford anything better.
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Even with over 300 stores opened by the late 90s, people outside Japan's major cities saw it as the budget option at the edge of the town.
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Then came 1998, Peak of the Lost decade.
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Japan's bubble economy had burst years earlier.
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The 90s had been a decade of loss, failed banks, rising unemployment, and a generation of people who were rethinking what they actually needed.
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People were not interested in spending money on status anymore.
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They wanted value - real value.
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That year, Yanai opened Uniqlo's First Tokyo store in Harajuku, which was a genuinely trendy neighborhood.
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And to launch it, He ran a fleece campaign.
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A fleece jacket from Patagonia at that time costed around $100.
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Uniqlo sold theirs for ¥1,900, roughly 15 to $20, And that too in 15 colours and comparable quality.
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In the first year, They sold 2 million of these fleece jackets.
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The Year after 8.5 million.
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The year after that, 26 million.
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In three years, they sold over 40 million of these fleece jackets, from just one campaign.
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And overnight, everything changed.
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The same people who called Uniqlo cheap and suburban, were now lining up to buy multiple fleece for the entire families.
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And in that moment, Yanai realized that people didn't just want cheap, They wanted something that actually worked.
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Something that made their everyday life a little bit better.
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And that one insight became the philosophy behind everything Uniqlo makes today.
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And they call it Lifewear Life Wear is not a product line or a slogan.
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It's a tool for living.
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And a good tool should not just work better, but it should be available to everyone and should not require too much of thinking.
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The goal of a lifewear is to make clothing that just disappears.
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Uniqlo does that in three steps.
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Number one, the fabric, number two, the design.
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And number three, the manufacturing.
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Let's start with the fabric.
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In 2003, Uniqlo approached a Japanese chemical company called Toray Industries.
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Now, Toray is not a fashion company.
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It's a material science company.
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They make carbon fiber for Boeing aircrafts and rockets for the Japanese space agencies.
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And Yanai wanted to know if they could apply the same level of engineering to clothing fabric.
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The result of that partnership was Heat-Tech, A fabric that generates heat from the natural moisture of your body.
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It traps that moisture and keep it close to your skin, without adding any bulk.
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One thin layer of this, can give you more warmth than multiple layers of traditional cotton.
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Your body constantly releases water vapours- even when you're not sweating, you just don't notice it.
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Heat tech is made with rayon fibers that absorbs that vapour and convert the kinetic energy of your movement into heat.
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Then the fabric traps that heat inside tiny air pockets between the fibers so it never escapes.
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It was so effective that they have sold over 1 billion units of heat tech since 2003.
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After engineering this solution for winters, then they decided to solve for summers and they called it Airism Again with Toray they developed a polyester fiber that is 1/10 of thickness of human hair that's so thin that you can barely see it.
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And because the fiber is that fine, the fabric has almost no surface irregularities. It's incredibly smooth.
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And it matters because when your body sweats, Moisture needs to move away from your skin.
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With regular cotton, the fibers absorb that moisture and hold it.
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That's why cotton feels damp, sticky and uncomfortable.
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But with AIRism, those micro-thin fibres, pulls the moisture away from your skin and spread it across a much larger surface area where it can evaporate almost instantly.
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They also engineered the cross section shape of the fiber to increase the surface area even further, which means more contact points for moisture to travel along faster.
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the result is a t shirt that feels almost like air against your skin.
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It doesn't cling, it doesn't trap heat, It doesn't wrinkle badly or lose shape.
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It just works.
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and after solving for hot and cold.
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Then they solved for rain and wind with Blocktech.
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Most waterproof jackets have a problem.
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They keep the rain out, but they also trap all your body heat inside.
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So you stay dry, but you get all sweaty and uncomfortable.
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Block tech solves both of these problems at the same time.
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The fabric has multiple layers Which are bonded together.
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The outer layer repels water, and the inner layer let your body heat and moisture escape outwards.
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so it's windproof, water-resistant and still breathable.
