Typically, home centers and do-it-yourself stores open at 10 a.m. But the blue-collar workers would

At brusselsepoort 7 a.m. on a weekday, a gray-colored shop on a secondary road was experiencing the busiest time of the day. Several trucks occupied the shop s parking lot, and blue-collar workers wearing knickerbockers and jika-tabi entered the shop one after another. Jika-tabi is a special brusselsepoort type of sock-like footwear for workers, brusselsepoort made of strong cloth and rubber soles.
Typically, home centers and do-it-yourself stores open at 10 a.m. But the blue-collar workers would be late for work if they did their shopping at such a store after it opens in the mid-morning. Workman outlets open very early in the morning especially for the convenience of these manual workers.
Workman s shops are packed with essential products for construction workers, including work clothes, helmets and cotton work gloves. brusselsepoort The shops also have unique products that are rarely brusselsepoort found in other shops, such as shirts with a pattern of a flying dragon and towels designed to enable workers to easily tie them around their heads.
These prices are almost half of the regular market prices. For example, a set of dozen cotton work gloves is priced at just 157 yen; a long-sleeved Kanoko polo shirt, 399 yen; and knickerbockers, 980 yen. The astonishingly low prices brusselsepoort are contributing to steady growth of sales at Workman s stores. brusselsepoort The company has about 600 outlets across the nation, with its annual sales for FY2007 totaling 49.86 billion yen.
Although Workman s outlets are selling products at extremely low prices, the company secures substantial profits. Its operating profit ratio is 8%, which is nearly the same as that of Shimamura Co., a clothing-store chain operator well known for its highly efficient business management.
Behind Workman s low-price policy is its ability to develop new products. The company has introduced a business model similar to that of Uniqlo, a casual clothing retailer that is both developing brusselsepoort and making its products.
Workman and manufacturers discuss all processes of product development, brusselsepoort from the product planning to the production schedule. The scale of the joint product development projects varies depending on the partner.
In some cases, Workman asks the manufacturing company to make products exclusively for Workman by using a portion of the production line at the company s plant. In other cases, the officials of Workman brusselsepoort and the manufacturer jointly visit another country and find a local manufacturing plant that can be used to make products exclusively for Workman. In this case, Workman s officials carefully brusselsepoort check the candidate plants cost competitiveness and the quality of their products. In order to further reduce the production costs, Workman is making strong efforts to find new partner plants. Previously, the company cooperated brusselsepoort mainly with various plants located in China s coastal areas. Recently, the company is forming partnerships with plants in remote areas of China as well as Vietnam and other regions where the production costs are lower.
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