Founding the mail-order specialist Orbis — a two-pillar business (1984)

A vessel that houses the incompatible

The heart of this decision was that a company with a real strength deliberately set up, inside itself, a model at odds with that strength. For a Pola that had grown on door-to-door selling, mail order — commerce without a face-to-face meeting — was a choice that could even amount to a denial of its founding trade. Even so, Tsuneshi Suzuki chose not to shut out the new touchpoint in order to protect the existing strength, but to let the two live side by side by separating name and organization. Taking in the customers it had been letting slip, without injuring the founding trade — that clean break can be read as the prototype of the group’s later brand diversification.

The figure of one company holding two unlike models — face-to-face and non-face-to-face — also became the premise for the 2006 move into a holding company, a vessel that bundles multiple brands on independent P&Ls and takes them in and out as needed. That a mail-order brand carved out as a separate company in 1984 still occupies a corner of the group’s very name forty years on suggests that the cosmetics trade — a business that touches the skin — has a breadth that refuses to be bound to any single way of selling. Not to shut oneself inside a strength, but to keep the opposite model standing right beside it — the beginning of that stance can be said to lie in this founding of Orbis.