Yano Shoten, 1972; Daiso Industries, 1977.

Daiso began on the road. In a profile published in September 2001, Tokyo Weekender described how Hirotake Yano, the founder and owner of Daiso Industries Co., Ltd., had started out selling goods from the back of a truck driven by his wife. English Wikipedia names that first business Yano Shoten, or Yano Store, and dates it to 1972, describing a street vending operation that laid its goods out on a mobile wooden stand. Japanese Wikipedia gives the same year for the founding of Yano Shoten as a seller of household goods.

Yano had not set out to be a retailer. Tokyo Weekender said he was born Koro Kurihara and changed his name when he married, taking his wife’s surname because, in his words, “Yano sounds better than Kurihara in a business transaction.” The magazine said that as a young man he moved from Hiroshima to Tokyo with his family. The Chugoku Shimbun, the Hiroshima daily, noted in 2024 that he had been born in Beijing.

Back in Hiroshima, the trading business grew. Japanese Wikipedia says the company was incorporated in 1977 as 株式会社大創産業, Daiso Industries Co., Ltd., and English Wikipedia says the same year saw Yano bring in a single price for everything he sold. Yano later explained the choice in practical terms, according to English Wikipedia: tagging a crowd of different goods with different prices had become too slow for him and his wife, so they priced every item the same. Tokyo Weekender quoted him on how odd that looked at the time. “During the inflation era, I thought many times about quitting,” he said. “It seemed absurd to sell things at a fixed price. But I kept going because I thought there was nothing else I could do.”

The shop format came later still. Japanese Wikipedia dates the start of the “100円SHOPダイソー” business, the 100-yen shop format, to 1987. It says the move to fixed premises followed requests from shop owners and an invitation from a supermarket owner to trade as a tenant, and that in March 1991 the company opened its first directly managed 100-yen shop in the Marugamemachi shopping street in Takamatsu, Kagawa Prefecture. A permanent shop, Japanese Wikipedia adds, let customers come back whenever they liked and bring a complaint if something went wrong, which won the company far more trust than selling from a vehicle. By 2001, Tokyo Weekender could describe Daiso as the company behind the “100 Yen Daiso” Plazas, still run from Hiroshima, Yano’s home city.

Create big, keep it simple.

The company name was chosen before the company was large. Japanese Wikipedia says 大創, Daiso, comes from the phrase 大きく創る, “to create big”, picked on the idea that while the business was still small, its name at least should be big. Tokyo Weekender, writing in 2001, glossed the word for its English-speaking readers as “big warehouse”. In the katakana used on Japanese shopfronts, English Wikipedia notes, the brand is written ダイソー.

For years the shops carried a definite article. Japanese Wikipedia says the stores were long called ザ・ダイソー, “The Daiso”, and the Japan Times, carrying a Kyodo report from Bahrain in June 2007, referred to the Bahrain branch as “The Daiso”. According to Japanese Wikipedia, the company renewed its CI and logo mark on 5 March 2019. From that month the shops were renamed step by step as plain ダイソー, and the lettering on signs moved to the Latin capitals DAISO. Japanese Wikipedia adds that many shops run by sales agents rather than by the company itself kept the older “The Daiso” name, and that signs inside and outside some shops were not updated to the newer logo.

The article also turned up inside the shops. English Wikipedia says Daiso sorted its own-brand goods using ザ, the Japanese rendering of the English “the”, followed by a category word: za hanabi for fireworks, za purasuchikku for plastic buckets and trays. Japanese Wikipedia says the company’s private-brand items are made by outside manufacturers and carry only Daiso’s own logo or brand, its own product number and the Daiso Industries company name. From 2013, it adds, a second private label, Daiso Select, covered mainly food made with partner manufacturers and marked with its own logo.

Price labels became part of the look as the range widened. English Wikipedia says Daiso began selling items at multiples of 100 yen in 2004. The everyday 100-yen goods, Japanese Wikipedia says, carry no price tag at all, while dearer items show the price on the pack or on a label. Those labels have changed colour over the years: Japanese Wikipedia describes red labels with yellow or white lettering until about February 2016, then white labels with red lettering, and, as of January 2025, white labels with pink lettering.

A name, a mark and a single price.

Retail and telecom names across Japan, Australia and Africa tend to come from a small set of sources. Some carry a founder’s surname, sometimes in the plural when a family of brothers or partners started the business together. Others are coined words built from Latin or English roots, chosen to sound settled and durable rather than to describe a product. A third group joins two everyday words into one, so that a service name reads as a single compound rather than a description. Acronyms also recur, especially where a company began as a network or a division with a long formal title.

For a design reader the more useful pattern is how these identities travel. A shop name has to work on a fascia board seen from across a car park, on a till receipt, on a carrier bag and on an app icon. A telecom mark has to sit on a SIM card no bigger than a thumbnail, on a scratch-off airtime voucher, on a kiosk umbrella and on a phone screen. Many of these companies settle on a single house colour and apply it everywhere, so that the colour does the work of recognition even where the wordmark is too small to read.

Hiroshima to the Gulf, one shelf at a time.

The name travelled early. Japanese Wikipedia dates the first Daiso shop outside Japan to Taiwan in 2001. The Japan Times, publishing a Kyodo report by Miya Tanaka on 9 June 2007, said the first Daiso shop in the Middle East opened in Dubai in 2004 under a franchise agreement with a local joint-venture company, and that a Bahrain shop followed in 2005. The report quoted staff from Daiso’s headquarters in Hiroshima Prefecture and its overseas store leader, who said goods were imported from Japan and that the shops leaned on Japanese-style displays and service, with clerks taught to walk customers all the way to the item they wanted. Greeting shoppers with “Irasshaimase”, he said, had annoyed some of them.

Partners carry the name in some places. English Wikipedia says the Hong Kong branch is operated by AEON. Japanese Wikipedia says that from 2020 some 7-Eleven convenience stores, the chain held by Seven & i, began stocking Daiso goods.

In the 2020s Daiso added shop names of its own. Japanese Wikipedia says Standard Products opened its first store on 26 March 2021 on the ground floor of Shibuya Mark City in Tokyo, and English Wikipedia describes it as a separate format built around minimalist household goods. A second banner, THREEPPY, is aimed at young women, Japanese Wikipedia says, and has its own website and Instagram account. Some shops combine DAISO, Standard Products and THREEPPY under one roof, with a single checkout for all three.

The founder handed over in 2018. Japanese Wikipedia lists Hirotake Yano as president from 1977 to 2018 and his son Seiji Yano as president from March 2018. The Chugoku Shimbun reported on 19 February 2024 that Hirotake Yano had died on 12 February in Higashihiroshima, where Daiso Industries has its headquarters, and that the company had announced his death that day. In the 2001 Tokyo Weekender profile he had described his approach in one line: “I wait for my destiny to lead wherever I go.”

For a design guide, Daiso shows how a name chosen to sound bigger than a small company, and a single price chosen to save time, can become a retail identity, later tidied from “The Daiso” into four Latin capitals. Compare AEON, the retail group that runs Daiso in Hong Kong, and Seven & i, the Japanese retail holding company. For this guide we use pink, blossom and plum with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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