Tabio Online Store

Mr. Ochi quit a regular job in 1968 to start a wholesale trading house that specialized in socks, with three colleagues and 130,000 yen. Not surprisingly, it was hard to find factories that were willing to do business with a man who had so little money. Nobody was really interested in trusting him on his good name alone. Deeply worried, Mr. Ochi turned to his old friend Mr. Haruhiko Yamashita of BS Socks. Mr. Yamashita agreed to lend a hand by allowing the new company to pay in cash at the end of a month for all merchandise shipped to it by the twentieth.
Thanks to Mr. Yamashita, the fledgling company now had a small selection of goods to sell, but it still needed a trade name. Reflecting his feelings at the moment, Mr. Ochi came right out and said, “Since I am a man who is confronting a challenge, just make it ‘íj (man).’” People told him that particular Chinese character might strike people odd as the name of a company, so he thought for a bit about how to fix that problem. He really liked the feel of the two-character Japanese word íjëO – a handsome man of high caliber. Since his trusty old Japanese-English dictionary translated that as “dandy,” then of course the first half of dandy – “dan” – must be another English word for “man.” Perfectly logical. And that’s how the company got its name.
On the night before the official launch, Mr. Ochi made a calligraphy scroll to steel himself for his great project. He used powerful brushstrokes to express his determination to make good with this new company, borrowing the words of the famous Japanese philosopher Sontoku Ninomiya:
A product should be a joy, bringing happiness equally to the manufacturer, seller, and purchaser. If the product makes the manufacturer and seller happy, but not the purchaser, your business has strayed from the honorable path.
This became dan’s guiding philosophy.

At the beginning, dan just sold other companies’ socks. No matter how hard they tried to keep costs down and pick winning products, they couldn’t turn a profit. One day, it dawned on Mr. Ochi that his company needed to plan and design its own products. Meanwhile, a lot of 96 pairs of knee socks from BS Socks, knit with linking machines, happened to catch his eye. Mr. Ochi asked Mr.Yamashita, president of BS Socks, for the address of the manufacturer of these socks, and he set off to pay a visit to Mr. Masahiro Horiuchi, current General Manager of the CSM Engineering Department at Kutsushitaya. The two men turned out to be soul mates. They lost all track of time as they went about sharing dreams and feelings neither had ever before been able to find the words for. So began the manufacturing of original dan products.

The company went begging for a hand from other manufacturers, and soon began to turn out a steady stream of its own original products. Unfortunately, the minimum production lot at the time was 3000 pairs of socks. That was way beyond what the small retailers and general stores that were our main customers could ever hope to handle. Our tiny company, a latecomer to the market, understood perfectly well that large-volume retailers were reluctant to handle our products, but that didn’t keep us from trying. Their feedback: we had good quality products, but they were too “expensive.” None of that was news to us, but we wouldn’t dream of cutting corners on quality, especially since we were broke. So we figured that the only way we could build our brand would be to get our products into specialty stores that attracted a clientele who appreciated the finer things in life, like our socks. We sensed that this style shop was on the verge of coming into its own, and set out to knock on the doors of the trendiest ladies boutiques, places like San-ai, Suzuya and Tamaya.

Around that time, Mr. Tokuhiro, president of ELSE Co., Ltd. of Kochi city, came to see us to ask for a supply of our products. We were thrilled, of course. There was only one tiny problem. You see, in the sock business, you have to stay on top of your bestsellers from day to day and make sure there are plenty of those on the shelves, or you go broke. We were already broke, and probably couldn’t find the money for the trips back and forth to Kochi we needed to make to keep track of sales. But we were ready to do whatever it took to keep from letting Mr. Tokuhiro down. Thinking caps donned, we eventually decided to borrow a page from the way bakeries control inventory. That was how we came up with a Unit Control System that let us keep track of sales at individual stores from a distance. Our system attracted a great deal of attention, and instantly brought us deals from across the nation.
Business was growing steadily. Now, our system required the store clerks to spend a lot of time checking their inventories, and success was making this rather burdensome for our clients. Then one day somebody noticed that the clerks in a bookstore pull a card from every book as they ring up the sale, and we knew we had an answer to our problem. We attached a card to every pair of socks, and asked the store clerks to pull them when they made a sale and send them back to dan. Now the stores didn’t have to do any more daily counts. The Card System was born, and we had a sales control system that didn’t wear down the store clerks.

As we gradually introduced our card system to the ladies fashion stores, dan’s business really began to take off. One new customer after another came knocking on our door, looking to do business with us. Now that we felt like we had a future, we were in a hurry to build up production and introduce new models of socks. Unfortunately, our subcontractor factories didn’t see things quite our way. As we hustled to beef up production, our cash flow took a serious dive. We owed money to practically everybody we knew, and the debts weren’t getting any smaller. We had started the company with only 130,000 yen, and in five short years, by 1973, we had managed to transform that small pool of capital into a huge debt of 70 million yen. Not only that, a note for 5.3 million was coming due in two days. We didn’t have that kind of money ourselves, and we had already tapped out everybody we knew: not a soul was willing to lend us even 100,000 yen, let alone a few million. With bankruptcy looming on the horizon, we went to see Mr. Fujiwara, the president of the developer Yamato, to bemoan our fate. He let us go through our spiel without saying a single word. When we had finished, he asked us exactly how much we owed. “A little over 70 million yen, not counting a few million we have to pay back day after tomorrow.” What was his comment? a booming “Guys! So what?!” Mr. Fujiwara was also running a food company called New Nichii at the time, and was very well known in the Kansai region for his entrepreneurial genius. Well, his reaction hit us like a break in the clouds after a week of rain. The sun was shining again. On the day that note came due, we scraped together 3.3 million yen in cash, took it to a credit bank, and sweet-talked the branch manager into lending us a hand. We were still in business.

