Selling everyday items to bargain hunters has made the founder of Japan's biggest discount store a billionaire.
Hirotake Yano, founder and president of closely held Daiso Sangyo Corp., the self-described "Japanese shopping wonderland," was one of the country's first vendors to adopt a single-price model and used that strategy to build a net worth that the Bloomberg Billionaires Index values at $1.9 billion.
"His timing was perfect," said Pascal Martin, a partner at OC&C Strategy Consultants. "Opening the first ¥100 store in 1991, a couple of years after the burst of the Japanese economic bubble, which was the beginning of a profound shift in Japanese consumer culture."