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They also sealed every seam with waterproof tape so that no water can enter, even from zips and seams.
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the result is a jacket that looks like a normal parka while still keeping it sweat free and breathable.
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This is what Yanai means when he say that Uniqlo is a technology company.
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the clothes look simple, but underneath that simplicity is a level of material engineering that most fashion companies never attempt.
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ButLifewear is not just about what the fabric does, it's about what the whole product feels like to live in.
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And for Uniqlo, that starts with one idea clothing that gets out of your way.
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So let's talk about how they actually design for that.
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when you walk into a Uniqlo store the products.
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Never try to tell you what to be.
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They are neutral on purpose.
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It's made for all. The same t shirts.
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fits a 22 year old designer and a 60 year old professor.
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The same fleece works on a student and a retiree hiking in the mountains.
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There are no subcultures, no tribe signals, and no aesthetic codes.
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this creates something unusual in fashion, a product with maximum compatibility.
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because it adds no identity of its own.
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It works with everything else you own.
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You don't have to rebuild your whole wardrobe around it.
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It just slots in.
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And more than that, when the clothes are quiet.
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You as a human, as a personality can do the talking.
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That's why the design language is also deliberately quiet.
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clean cuts, no excessive seams and no logos on the outside.
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The colors are chosen to work across seasons and skin tones.
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But Quiet Design does not mean Lazy Design.
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Inside every Uniqlo product there is a surprising amount of details.
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The collar on a T-shirt is structured to keep its shape after washing.
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something that most basics don't manage.
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The Hems are finished in a way that doesn't unravel.
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The buttons on the shirts are sewn with extra thread underneath so they can hold through machine washing.
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And none of these details are visible when you're looking at the product in the store.
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But you will notice them in the second year or the third year when the products still look good after years of wearing and washing.
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Most companies, design a product for the moment you see it on the shelf or on the product page.
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And then there are a few brands like Uniqlo that design for the third year, not for the first day.
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And that's only possible because of the third part, the way they manufacture things.
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See, Most Clothing Companies don't make anything They design something, hand it to a factory and hope that it comes out right.
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But Uniqlo does something called SPA Speciality store retailer of private-label apparel.
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which is a very complicated way of saying that they control everything.
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Design, Fabric Development Factory Selections, Quality Checks, Distributions.
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All of it in-house, They work with around 70 factories, mostly in China, Vietnam and Bangladesh.
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But unlike most brands, that treat their factories as interchangeable vendors, Uniqlo sends their own staff to live inside those factories.
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They call them Takumi, which means master craftspeople.
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These are engineers or specialists with decades of experience in Japanese textile industry.
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they don't just visit.
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They move in and live on the factory with the workers to monitor every small detail.
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Because if you want the product to be right, you have to be in the room where it's made, But this level of control also means that Uniqlo can only release fewer products every year.
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But what they do release, they manufacture in enormous quantities.
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sometimes tens of millions of units of a single item.
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And that scale changes everything.
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Because now you can negotiate The cost of the raw materials down.
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You can justify investing in better fabric process, and you can run the factory at full efficiency with zero waste from changeovers.
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This is how Uniqlo sells a better t shirt at a lower price.
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Not by cutting corners, but by removing everything that doesn't add value.
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A fabric engineered to solve a problem. A Design quiet enough to disappear.
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A Manufacturing system that controls every step from fiber to shelf.
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That's LifeWear as a system.
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But a Company's success is not just defined by its products.
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It's defined by the principles and philosophy behind each of these products.
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And there are three principles that make Uniqlo special.
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Number one is the Value over Trends Number two is the Control in Their Process.
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And number three is Their continuous evolution.
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So let's start with the first one.
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Value over Trends.
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Now Trends matter.
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I'm not going to tell you they don't.
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Its What gets someone through the door.
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It's what makes someone stop scrolling.
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It's what makes the product feel relevant right now.
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But what makes them buy and keeps them coming back is never the trend.
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It's the value underneath that trend.
