Hirotake Yano, the founder of the Japanese discount store Daiso and a billionaire, passed away at the age of 80 due to heart failure.
Yano's death was announced by the company earlier this week, stating that he died last Monday, February 12. Members of the immediate family had already arranged a private funeral.
"It's with profound sadness that we announce the passing of Founder and Former President of Daiso Industries Company Limited, Mr Hirotake Yano, last Monday," Daiso said in its press release.
A customer walks out from a Daiso shop at a shopping mall in the Shinjuku district of Tokyo on February 20, 2024. The company said that Hirotake Yano, the Japanese 100-yen shop pioneer and founder of the Daiso chain, has died.
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Successful 100-Yen Retail Store
Comparable to pound stores, Daiso is a retailer that sells goods for 100 yen ($0.67). Yano was a trailblazer in the dollar store industry when he launched his first discount retailer in 1972.
According to BBC, Yano worked his way through a number of positions after graduating from Chuo University in 1967 in Tokyo. One of them was managing his father-in-law's fishery until it went bankrupt.
He opened his first store, Yano Shoten, or Yano Store, in 1972, when he was 29 years old. Daiso, meaning "create something big" in Japanese, became the company's name five years later. The fact that every single thing sold there cost 100 yen made it renowned.
According to Yano and his wife Katsuyo, they charged 100 yen for every item because they found it too time-consuming to price them individually.
As the Japanese economy stalled in the 1990s and consumers became price-sensitive, Daiso flourished. Many people all around the globe now use the business concept that Yano created.
Daiso has 4,360 stores in Japan and about 1,000 stores elsewhere as of the end of 2023. The company has locations all over the globe, including North America, the Middle East, and Asia.
It claims to create over a thousand new goods every month and has over 70,000 unique things in store. The business promotes itself as "Japan's No.1 living ware supplier."
The Bloomberg Billionaires Index estimated that Yano's net worth was $1.9 billion.
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