Workman - Company History

In 1980 Tsuchiya Yoshio, founder of the Gunma retailer Iseya — later Beisia — saw a workwear shop doing brisk trade in western Japan and judged the trade to be an unusually good market: carpenters and construction workers bought by name, and no chain had claimed it. He opened a single Iseya store under the name Workman, and in August 1982 incorporated it to roll the format out by franchise. The second purpose of the new company was internal — a subsidiary in which the group could train managers.

What made the format work was decided at the outset. Workman would be a pure franchisor and would practise what it came to call shinai keiei — “management by not doing.” Everything from buying to shop-floor routine was written into manuals so that, as the phrase went, anyone running a franchise would make money; owners were held by goodwill rather than by orders and quotas, contract renewal rates stayed high, and a head office that never had to run the stores could add them almost without adding weight. A distribution centre opened at Takasaki one month after incorporation. The legal shell was untidier than the story: a company registered in November 1979 in the same Isesaki location was kept as the surviving entity and only in April 1994 was merged and renamed Workman Co., Ltd., aligning the corporate form with the business. From the start Tsuchiya handed the presidency to Yamane Sadami and took the chairmanship himself, separating ownership from execution.

The network then filled in by region. The hundredth store opened at Sakata, Yamagata, in March 1988 — six years from founding — behind radio and television advertising aimed at recruiting franchisees, and area offices in Niigata, Nagano, Tochigi, then Ibaraki and southern Tohoku carried the chain out of its Gunma stronghold into eastern Japan. Gifu followed in 1996, Osaka in 2003. The five-hundredth store opened at Yamatokoriyama, Nara, in November 2000. When Workman registered on the over-the-counter market in September 1997 it ran 193 franchised and 103 directly held stores, and it was the only company operating nationally in a domestic workwear market worth about $578.4M (¥70bn); Yamane told analysts he wanted 1,300 stores by 2010.

The chain went public in stages: JASDAQ in December 2004, the Osaka Securities Exchange JASDAQ in April 2010 when the two exchanges merged, and the Tokyo Stock Exchange JASDAQ in July 2011 on the Tokyo–Osaka integration. Under Kuriyama Kiyoharu, president from 2009, the work of the period was infrastructure rather than expansion: a Kyushu area office in May 2011 completed the map, and the Ryuo distribution centre in Shiga, opened that July, gave western Japan the logistics base its store count already needed.

Completing the map also revealed the problem. Workman had held the top share of its market for thirty-two consecutive years, but the market itself was worth only about ¥100 billion, and with Kyushu done the chain could see where it stopped: roughly 1,000 stores and ¥100 billion in sales, and no further. In 2012 the founder brought in his nephew Tsuchiya Tetsuo — long a Mitsui & Co. man, latterly president of its digital arm — as chief information officer. His own reading was blunt: the company would eat through its market in about eight more years.

His answer was to shift the weight of the business toward new product development, and to make that development argue from numbers rather than from instinct. The instrument he chose was not an analytics platform but Excel — a tool everyone already had, so that supervisors could run their own analysis instead of buying it from vendors, and so that arguments in a development meeting had a common language. Excel proficiency was written into how people were appraised, which quietly raised the standing of staff who were better with a spreadsheet than with a room. It took roughly a decade to take hold. In the same years the company deepened its bench of insiders — Kohama Hideyuki moving through merchandising, product and supervision, alongside Ouchi Koji, Iizuka Yukitaka and Hasegawa Hiroshi — so that execution could eventually pass out of the founding family.

In 2018 the data produced a target. Analysis identified a gap in apparel worth roughly $3.6B (¥400bn) — clothing that was both genuinely high-performance and cheap — which nobody was serving, and which Workman had been quietly making for tradespeople all along. Workman Plus changed no product. It changed the shelf, the presentation and the customer, put the data-selected best sellers in a mall, and cleared its profit targets in the third month. A casual-and-sneaker boom and the fashionable rediscovery of workwear in 2019–20 then amplified it: chain-wide sales reached $1.4B (¥147bn) in the year to March 2021, with net profit of $159.2M (¥17bn).

Kohama Hideyuki, forty-nine and a career insider, became president in April 2019, leaving Tsuchiya Tetsuo on strategy — ownership with the family, execution with the staff. In October 2020 the first #Workman Joshi opened in Yokohama, a women-facing format that took workwear off the sales floor entirely; the following month a store at Miyakonojo, Miyazaki, completed coverage of all forty-seven prefectures, thirty-eight years after founding. In April 2022 the listing moved to the TSE Standard market. September 2023 brought both the 1,000th operating store and the first Workman Colors in Ginza, giving the company four formats running in parallel.

The economics of the original design survived all of it. In the year to March 2025 parent-company sales were $658.1M (¥100bn) and net profit $111.6M (¥17bn), an operating margin of 24.5% — earned by 417 head-office employees supporting more than a thousand franchised stores. The company is pushing toward 1,500 stores, accelerating Colors through roadside sites and conversions with 48 openings planned for the year to March 2026, and began overseas trials in 2025. The unresolved question is the share register: Beisia Kogyo (28.23%), Cainz (9.67%), Cainz Kosan (4.26%) and Tsuchiya Hiromasa (14.09%) hold more than 60% between them, and family-related holdings reached over 70% in 2021. Workman remains, in capital terms, the founding business of the Beisia group — with too little free float for institutions to take a position, and therefore a company the market finds hard to price.