Nitori. From a sleepy furniture store in Sapporo to one of Japan’s most successful companies.

I hadn’t paid much attention to Nitori for many years.

I associated the brand with simple and not particularly inspiring products in large warehouse stores on the way to the airport. I more or less forgot about them until Nitori opened their urban format in Shibuya.

I was blown away. How had I missed this?

So I dug into their story a bit. It turns out Nitori is a Good to Great Japanese style company.

Founded by the charismatic Akio Nitori, the eponymous home furnishings giant is known for going against the status quo (the man and the company).

Nitori has always had a laser focus on customer satisfaction. Every product is meticulously designed with distinctly Japanese stylish minimalism and engineered to be incredibly easy to assemble.

Nitori is equally obsessive about offering everyday items at the lowest prices possible. They are not shy about disrupting categories such as their redesigned traditional school packs (Randoseru) at far lower prices.

Nitori the man is known to be unconventional and has vowed to avoid a traditional hereditary succession, promoting a long-time lieutenant to president in 2016. His love of color in clothes while selling warehouses of furniture in white pretty much tells the story.

But Nitori has its conventional side. Nitori began as a sleepy furniture store in 1967 in Sapporo, Hokkaido, establishing itself as a retail business in 1973 and is now the largest furniture retailer in Japan.

They adopted a direct purchasing scheme from overseas in 1973, rare at the time, established the first vertical warehouse in Japan, and tightly control their value chain.

By taking a well-considered trajectory, continually innovating and taking (well considered) chances, Nitori has enjoyed record sales and profits for 36 consecutive years and has been voted one of Japan’s best places to work for many years.

Wow, lessons learned. Another best in class innovative and successful Japanese company. Good to great Japanese style. 

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