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That's what stays when the trend is gone.
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The fleece that actually kept them warm.
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The t shirt collar that held its shape two years later.
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The jacket that didn't make them sweaty in the rain.
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That's what Uniqlo Understood from the very beginning that Trends bring customers to your product.
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But value is what makes them stay.
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So let's focus on that.
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That's why they have the trendy collection with subtle prints and patterns, along with the universal basic designs that stays forever.
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But here's the thing about value.
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You can't just decide to make something valuable and then hand it over to someone else to figure out how to make it.
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Value is only possible if you control the process that creates it.
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Which brings us to our second principle of control.
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Most clothing brands are essentially marketing companies.
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They come up with an idea.
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Hand it to a supplier.
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Receive a product.
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Put their name on it.
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And finally they sell it.
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For them, the factory is just a vendor and the fabric is just a cost line.
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Uniqlo doesn't operate that way.
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And it's not just about quality control.
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When you don't control the process, you don't fully understand the product.
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And there's a saying You can't improve what you can't see and you can't fix what you never touched.
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Uniqlo has spent decades building a system where nothing escapes their attention.
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The Takumi are not just quality checkers They're the reason that product can even make a promise.
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Because when you live inside the factory, when you watch the thread tension shift between morning and afternoon.
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When you track how a seam behaves after the third wash, you learn the things that no spec sheet can ever teach you.
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And that knowledge feeds back into the next product and the one after that.
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But control is not about being a control freak.
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It's about not outsourcing your understanding of your own product.
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But there is a problem with control that once you have it, once you've built all the system and locked in all the processes and found what works, the easiest thing in the world is to just keep doing that because it works.
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But Uniqlo does something very different, which is the third principle of continuous evolution, Heat tech was launched in 2003 with one function keep you warm without the bulk.
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That should have been the end of it.
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It worked. It sold a billion units.
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so just leave it alone.
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Except Uniqlo didn't leave it alone.
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They went back to Toray and asked What if we could make it Warmer?
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What if we could make it for people with sensitive skin?
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What if there was an extreme cold version?
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and today there are multiple generation of heat tech.
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Light, Regular, Extra Warm, Ultra Warm.
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each one is a new iteration of the same core idea, and is built on everything they learned from the version before.
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And they did the same thing with Airism and Block tech.
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The product never stops being developed.
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it just gets quieter, more refined, and more precisely tuned to the problem it was built to solve.
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and that's not restlessness.
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That's the discipline to keep asking, Can this work better for the person who is wearing now?
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Everything we talked about so far is for Uniqlo, but none of them are exclusive to clothing.
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Value over trends.
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Control over processes, Continuous evolution.
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These are not just fashion strategies.
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They are product strategies.
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and they can work wherever you're building something.
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So let's talk about how you can actually apply them.
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The first one value over trends.
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It starts with a simple question what problem does this actually solve?
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Not what just looks good right now.
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Or what's the new investors hype?
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But what is the real specific unglamorous problem that your product exists to fix?
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because attention without value underneath it, is nothing.
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People will come, they will try it and they will leave.
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Uniqlo fleece didn't win because fleece was trending.
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It won because people were cold and the existing solutions were too costly and too bulky.
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The trend was just the moment.
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The value was the actual reason that they stayed and kept coming back.
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So before you chase what's working right now, whether it's AI or energy, find the problem that is not going away and build for that.
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Now that's all about the value or the problem, but the way you solve it matters just as much as the solution itself, which is where the second principle comes in- Control.
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Now, control is the one thing that most people skip because it's slow, it's expensive, and it feels like an overkill when you're starting out.
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But every time you outsource a decision that you don't understand.
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Whether it's materials, the process or the experience, you lose the ability to improve it.
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Of course you can ask for changes.
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You can complain when it's wrong, but you cannot learn from it and you cannot fix it yourself.
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You don't need to control everything from day one, but you do need to know your product deeply enough that you could.
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So talk to your manufacturer or supplier.
