Japan

“Like, you could really see, like, with the kimono, for example, one shape, you know, for thousands of years, and, you know, they would just do, you know, use different fabrics and different techniques to make it different every time, and, you know, it was beau…”

“Japan had just exploded, so it was about 30% of all snowboarders business.”

“And it started to occur to me that the five big trading companies in Japan were making North American brand name clothing. In other words, they would come up with their own brand name in order to deliver that to the Japanese customer. But Japanese, those big t…”

“I went to Japan. I'd heard about these machines that were 40,000 dollars a piece, which was Huge at the time, and I bought four of them.”

“You know in Japan, your last name really signifies whether you are Japanese or not, so much so that Korean Japanese people or Chinese Japanese people, they will change their last name to signify that they are truly Japanese.”

“I went to Japan. I'd heard about these machines that were 40,000 dollars a piece, which was Huge at the time, and I, ah, bought four of them.”

“They're Japanese corporate, very respectful, very considerate, but they are slow on the decision-making process, and everything has to go back to Japan to take decisions”

“We actually went there with a mission in hand, which was to try to find products in Japan that we could bring to North America.”

“Even though we are sort of like supply chain proof, and that's something we talk about a lot, we're not really because of some of our parts, like our robotics, like our pneumatics are all Japanese. So what happens if we can't get our Japanese parts? Like they …”

“Prior to that, there was a moratorium on research in the United States on stem cells, and the future of understanding how these incredible cells grow, develop, and communicate with each other was really in question because of this, and so this incredible disco…”

“The Black Onyx was the first role-playing game in Japan”

“And then SoftBank came back, and we had, for April, we had 10,000 units. And in May, 10,000 units. So we were, like, killing it. We were number one game in, in Japan in 1984.”

“So I started traveling around the world looking for games to bring to Japan, because at the time, movies were coming from other countries, and music was coming from other countries. So I could see that all this culture was being imported from a lot of from the…”

“Literally, I would get the yellow pages from those cities and go look for electronic retailers, and then I would buy from them because they were selling them cheaper in Japan than they were selling it in the USA. And I would import those 10, 12 pieces at a tim…”

“To get that fabric knitted, the I don't want to get too wonky with your audience, but it requires a certain type of knitting machines, and those machines had gone over to Japan a long time ago,”

“I found the right factory in Taiwan. They can build a lot cheaper than, at the time, the labor costs in Japan. And, the components are all the same. At the same time, we've, we're vertically deintegrated, I use that efficiency, and we pass the saving to the co…”

“And then Japan was probably 40% of that first year's wholesale business.”

“So finally on the very second to last day, we find a factory that had a vacuum and it wasn't very big. It was kind of the size of a motorcycle, which isn't huge for the vacuum world. And they were doing these little vacuum insulated Japanese milk bottles.”