The Zipper

Take a look at your jeans, jacket, bags or any other item that has a zip on it. I bet majority of the zips will have the initials YKK imprinted on them. I've been wondering who YKK was ever since my secondary school days, because it was only then did I realise that most of my zips were YKK zips.

Now with the power of the Internet and time on hand, I did a search on YKK. I had never suspected that YKK was actually an original company called San-S Shokai from downtown Tokyo in 1934. Tadao Yoshida determined the most beneficial way to prosper would be to manufacture items of value to which he could add worth. He chose to produce a simple, yet high potential item that had fascinated him for years: the zipper.

They now have 122 affiliated companies in 70 countries, making 212 million yen solely on fasteners like zippers; those small and insignificant things that have become part of our life that we often overlook. Well, of course the YKK Group does other things as well, such as architectural products, machinery and engineering, R&D and other developments, in which all these were expanded from a single zipper manufacturing company.

I've always wondered how the zipper works, actually I ONLY wonder about it when my zipper spoils, because in order to troubleshoot something, you need to know how it works first. I performed a search on Wikipedia and I still don't really know how the zipper works. It's something like this:





















The slider meshes the interlocking teeth together or seperately, depending on the direction of travel. That's how a zipper works, in a nutshell. But I STILL don't know how it REALLY works. I want to put the zipper under a microscope.

What's so fascinating about the zipper you ask? It has made our life so much simpler and convenient. We don't need to know how to tie knots anymore. It's an evolution of useful things. And why am I writing about zippers at work? Because I was zipping up my jacket and did not find the brand YKK there. I found 'Nikon' instead.