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Understand why A material behaves the way it does.
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Be in the room physically or virtually Because the insight that makes your product better is almost never sitting in the report.
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It's sitting in the gap between what you specified and what actually happened.
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And control is not about size.
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It's about understanding your product deeply enough to improve it.
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And the last principle is about what you do with that understanding.
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You don't stop continuous evolution.
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This is probably the easiest and the hardest because it's not complicated, but it requires you to keep questioning something that's already working.
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Most products plateau not because the market change, but because the team stopped asking questions.
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the product shipped, the reviews are good.
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And somewhere in the relief of that, the curiosity went quiet.
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Uniqlo has been refining the same t shirt for decades, not because it was broken, because they believe that the current version is just the best they could do right now.
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So build the habit of going back and asking, what do we know now, that we didn't know when we made this?
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And what would we do differently?
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Small answers to that question, compounded over years, is how you end up with a product that feels like it was made specifically for the person using it.
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And that's it.
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Find the problem that isn't going away.
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Understand your product deep enough to improve it, and never make mistake that good enough is finished.
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None of this is complicated, but simple is not the same as easy.
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Because the temptation always- is to chase what's working right now, and to outsource the hard part- to ship it and move on.
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Uniqlo has spent 40 years resisting that noise.
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They realize that when you stop trying to be fashionable, you start being essential Because fashion is usually a performance, a costume.
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We wear to tell the world who we are.
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And Uniqlo realize that the most important part of an outfit is not the fabric, it's the person inside it.
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Because when you stop designing for the mirror and start designing for the life being lived, the product changes.
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It stops being a statement and starts being a solution.
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It doesn't demand your attention.
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It gives it back to you.
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So, as you go out and build your own thing, Remember, that utility outlasts hype.
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Build something that works so well that it just disappears because when the products become quite, the person using them can finally be heard.
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That's all for today.
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I'll see you in the next one. Bye.
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What You'll Learn
This video is a goldmine for building conversational fluency and topic expansion skills. You’ll practice explaining complex ideas—like how a brand succeeds by breaking trends—using clear, logical steps. You’ll also learn to use contrastive language (e.g., “while other brands spend millions… Uniqlo sells the same basic T-shirt”) to highlight key points, a critical skill for persuasive speaking. Plus, you’ll pick up vocabulary for discussing business, fashion, and consumer behavior, perfect for real-world conversations.
Listen For These Sounds
Pay attention to connected speech in phrases like “wanted to bring a change” (where “to” reduces to /tə/) and “decided to keep it” (where “to” becomes /tə/). Notice how “nothing here is” links smoothly into “nothin’ here’s” (/ˈnʌθɪŋ hɪrz/), a common reduction in fast speech. Also, listen for the softening of “t” in “patent office” (/ˈpætnt ˈɔːfɪs/) and “marketin’” (/ˈmɑːrkɪtɪŋ/), where the final “g” is often dropped in casual talk. These nuances will make your listening comprehension sharper and your speech sound more natural.
Say It Like a Native
To mirror the speaker’s rhythm, stress content words like “$22 billion,” “2500 stores,” and “15 versions” to emphasize key facts. Notice how the speaker pauses before important ideas—like “So how is it possible…”—to build curiosity; copy this pause to create engagement. Practice shadowing the dialogue with a shadowing app to match the pace: the speaker uses a moderate, conversational speed, not too fast, which is perfect for learning. Focus on the rising intonation in questions like “Is it because people are now tired of dressing for others?” to sound natural. Whether you use “shadowspeak” techniques or repeat lines aloud, mimicking the speaker’s stress and rhythm will help you master authentic English pronunciation. And remember, this video is a great resource for learn english with youtube—it’s practical, engaging, and full of real-world language you can use today.
Grammar in this video
The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:
| Structure | In the video |
|---|---|
| Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it | was seen · is made · are bonded |
| Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing | people who own · people who were · Harajuku, which was |
| Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now | have sold · has spent · you've built |
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.