Workman Brand Guidelines: An Isesaki Workwear Chain, Workman Plus in 2018 & Workman Colors

A first store in Isesaki in 1980.

Workman began in 1980 in Isesaki, a city in Gunma Prefecture north-west of Tokyo. The company’s own history page says its first store, called “Shokunin no Mise Workman” — a shop for craftspeople — opened there that year as a division of a company named Iseya. The present company, Workman Co., Ltd., was set up in August 1982, its corporate profile says, and in the same year it opened a distribution centre in Takasaki and its first store in Saitama Prefecture.

The chain spread outward from the northern Kantō plain one prefecture at a time, and the company’s timeline records each entry: Tochigi in 1983, Ibaraki in 1984, Chiba in 1985, then Nagano, Niigata, Fukushima and Yamagata in 1986. That year it moved its head office into a new building in Isesaki, and in 1988 it opened a Tokyo headquarters in Taitō ward and entered Tokyo and Kanagawa, reaching 100 stores, the timeline says. In 1991 it moved into its own Tokyo headquarters building and introduced a new corporate identity. The company counts 200 stores in 1992, 300 in 1997, 400 in 2000, 500 in 2002, 600 in 2008, 700 in 2012 and 800 in 2017.

In 1997 Workman registered its shares for over-the-counter trading with the Japan Securities Dealers Association, the market later known as JASDAQ, the company says. Distribution grew alongside the stores: a centre at Komaki in Aichi Prefecture from 1995, one at Ryūō in Shiga from 2013 and a new Isesaki centre in 2017, with a warehouse at Taicang in China opened in 2016, according to the timeline. The online store began in 2013, and the chain reached Hokkaidō and Saga in 2014 and Ōita and Okinawa in 2016. Nagasaki followed in 2018, the year WORKMAN Plus opened.

From the building site to the campsite.

For most of its history Workman sold to tradespeople. Its business-model page says that from the start its customers were mainly “working people,” professionals who need clothing that copes with cold, heat and ventilation better than everyday garments, along with gloves and other goods bought often because they wear out. The same page stresses low prices, clean and tidy sales floors and a cheerful greeting, so that workers will drop in on the way to and from a job. Retail & Leisure International wrote in March 2022 that the company “made its name” with stores for tradespeople in roadside locations.

The change came with WORKMAN Plus, a format for general shoppers that opened in autumn 2018, the Nikkan Kogyo Shimbun reported in February 2019. In an interview with the paper, president Seiji Kuriyama said work clothes sold as cold-weather wear had become popular by word of mouth among anglers, motorcyclists and outdoor fans, that their views had been fed back into product development, and that a television programme had raised awareness sharply. With more general customers coming in, he added, staff were spending longer explaining products. The paper’s reporter wrote that the hits in casual clothing were fading the image of a “work clothes” company.

Today the company lists several store brands. Workman Plus carries professional workwear alongside sports and rainwear, built around three in-house ranges: FieldCore for outdoor wear, Find-Out for sportswear and AEGIS for waterproof rainwear. #Workman Joshi (“Workman girls”), launched in 2020, and Workman Colors, launched in 2023, carry no work clothes; WORKMAN Pro concentrates on professional workwear; and WORKMAN Plus 2 brings the professional, #Workman Joshi and Shoes ranges together under one roof. In 2022 Retail & Leisure International also noted a separate Workman Shoes format in Namba City, Osaka, and urban stores at Sakuragichō near Yokohama and at Tokyo Soramachi.

Japanese discount, apparel and drugstore chains.

Japan’s discount stores, value-apparel chains and drugstores tend to present themselves above all through the shop floor. At Don Quijote, Japanese Wikipedia describes a method called “compressed display,” with goods packed in so tightly that the store becomes half a maze, and price cards written by hand: each store employs its own POP writers, whose lettering the chain calls Donki moji. In these chains the sign on the shelf often does more identity work than the logo above the door.

Own-brand ranges are the second layer. Large groups sell their own lines under names that sit alongside the store name rather than replacing it; Pan Pacific International Holdings, the parent of Don Quijote, lists ranges such as Jonetsu Kakaku, launched in 2009, and EDRP, whose packs are printed in black and white to cut costs. Mascots work in the same way. Don Quijote’s penguin, Donpen, dates from 1998, and in 2021 the company set rules for how the character may appear in signs and illustrations.

Store names are usually plain. Some come from a founding family or an older family shop, others from a borrowed idea: the Don Quijote name comes from Cervantes’s novel, according to a company FAQ quoted by Unseen Japan in 2022. Many chains also run a second name for a format or a market, such as Don Don Donki for stores outside Japan.

Behind the stores sit corporate websites that set out founders, parent groups, timelines and stock-exchange listings, often in both Japanese and English. This guide uses those pages for dated company facts, adds encyclopaedia and press sources where they exist, and describes each chain only by what it sells, how its stores look and who owns it, with no claims about the products themselves.

A franchise chain inside the Beisia Group.

Workman is a franchise business. Its profile describes a chain of specialist stores, run on a franchise system, selling work clothes, work-related goods, outdoor and sportswear and casual clothing, and its business-model page argues that store owners who stay in a district for ten or twenty years come to know local customers well. As of the end of March 2026 the company counted 1,094 stores across all 47 prefectures and 440 employees, and it says it passed 1,000 stores in 2023. Its store finder in November 2026 split the network into 967 work-and-active-casual stores and 138 stores inside shopping centres, eight of them Workman Plus units. Four years earlier, in March 2022, Retail & Leisure International counted 940 stores: 560 Workman, 369 Workman Plus and 11 Workman Joshi.

The company keeps two head offices, one in Tokyo’s Taitō ward and one in Isesaki. It says it has no parent company and no subsidiaries, but belongs to the Beisia Group, formed by the retailer Beisia, the home-centre chain Cainz and other companies, whose main business is retailing built around shopping centres and home centres; Workman describes itself as a core company of that group, in its retail division.

For a design guide, Workman shows how a trade supplier can be reframed for a wider public through new store names rather than a new company: the Plus, Joshi, Colors and Pro banners each sit on the same Workman word. Compare Uniqlo. For this guide we use ink blue, a hi-vis yellow and concrete grey with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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