A plastics workshop in Osaka.

IRIS USA is the American company of IRIS Ohyama, a Japanese housewares maker, and its story starts in Osaka. Japanese Wikipedia, citing the business magazine Diamond Online, says Morisuke Ohyama founded a plastics-processing workshop, Ohyama Blow Industries, in April 1958 in Fuse, a city now part of Higashiosaka. In July 1964 his son, Kentaro Ohyama, became head of the business.

The workshop became a company on 14 April 1971, when it was incorporated as Ohyama Blow Industries Co., Ltd. — the date IRIS Ohyama still gives as its founding. Its centre of gravity then moved north. In 1972, Japanese Wikipedia says, a plant at Sendai in Miyagi Prefecture — now known as the Ōkawara plant — became the main factory, and the Higashiosaka factory closed. The headquarters followed to Sendai, in December 1989 by Japanese Wikipedia’s account, and in September 1991 the company took the name IRIS Ohyama.

The company is still family-led: in July 2018, Japanese Wikipedia says, Akihiro Ohyama, Kentaro’s son, became president. IRIS Ohyama describes its business as planning, making and selling housewares, and English Wikipedia lists its fields as furniture, housewares, garden accessories, office products and pet supplies. Its name in the Sendai region is also visible off the shelf: it has sponsored the J.League football club Vegalta Sendai since 2004, English Wikipedia says, and it also backs the Tohoku Rakuten Golden Eagles baseball team and the Sendai Philharmonic Orchestra.

The company’s reach outside Japan is not limited to America. English Wikipedia records a European subsidiary, Iris Ohyama Europe, with offices in Tilburg in the Netherlands, and a factory at Lieusaint, south-east of Paris, opened in March 2019 to serve European customers. The United States, though, was where the company first built abroad.

Clear storage, 1996.

IRIS Ohyama went abroad through the United States. English Wikipedia, citing the company’s own pages as they stood in 2010, says its first plant outside Japan opened in Stockton, California, in 1995. IRIS USA’s own anniversary page dates the American business a year later: “IRIS USA was established in 1996,” it says, and it lists a Stockton storage building from that year where the company “introduced CLEAR storage products to the market.” We give both dates, from their sources.

Clear plastic is the brand’s founding idea in America as the company tells it: a box you can see into, so that what is stored does not need a label. Japanese Wikipedia says sales of clear storage cases drove a period of strong growth for the parent company in Japan, though it gives no date. In the US, the company’s current range still leads with storage — boxes, drawers, carts and shelving — and with product lines such as WEATHERPRO boxes and the Stack & Pull stackable storage, alongside pet products such as litter boxes, carriers and playpens.

The American plants came in sequence. The company lists Pleasant Prairie, Wisconsin, from 1996 as a manufacturing and distribution site; Mesquite, Texas, from 2002; Surprise, Arizona, from 2015, which it calls “now the US headquarters of IRIS USA”; and Hazleton, Pennsylvania, from 2020. Japanese Wikipedia dates the completion of the Arizona factory to May 2016, a year after the company’s own date.

Pleasant Prairie, in Wisconsin’s far south-east, was the company’s first large American manufacturing site by its own dates; its headquarters, the company now says, is in Arizona.

Design and documentation.

Storage and organisation brands in general sit at many different points in the home and office trade, from closet-system makers that design and install whole rooms to companies that sell plastic boxes, shelving and desk accessories through retailers and their own websites. A single name can cover anything from a stackable bin to a built-in wardrobe or a range of office furniture.

A storage brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single product than by a system: a colour range, a modular set of parts that fit together, a catalogue or a showroom that shows how the pieces add up to a room. Because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its production or broadened its range, the plain questions behind each name are worth asking: who started it, who owns it now, and where its products are actually made.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its products are made and how its look has changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

IRIS in capitals.

The brand has widened well beyond storage. On its anniversary page IRIS USA lists the release of WOOZOO, its range of air circulators and fans, in 2018; the production of face masks in 2020; and, in 2026, sparkling water described as “water from Fuji.” Its online shop now groups products under storage, pets, appliances — air circulators, air purifiers, heaters, vacuum cleaners, pressure and rice cookers — food, including Japanese rice and microwavable rice, home goods, outdoor coolers and furniture such as desks, clothing racks, shelving and TV stands.

That spread follows the parent company’s model in Japan, where IRIS Ohyama moved from plastic housewares into appliances, furniture and food. The American range keeps the parent’s name on almost everything, with sub-brands such as WOOZOO and WEATHERPRO used for particular lines rather than as separate companies.

Where the products are made is partly documented. The company names its four American plants — in Wisconsin, Texas, Arizona and Pennsylvania — as manufacturing and distribution sites, and describes the Arizona site as both headquarters and manufacturing.

The name is written in capitals, IRIS, on the company’s own website, and the American company styles itself IRIS USA, Inc. The palette here is our interpretation of a storage brand built on transparency: a blue, a near-clear white like an empty box, a pale tinted-lid blue and a dark ink for text.

For a design guide, IRIS USA shows how a Japanese manufacturer carried one simple idea — storage you can see into — into a foreign market and then built a broad household brand on it. Compare Sterilite, the American plastic-storage maker, and Rubbermaid, another long-standing name in plastic housewares. For this guide we use blue, clear white and a tinted blue with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep IRIS USA’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.