Keiswi’s Encounter with Failure
The Keiswi company used to be in Azabu, but after the economic bubble burst, it went out of business. That time was so painful. I figured I had thirty years left of my life but I just couldn’t be bothered anymore. That was when I decided that if I could use those thirty years to make something I personally liked, then I wouldn’t mind dying. That is how I wound up doing Aero Concept.”
Keiswi once went out of business. That’s a shock. It’s strange to think that this neighborhood workshop with such high levels of expertise has experienced bankruptcy. But Keiswi has in fact done just that. There was one big reason for it; Keiswi had been taking on a lot of work from a single large company.
At that time, we got eighty, ninety percent of our work from there. We didn’t plan it that way, it was just a matter of being told, “We’ve got a large workload. Come help us and don’t take on work from anywhere else.” We naturally wound up working mainly for that one company. In a sense we became an exclusive subcontractor. It’s more efficient than taking on work from a lot of different companies, if it lasts. Then one day, that company got into a joint management agreement with a Chinese company and just as the work was decreasing and our income along with it, it all ended. We went bankrupt, but that company, the products they mass-produced with their joint management venture wound up sending out defective products worldwide, and the cost of the recalls ruined their management. This is a company traded in the first section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange. Copal. Now it’s called Copal Electronics.”
“It was a good company. The founder used the technological power in the neighborhood workshops of Itabashi and grew it into a publicly traded company. The reason why good work came of good talks with the people in the planning department was because we were both from the same good tradesman’s stock. But after they went public, a guy from the bank replaced the founder as the company president, and before you knew it they started getting into all kinds of strange things. I can understand reducing activities in non-profitable sectors, but they laid off a huge swath of people in the planning department: the kind of people who should be at the heart of a manufacturing company. Plus they started getting into joint management in China and cost competition. Suddenly the work decreased and by the time we realized, “This is a disaster” it was too late…”
Mr. Sugano was forced into a terrible situation due to his company’s bankruptcy, experiencing a host of trials on a daily basis. The company that his father and his grandfather before him had carefully raised was blown away in a single moment. His father became mentally unstable, his employees and family members were thrown into a dire state of anxiety, and debt collectors were at the door nearly every day. Loan foreclosures meant the factory, the house, any and all large posessions worth money were all turned over to the banks and debt collectors. Keiichi Sugano himself fell into a mentally ill state due to the pressure. Eventually he began to feel that the only option left to him was suicide.
However the thing that kept him from suicide was a certain joy amidst the suffering. A good idea came to him through it all. It could be that once a man has seriously faced death, for some strange reason things manage to fall into place.
Aero Concept Becomes the Foundation
From the depths of his heart, he began to feel a longing to “make something I like.” The bankruptcy itself became the event to kick off the story of Aero Concept.
Although Keiswi once went out of business, there was a reason why it came back to life. Said simply, it’s because they have the skills as a small-scale factory to make things no one else knows how to make. Precision sheet metal processing techniques are sheet metal processing techniques taken to the precision level, so if it’s sheet metal processing, it’s certainly not difficult to understand what kind of shape you’ll wind up with. If you read this book, follow these instructions, you can understand most things. In other words, it’s a very transparent skill.
However, if you try to actually physically create something with a high degree of precision out of sheet metal, you’ll understand how difficult it truly is. Outsourcers don’t realize this, and wind up taking their manufacturing development from one cheap place to another.
They try to shave off the cost, without a thought to whether it’s cheap or poor quality. Outsourcers who succeed in reducing costs achieve high ratings within their company, and that skill can translate into a higher salary. However, what happens in the field is beyond the imaginings of that person. They don’t spare a thought for the condition of the spirit of the people in the field. In the end the power of imagination in relation to traditional manufacturing is reduced to a thin shadow.
As a result, the finished product is nothing but a mountain of defective goods. This is not a rare thing. When this happens, they next begin to desperately seek out workshops with the right technology.
When Keiswi went bankrupt, that group of craftsmen had everything taken from them: their homes, their factory, every asset possible was reposessed. However there were two things that even the law couldn’t touch. That was their skills and their knowledge.
An acquaintance of Mr. Sugano’s once said, “Your hands and your brain are the two things no one can take away.” It could be said that what Mr. Sugano was experiencing with Keiswi was this very thing. Even though the times dictated that the flow of cash had to temporarily stop, the technical skill and knowledge that Keiswi had couldn’t be taken away by anyone, and that was what saved the company.
After the company folded, representatives from a number of companies began to realize what Keiswi had to offer after going around to several other places.
When they came, Mr. Sugano said to them,
It’s over. We’ve got no factory. The company is bankrupt.”
But these companies that came to call said they wanted to revive the factory line and have them build things for them. One company even went so far as to offer to introduce a bank. All this to a ruined company.
Keiswi is here today because of the support of those companies. However, look deeper and it’s clear that at the core, what kept Keiswi alive by the skin of its teeth, was their inimitable, indomitable skills and knowledge that lay inside the craftsmen themselves.
We’d always been told, do it fast and do it cheap. But when it came down to the crunch and we realised that we had a special value, I have to admit I was pretty happy.”
