Building From Scratch: What It Really Takes to Start a Fashion Brand in Japan

A conversation with Takayuki, co-founder of Divka, a Tokyo-based womenswear label fifteen years in the making

Starting a fashion brand anywhere is hard. Starting one in Japan, with its high manufacturing standards, relationship-driven supply chains, opaque retail structures, and a domestic market that rewards quiet consistency over noise, is something else entirely. Divka has been doing it for fifteen years. Founded by a Central Saint Martins graduate, the brand built itself almost entirely through wholesale before opening its own store in Tokyo's Shinagawa district three years ago.  This conversation goes into the practical reality of how they did it: where the money came from, how collections get made, what the materials sourcing process actually looks like, and what it means to be a designer in Japan who also has to do the accounting.

Esteban: You studied at Central Saint Martins and then came back to Japan to work for Yoji Yamamoto. At what point did you decide to go out on your own, and how did the brand actually get started?

Takayuki: I came back to Japan after graduating, then worked for Yoshi. Only two years. Then we decided, me and my partner, who is a pattern maker, that we would start our own brand. We didn't have money. We didn't have any funds.

Esteban: That funding gap is something a lot of independent designers in Japan run into. It's a real structural problem, right? In France or the UK you have incubator programs, institutional grants, a whole support system. Japan doesn't really have that equivalent infrastructure for emerging designers.

Takayuki: Exactly. The main option here, if you don't have money behind you, is competitions. That's what we did. We got the Mango Fashion Award, and we got some money to create the first collection because of that. And then slowly, collection after collection, we started with wholesale, here in Tokyo.

Esteban: So a competition prize was the seed funding. How did you go from that first collection to actually building a business?

Takayuki: The first one was sold through a buyer. That's why it's hard at the beginning, because we didn't have money. You start, you make a little bit of money, then you use it to make the next one. At the beginning, maybe you lose a little bit. And then slowly, more money, more collections, more accounts.

Esteban: How long did you run primarily on wholesale?

Takayuki: Fifteen years. Not purely, but ninety percent. And it was sixty percent Japan, forty percent international.

Esteban: And internationally, you were showing in multiple cities?

Takayuki: We do Tokyo, New York, Paris, and Shanghai. And then Kobe. We do several places.

Esteban: That circuit is a serious financial commitment, especially doing it from Tokyo. Paris alone, just booth fees, travel, accommodation, samples, can run a brand tens of thousands of dollars per season. For a label that's still building, that's a real gamble every time.

Takayuki: Every time, yes. But you need those international accounts. Especially in the early years, before you have enough direct customers to rely on. The wholesale relationships are what keep you alive while you're still building everything else.

Esteban: After fifteen years of running almost entirely on wholesale, you opened a physical store in Shinagawa about three years ago. That's a significant shift. What drove the decision?

Takayuki: One reason is that we were renting a showroom every season, like one month at a time, always renting a gallery, spending a lot of money. So we thought: maybe it's better to rent a shop space that we can also use as a showroom. It's kind of two-in-one.

Esteban: The space is off the main commercial drag. Was that a deliberate choice, or a pragmatic one?

Takayuki: It's far from the center. But it's okay, because we have a tree just there. He laughs. It's clearly not a line he's given before, just an honest accounting of what the space offers.

Honestly, people don't walk in off the street. But the customers who come here already know the brand. It's just an excuse for them to come and try things on, to touch the fabrics. That's the main thing.

Esteban: Did it cost a lot to fit out?

Takayuki: We didn't spend any money on the design. We did everything ourselves, me and our staff. We walked down the street, we found things. We found this staircase at an antique shop. We really spent nothing.

Esteban: That actually tracks with something you see consistently in Japanese independent fashion. There's this strong aesthetic philosophy that gets applied even on almost zero budget. The same attention that goes into the clothes goes into the space. The constraint becomes part of the character rather than a limitation.

Takayuki: Yes, that's exactly it. You work with what you have, and you find a way to make it say something. The space has to feel like the brand. It can't be separate from it.

Esteban: Walk me through how a collection actually starts. Is it a concept first, or something else?

Takayuki: We start from the fabric. We try to find something interesting, to create the fabric first. Then I do the draping from there. Then at the end, I put them together. It's like a puzzle, putting the right form with the right material.

Esteban: So you're not sketching first? No mood boards and then hunting for the material to match?

Takayuki: Many designers do it like drawing, yes, that's one way. Choose a concept, then choose the fabric. We are really different. It's a kind of personal preference, but also some of the Japanese designers, like Comme des Garçons, or Yohji Yamamoto, do it in a similar way.

