Shima Seiki Brand Guidelines: The Wakayama Glove-Machine Maker Behind WHOLEGARMENT

A repair shop and a work glove.

Shima Seiki starts with work gloves. Masahiro Shima was born in Wakayama in 1937, and the company says he came to glove knitting machines as a junior high school student at a repair shop next door. By 16 he had invented a sewing machine that made glove production less labour-intensive, Nippon.com and Bloomberg report.

The founding date depends on which company you count. Shima Seiki’s profile says it was established on 4 February 1962. Its history page says Masahiro Shima founded a predecessor, Sanshin Seiki, also in 1962, and that the firm split when a partner preferred semi-automatic devices to his fully automatic machine. Japanese Wikipedia, citing the company’s 2012 securities report, dates Sanshin Seiki to July 1961, with the move and the new name Shima Seiki in February 1962 and the present name, Shima Seiki Mfg., the next month.

The machine that saved the company came at the end of 1964. Shima Seiki says the early seamless prototype had left it deep in debt and close to bankruptcy before Masahiro Shima completed a fully automatic glove knitting machine with a square fingertip; Japanese Wikipedia, citing the Yomiuri Shimbun, gives the date as 31 December 1964. The company calls it the world’s first. The Japan Society of Mechanical Engineers lists it as Mechanical Engineering Heritage No. 90, and says it joined the steps of fingertips, fingers, palm and wrist in one machine. A glove took 2 minutes 15 seconds, and one operator could handle up to 30 machines. Shipments passed 15,000 through the 1970s, according to a 2011 Hitotsubashi University study cited by Japanese Wikipedia.

Flat knitting, then computers.

Gloves paid for the next step. In 1967, the company says, it built the FAC, a fully automatic collar knitting machine; in 1968 it moved its head office and factory to Sakata in Wakayama and became a full flat-knitting machine maker. It first showed at the international ITMA exhibition in 1971. A jacquard glove machine won a gold medal at a Leipzig textile machinery fair in 1975, the Hitotsubashi study records.

Computers came next. In 1978 Shima Seiki developed the SNC, a computerized flat knitting machine sold on the phrase “doubled performance at half price.” In 1979 Masahiro Shima bought a NASA graphics board, Nippon.com reports, and in 1981 that work became the SDS-1000 Shimatronic Design System, built for knit programming. The company says television stations took an interest too. The line led to SDS-ONE in 2000 and SDS-ONE APEX, whose first version arrived in 2007. From 1993, Japanese Wikipedia says, its total design system let firms exchange digital samples in place of physical ones.

The defining product arrived in 1995. The WHOLEGARMENT machine, the SWG, debuted at ITMA in Milan, Nippon.com reports, and knits a garment in one piece with no sewing; the company says it made a single sweater from yarn in 30 minutes, and calls it the world’s first. Bloomberg says the company pioneered the technology. The SlideNeedle, a knitting needle developed for WHOLEGARMENT, followed in 1997. In 2008, the company says, WHOLEGARMENT clothing went into space on the space shuttle, and it opened its Knit Museum the same year. Nippon.com reported in 2023 that about 13,000 WHOLEGARMENT machines were made from 1998 to 2022, nearly 80 percent of them exported, with Italy, Hong Kong and Vietnam among the top importers. The same report says cut-and-sew leaves scraps, while a garment made on the machine involves “zero loss.”

Design and documentation.

Textile machinery is sold through scale. A spinning frame can run the length of a mill hall, so makers often photograph it from one end, with spindles and yarn packages receding in a long line. Looms are shown mid-beat, with the rapier or the reed caught in motion. The pictures are less about a single object than about a repeated one, thousands of identical parts working in rows.

The opposite view is the close-up. Catalogues and websites in this trade move in tightly on needles, yarn guides, rings and travellers, because the product’s precision is hard to see from across a hall. Cones of coloured yarn supply the colour that grey and white machine casings lack, and flat-knitted sample panels show what a machine’s pattern work can do. 3D-knitted shoes and technical fabrics do the same for newer markets.

Software has joined the picture. Control touchscreens, status lights and mill-monitoring dashboards now appear next to the steel, as makers present automation and digital services alongside the machine. Saurer, for one, promotes LED operator guidance on its Autocoro 11 rotor machine.

The trade meets at its fairs, and these set much of the calendar for launches and imagery. ITMA, ITMA Asia, Techtextil and ShanghaiTex are the names that recur in these companies’ news pages, and a stand there works much as a catalogue does, with working machines, sample walls and yarn displays. Few makers in this guide publish a brand rulebook. Their identities show up instead in a company name carried over many decades, in product family names, and in how they picture the machine.

“Ever Onward.”

Shima Seiki remains a listed company based in Wakayama. It joined the Osaka exchange in 1990 and the first section in Tokyo in 1996, Japanese Wikipedia says, and its stock now trades on Tokyo’s Prime market. Mitsuhiro Shima succeeded his father as president in 2017, when Masahiro Shima became chairman, Bloomberg reported. The company’s profile, updated in April 2026, lists 1,654 people across the group and describes its business as computerized flat knitting machines, design systems, automatic fabric cutting machines, and glove and sock knitting machines.

Manufacturing is tied to Japan in the company’s own telling. It says it chose to focus on domestic production when it developed WHOLEGARMENT, and that it finished an assembly factory dedicated to those machines in 2012. Knitting Industry described two N.SSR models in June 2026 as offering “Japanese-built reliability.” Its overseas branches and subsidiaries run across Asia, Europe, the United States and Morocco.

Fashion is the proof it reaches for. Bloomberg named Prada, Giorgio Armani and Uniqlo among brands using its machines in 2017, and an Asahi Shimbun article of 2006 cited by Japanese Wikipedia named Hermès and Gucci. In October 2016 it signed a joint venture agreement with Uniqlo’s owner, Fast Retailing, to make knit products. The current range includes the MACH2 XS153 and SWG-XR, the latter “shaped like a piano,” Nippon.com says, 3 metres across and 1.4 tons. Newer ventures include Blueknit, a platform for buying back used garments; yarnbank, a digital yarn sourcing site; and APEXFiz, a design system sold by subscription.

Its language comes straight from the founder. The motto is “Ever Onward,” its mantra “Love,” “Creativity” and “Passion,” and the company presents Masahiro Shima as the “Thomas Edison” of Kishu, or Wakayama. WHOLEGARMENT and SlideNeedle are set in the company’s own capitals and compound forms. Its English site is shimaseiki.com and its Japanese site shimaseiki.co.jp.

For a design guide, Shima Seiki shows how a machine maker can turn a technical process into a branded word. Compare Stoll, the German flat-knitting name discontinued in 2025, and Groz-Beckert, the German needle maker. For this guide we use a deep indigo and a yarn orange with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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