One day, Mr. Ochi stopped in to see Mr. Imai, our present Senior Managing Director. “Up to now, I’ve been a borrower. I think it’s about time I give some of it back. How do you suggest I go about it?” Mr. Imai’s reply: “Make as many marketable products as we can sell. Never make junk. We can’t sell junk. Use whatever money comes in to cover expenses, and anything left over will be gravy.” Now, this wasn’t exactly the mainstream thinking in the socks industry at the time, as Mr. Ochi knew only too well. Nevertheless, what choice did he have? So he went along with Mr. Imai’s advice, and it turned out to be a real eye-opener.

Our “Card System” suited our gradually improving production capabilities well, and by around 1980 we had managed unusual growth for a socks company. And we were catering to the best ladies boutiques all over Japan. Our mainstay clients were growing, too, and opening more and more franchise stores. Lately, though, they had started to balk at assigning full-time employees just to sell ladies socks, and began to replace them with part-timers. These new people didn’t know much about our products, and we begged our clients to put full-time staff back in the sock department. Budgets were tight, they said, and our pleas went nowhere. Meanwhile, we decided to put out a new line of top-quality alpaca socks. This move had its fair share of risk. We were gambling our reputation as a sock specialist, because customers had to go to some extra trouble in washing and drying these socks or they would end up ruined. We worried that no instruction booklet by itself would be enough to get customers to use the extra care these socks required. And we were right. Even though we sent our salespeople on personal visits to make sure the store staff was advising customers on how to take care of socks made of natural alpaca, there were lots of complaints, lots of returns. It was time to rethink the “specialty store” concept.

Around that time, a store called San-ai in Sannomya, Kobe, decided to change direction and become more of developer. They asked us to take over management of a one-tsubo sales area (3.3m2) in the store. So we found ourselves running around to our factories with their sales clerks every day, getting them as thoroughly trained as we could, until our new retail space was ready to open, which we named DOS (Dan Operation System). The year was 1982.

The success of DOS opened up new opportunities for stores specializing in socks. At one meeting we had with our employees, everybody was passionate in their conviction that it was high time socks were liberated from the underwear drawer and allowed to stand on their own. Around the same time, we received a request from a Mr. Kenshiro Fuchigami, who owned tea stalls in Kurume, to let him and his wife run one of our sock specialty stores. We liked their enthusiasm and sincerity, and only laid down a few conditions: they had to follow our instructions to the letter; they had to consult with us whenever there was any problem; and they had to agree to take all responsibility for whatever happened with the store. So the Fichigamis became the proud operators of the first Kutsushitaya, which opened in Kurume City, Fukuoka Prefecture, on 1 November 1984.

Business continued to grow rapidly until we had 60 Kutsushitaya stores. We were thinking about franchising, but there was no way we could hope to keep up with any more growth without an established distribution center and a computer system. We set up a POS system that networked the stores with our dye factory, but we still needed to set up on-site distribution, inspection and testing, and production command centers. “Let’s stand up and create our own socks Utopia as torchbearers for this supposedly recession-ridden industry” became our motto. After four years on the drawing boards, we finally formed a cooperative with our subcontractor factories. The date was 11 November 1992, “Socks Day.” That was how the Corporative Society Kutsushitaya Mutual Prosperity (CSM) came to be. We installed the most advanced testing equipment in our laboratories and were able to significantly improve our quality control structure. And with our distribution center conveniently located within fifteen minutes of our principal factories, we could also markedly improve distribution efficiency.

We want to be able to provide socks that are both beautiful and comfortable, like the handmade whipstitch socks of old. In this spirit, under the umbrella of the Textile Industry Innovation Program and in cooperation with Ritsumeikan University, we have succeeded in completing a prototype of a fully automated “Linking” machine.

The stock exchange didn’t use to list any manufacturer that specialized in socks – dan was the first. Listing would give socks their own aura of respectability. We had christened our shops Kutsushitaya, which means “sock store” in Japanese. The name had become synonymous with The Sock Industry, we felt obliged to fulfill our responsibility to the industry in some way, and thought the least we could do was get dan and Kutsushitaya listed. We also thought getting dan listed would please our customers and our subcontractors. Thus, on 6 October 2000 dan took up residence on the second section of the Osaka Securities Exchange.

As in Japan, socks are still basically considered staples around the world, an image that is deeply entrenched in people’s minds. In order to change this frame of mind, and to give socks their proper place in the world, we established our first overseas sock specialty store, Tabio, on Kings Road in London, UK.

On 1 September 2006, dan changed in business name to Tabio. It was a heart breaking decision for Mr. Ochi and other company members to say good bye to the company's old name, dan. We have felt very attached to the name for 30 years. However, we promised not to accept things as they are and flap our wings to the world. Tabio stands for "The Trend And the Basics In Order". Tabio also means to travel around the world in Japanese and to evolve socks (old type of socks are called Tabi in Japan).