April 29, 2022 – Theme Week Day 5

We’re finishing up our “What’s It Called?” theme week today, with an abbreviation I’m sure you’ve seen on a lot of your jeans, jackets, sweatshirts, or pretty much anything with a zipper – YKK. YKK is a Japanese manufacturer, and YKK stands for “Yoshida Kogyo Kabushikikaisha”, which roughly translates to “Yoshida Company Limited”. The company is named after it’s founder, Tadao Yoshida, who started it in 1934.
Yoshida didn’t invent the zipper. It was invented by an American named Whitcomb Judson in the 18090s. He called his invention a clasp-locker, and it was primarily used to fasten shoes and high boots. It debuted at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, but didn’t have much commercial success.
A few years later, another American named Gideon Sundback made improvements to Judson’s design. He increased the number of fastening elements and introduced the familiar two facing rows of teeth that were pulled into a single piece by a slider.
We have the B.F. Goodrich Company to thank for the term zipper. They used Sundback’s product on a new type of rubber boots, and started calling it a “zipper”, and the name stuck! Originally, zippers were mainly used to close boots and tobacco pouches.
When YKK entered the zipper scene in 1934, Yoshida wasn’t satisfied with the current production methods, so he designed his own machines. Today,  almost every step of the zipper-making process is done in-house, from smelting the metal to packaging for the final product. This allows them to deliver consistent quality and speed of production, which is why their zippers have become extremely popular with many manufacturers. By one estimate, YKK makes half the zippers on Earth.