"I've always been interested in fashion. When I got to junior high school and started to become more fashion-conscious, I'd clutch my 1000 yen allowance and head to Kashiwa. After deducting the train fare, 500 yen was my budget. Even in high school, I'd always go to Kashiwa. Kashiwa is the Shibuya of Chiba Prefecture, after all (laughs). I'd go to cram school wearing a colored shirt and my grandfather's jacket. Oh yeah, when I was in elementary school, my favorite thing to wear was a silver jacket (laughs)."

Later, Minami went to a fashion design school, but she wasn't particularly interested in getting a job, so she ended up working at a local shirt-making factory that she found by chance in Townwork. It was a factory that made custom-made shirts for department stores.

"I've always liked shirts, and back in vocational school, I even wondered during a casual conversation with my homeroom teacher, 'Why aren't there any shirt brands?' But at the time, I never imagined I'd be making a living as a shirt craftsman."


He was naturally dexterous, and he found the job of sewing shirts suited to him. During his three years there, he was put in charge of the sewing workshop for the last year.

"I don't have the aptitude for monotonous work. The reason I didn't give up on that job that lasted until late at night was because I was in an environment where I could learn new things one after another."

Having absorbed all the necessary knowledge, Minami opened MINAMI SHIRTS at the age of 24. He made samples and went around selling, and surprisingly, he easily secured subcontracting (outworking) positions with two shirt brands.

"When I was working in the factory, I even sacrificed sleep to study on my own. I was a bad student who had never sewn more than one skirt (laughs), so I taught myself everything from patterns to everything else. I contacted my school teachers, got new textbooks, and asked questions whenever I had doubts. I followed the textbooks exactly, and learned the meaning of each thing one by one. From there, I derived my own theories and formulas, and that's how I got to where I am today."




His competitors were steadily aging. Before he knew it, Minami was handling nearly two-thirds of the production volume for his main client. It seemed like a promising start, but he would soon be crying out in despair over the low labor costs.

"If the prices are low, you have to produce a lot. I was sewing from 9 a.m. until late at night, and my neck became so stiff that I was bedridden for almost a week."

At the age of 29, she bought a house to use as both a home and a studio, and launched her own original brand using the same name as her business. She was then introduced to H TOKYO, a handkerchief specialty shop, by a fabric supplier, and was given the opportunity to hold a trunk show there. She gradually gained more customers, and now her daily bookings of 10 customers fill up in no time. Last October, her long-awaited flagship store opened in Nihonbashi.

"The Japanese custom shirt market is said to be 50 million shirts per year. I figured we could manage around 300 shirts. 300 shirts works out to one shirt per day."

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