Esteban: It makes sense that it's more common here specifically. Japan is one of the very few places where an independent designer can realistically access world-class woven fabrics, specialist dye processes, novel finishing techniques, all within a relatively small geographic radius. The mills in Nishijin, the weaving towns in Gifu and Aichi. When that quality of material is right in front of you, it becomes the natural starting point. Going to look at fabric is genuinely going to look for ideas.

Takayuki: Completely. The material tells you something. You pick up a fabric and it already has a direction. It suggests a shape, a structure. If you start from a drawing, you spend so much time trying to find the fabric that matches your vision. We prefer to let the fabric lead.

Esteban: How do you move from the draped form to the full collection? What's the process of editing?

Takayuki: It's like a collage, in a way. We also have a concept every season, a direction. And then maybe 80% of the collection is new experiments, and 20%  is what we know already works. Things we've done before, but we know customers respond to.

Esteban: Do you keep anything consistent across every collection? Are there pieces that always come back?

Takayuki: Yes. There are some things. We try to keep them, not because we're lazy, but because it's more a way to keep working. It's like a statement of where we want to take the brand. A reminder.

Esteban: What would you say are the core design pillars, the things that define a Divka piece?

Takayuki: The fabric and the shapes. Both equally. We make a lot of the fabric ourselves. We go to several places to look, we find old fabric, we find new fabric. Sometimes, for example, we find a very old fabric in Kyoto, and then we do a kind of reproduction to make it new.

Esteban: Tell me about the sourcing process in Japan specifically. How do you find the materials you use?

Takayuki: It depends on the fabric. Some of them, we choose the thread, then we choose the pattern, then we make the fabric from the thread. So it's from the very beginning. Others we find already made, and we do something to them. We have one print, for example, it's been our main print for almost twenty years. It's printed in Kyoto. It's from a photograph, turned into a pattern. We do different technical variations every season, but that base print continues.

Esteban: Kyoto specifically, what's available there that you can't find elsewhere?

Takayuki: In Kyoto there are very old techniques, for fabric, for dyeing. We found some very old fabric there and did a reproduction of it. Made it new. That's typical for us, taking something historical and finding a way to use it now.

Esteban: Kyoto is really in a category of its own for that. The Nishijin weaving district has been producing silk textiles for over a thousand years. The dyeing traditions, Kyo-Yuzen in particular, hand-drawn resist dyeing, they're nationally designated cultural assets. Which also means the people doing it are not just suppliers in the conventional sense. They're artisans, historians in a way. And they're selective about who they work with.

Takayuki: Very selective. You can't just call and place an order. You have to be introduced. You have to meet, show them what you're doing, explain your intentions. It takes a long time to build those relationships. But once you have them, they're very stable. They become real partnerships.

Esteban: Is Japan's production infrastructure easier or harder to navigate than what you'd find in London or New York?

Takayuki: It's different. In Japan, you can sustain production in a way that's very difficult in other countries. The quality, the attention at every stage, is just there. It's not something you have to fight for. But the relationships take time. You don't just call someone. You have to be introduced, to meet, to show them your work. It's slow. But once you have those relationships, they're very stable.

Esteban: You do the draping yourself. How much of your time is actually spent on design and making, versus everything else?

Takayuki: Now? Maybe twenty percent design. Eighty percent is everything else, financial things, production, admin. I even did the accounting myself for a long time. Japanese accounting is very different from other countries. Much more time-consuming.

Esteban: That's a striking ratio. Most people assume designers spend most of their time designing.

Takayuki: That's the reality. I don't know, this is what happens. I used to also manage all of the production. This season I have a little more time to concentrate on the design. I prefer to concentrate on the design. But the business needs everything.

Esteban: What does Japanese manufacturing culture actually look like in practice for Divka? What does it mean day to day?

Takayuki: The people we work with, the pattern maker, the factories, they care deeply about what they're doing. If there's a problem, they tell you. They don't just make it wrong and send it. There's a standard that's just expected. You don't have to enforce it. That's the main difference.

Esteban: That connects to something deeper in how making things is understood here. The monozukuri idea, the art of making things, though the concept runs much deeper than craft. It shapes everyone in the supply chain. A pattern maker in Tokyo sees themselves as a creative collaborator, not just a technician. Factories specialize very narrowly, sometimes one type of finishing, one family of weaves, and they've been doing that one thing for generations. For a small brand, the effect is that quality control stops being a management problem and becomes a shared value.

Takayuki: That's exactly the right way to describe it. When everyone in the process cares about the result, you don't have to spend your energy policing it. You can spend that energy on the work itself. That's a very particular thing about being here, and I think it's something you can feel in the clothes, even if you don't know where it comes from.Managing things also takes time.