Why do so many zippers have the letters YKK stamped on them? Is it some kind of ...

[Michie]

...secret code or something?

Why YKK?

The mysterious Japanese company behind the world’s best zippers.


The zipper is one of those inventions—along with the bicycle—that seems as though it should have occurred much earlier in history. How complicated could it be to assemble two wheels, two pedals, and a chain? Or to align two jagged strips of metal teeth and shuffle them together? There is no complicated chemistry here, no harnessing of invisible wavelengths. And yet the modern bicycle didn’t appear until the late 1800s, and the zipper didn’t really become the zipper until 1917 (when it was patented by a Swedish immigrant in Hoboken). The precision necessary to craft a working bicycle chain or a smoothly meshing zipper was simply beyond us for all those prior millennia.

More confounding still: Now that the zipper has been around for nearly a century, you’d think that something so simple might have been perfected—becoming a 100 percent reliable commodity. But that hasn’t happened. There are still tons of faulty zippers out there. Teeth that break. Pulls that pop. Herky-jerky sliding and irreparable lockups.



One zipper gone wrong can render an entire garment unwearable. Thus consistent quality is a must for reputable fashion brands. For decades now, apparel makers who can’t afford to gamble on cut-rate fasteners have overwhelmingly turned to a single manufacturer. YKK, the Japanese zipper behemoth, makes roughly half of all the zippers on earth. More than 7 billion zippers each year. Those three capital letters are ubiquitous—no doubt you’ve seen them while zipping up your windbreaker or unzipping someone else’s jeans. How did YKK come to dominate this quirky corner of industry?

Continued-
Why do so many zippers have the letters YKK stamped on them? Is it some kind of secret code or something?

 

[JBMM]

Very interesting, thanks for sharing, Mitchie!

 

[Michie]

I've actually wondered about those initials.