Dropping general knitwear for sportswear built on baseball stockings (1952)

Choosing the orders that are a nuisance

What was chosen in 1952 was not a growing market but a market whose orders were troublesome. Anyone can knit underwear and socks; trousers that will not melt under the friction of a slide, and tights that follow the leg when the body is upside down, cannot even have their dimensions fixed without asking the person who will wear them. What Tsuzawa Meriyasu Seizosho took on was that back-and-forth, and from then on the Toyama factory earned its money on the fineness of the specification rather than on volume. The speed of it — seven months after founding — looks less like a decision reached after deliberation than the result of moving to stand beside whoever placed the order.

The choice was still visible in the product mix forty years later. In a lecture in December 1991, president Nishida Tosaku set out a policy of keeping ski equipment to no more than about 47% of sales and growing golf wear and other lines to hold the imbalance down. Refusing to lean on a single sport is a different thing from thinking of leaving competition wear altogether. The single line recording the abandonment of underwear in July 1952 still sits in the corporate chronology of the 有価証券報告書, second only to the founding, unmoved.