Imabari City, Ehime is the towel manufacturing capital of Japan. You won’t find such a towel mecca anywhere else in the world, with over 130 different companies making towels here. There is one manufacturer here that stands out, Ikeuchi Towel. They’ve created a house brand, “Towels Woven by the Wind”, which has become their flagship product. PingMag Make spoke to the president, Keishi Ikeuchi, about the benefits of refusing to compromise.
Interviewed by Takafumi Suzuki
Translated by Claire Tanaka
Born into a towel family in a towel town, surely you must have grown up surrounded by towels?
No, that’s not the case. I did use towels just like everyone else, though. My father was managing Ikeuchi Towel, but he was very strict. “Children shouldn’t play in the factory!” he always said. That was his policy. The first job I got was in marketing and sales promotion. It was for Matsushita Electric’s audio brand, Technics.
Technics is really well-known as a high-quality audio brand, isn’t it?
At that time, Technics had a lot of really good developers working for them. I was in marketing and sales promotion there from the time it was founded until it peaked. Naturally, I was able to use what I learned there as a basis for what I do now. With audio, you can have a 5000 yen player or a 1,000,000 yen player, but in the end, they’re both playing the same record. How do you show the difference? It’s not just about technical skill, you’ve got to have “something” if you want to be able to sell it. And you’ve got to be able to sell it in Japan, America, Europe. As a planning man in those days, I really got to do some interesting work.
So what year did you start at Ikeuchi Towel?
It was in 1982. I thought I could do something good here at Ikeuchi Towel as an idea man, so I quit Technics. One day I said to myself, “Starting today, I’m going to be the president of this company!” and that’s how I entered Ikeuchi Towel. Since then, we’ve made a lot of different towels. Like most towel manufacturers in Japan, we are an OEM(Original Equipment Manufacturer). This means we are subcontracted to make products
under a variety of different brand names. But, I believe Ikeuchi Towel’s quality is the best, so in line with my children’s growth, I put orders from brands making cartoon characters at first priority (laughs)
The thing that most stands out about IKT(Ikeuchi Towel) is the “towels woven by the wind”.
That’s our ecological product, the organic cotton towels woven using electricity made from windmills. The organic cotton is grown just like organic vegetables. If the quality of the materials aren’t stable, it’s really hard to work with them. But, this product was originally started out as the pursuit of an ideal, and we weren’t thinking about the business angle. So, we started to get really stoic about our product development. After about four years, the product started to gather some fans, and we started to get some orders. In 2002, we won gold at a home textile show in New York.
Since they’re woven by wind-powered electricity, the product is called “Towels Woven by the Wind”
The old “Ikeuchi Towel” nameplate
So, what was the original reason for starting up the brand?
It was just our little way of rebelling against our usual OEM license branding work. It was born out of frustration. We said “We’ll just go and make our own dang brand!” Japan’s towel market is very unique when you compare it to other countries. Here, towels are something you receive as a gift. I think the norm in other countries is that you just go out and buy the towels you want for yourself. So we had that in mind, and we felt “It would be nice if one day this kind of thing would sell.” And with this in mind, we made the best towels we could.
This product that you worked at to make your best, now that it’s become your flagship product, that’s really an ideal situation, isn’t it?
It’s tough! (laughs) Even though we have lots of passionate fans, we can’t get any distributors or department stores to carry our products. It’s because there isn’t a stable demand. Even though our OEM products are accepted, they just won’t accept the original Ikeuchi Towel product.
A towel made by wind-power, IKT is pretty high-class. I mean, they
must cost a lot?
It’s the most expensive towel in the world. (laughs) Well, it might sound like a joke but it’s true. The American interior shop ABC Carpet and Home sells towels made by Christy Towels of England, which invented the modern towel 160 years ago, and Yves Delorme from France, which is another well-respected long-standing business in the field, but ours are the most expensive. We make them very soft but they’re not showy. Our customers call it “miracle softness” (laughs).
Do you have one master towel craftsman who is in charge of it all?
That would be me. Towels aren’t really a craft, after all. We have designers, and weavers, and it’s a combination of all those things. The person controlling the quality of the final product is me and only me.
How did you develop such sensitivity towards towel manufacture?
Well, towels are something everyone uses from childhood onwards. It’s just a matter of sensitivity. The most important thing about making towels is materials, water, and sensitivity. I can’t imagine putting cost first and trying to make towels in another country where I can’t get those things. Some manufacturers wander like gypsies from one cheap place to another, trying to keep costs down.
I imagine there are a lot of manufacturers who imitate Ikeuchi Towel’s products.
What’s wrong with that? It’s a good product so naturally there are imitators. We don’t make our second favorite concept. Everything we do is original. That’s our policy.
Imabari is known as a towel-producing area. Do you have any dreams of making some kind of contribution to the region?
Ah, well, if Ikeuchi Towel becomes famous, then naturally Imabari towels will also get more well-known. But just because Imabari’s towels get more well-known, it doesn’t mean they’ll all be best-sellers. My dream is that all the manufacturers in Imabari would make world-class high-quality towels. Global top-class products are actually of much higher quality than the people of Imabari imagine.
With that aside, you’ve really made a remarkable shift from the audio industry to towels, haven’t you?。
The product has changed, but as an idea man, in the sense of generating ideas, I can do that work anywhere. That’s what I think, anyway (laughs).
Ikeuchi Towel
762, Engi Ko, Imabari, Ehime
Keishi Ikeuchi
Born in Imabari City, 1949. Presient of Ikeuchi Towel.
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PingMag MAKE is the sister site to PingMag. We use an interview format to put the spotlight on a wide range of people active in rural areas. We document the voices of these unknown heroes and broadcast them to the world. It’s the Japan-based magazine about people and making things, coming out once a week. We’re passing on the passion, ideas, skills, and life stories of people who are building today and exploring tomorrow: craftsmen, engineers, entrepreneurs, and inventors. Stay tuned!
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Love seeing windmills. I’m pro-enviro and also think it’s something ailing economies should start work on. So I dig the towel representation!
Posted by: Big Bert on April 27th, 2008 at 2:32 pm
Organic towels that are woven by the wind is very poetic.
I enjoyed reading this article so much.
Thank you
Emma Howard
Posted by: Emma Howard on May 7th, 2008 at 10:40 am
Ikeuchi Towel manufactures Nandina, my favorite towel. Making an environmentally friendly fabric, from the raw material thru the manufacturing process is definitely worth the price. Great interview and the photos are as they say, “worth a thousand words”.
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