Maezawa soon noticed that his staff always came to work wearing the coolest garb.
Yusaku Maezawa, a former rock musician, has translated that intensely tactile experience into a very lucrative Web outing.
Maezawa started in the mid-1990s selling music CDs and band T-shirts by mail order from his kitchen table.
In 1998 Maezawa hired ten of his friends as his first employees, and in 2000 the business went online.
Maezawa goes with his gut in hiring, picking most of his 300 people for their energy, desire and up-to-the-minute looks and attitude.
Maezawa recalls designing the second-generation Pathfinder sport utility vehicle and having the project shelved four times before it went into production in 1995.
But along the way Maezawa took note of a business that hadn't arrived yet in Japan: music merchandising at festivals and outside of big-venue concerts.
Maezawa keeps up a we-are-family culture with a novel office design sporting huge pop art portraits of rockers such as Kurt Cobain and Radiohead's Thom Yorke.
From the big players like Samsung and the prime minister of Thailand to the rising stars like our cover subject, Jack Ma (an early discovery of FORBES'), Japan's 35-year-old billionaire Yusaku Maezawa and Indian coffee magnate V.
"There was no long-term strategy, " says former Nissan designer Yoshio Maezawa, who remembers traveling through the U.S. in the 1980s and being unable to explain to American staff what kinds of cars Tokyo planned to build--because management couldn't decide.
We first ran into Yusaku Maezawa about a month ago, when we learned that his company, Start Today, and its fashion site, Zozotown, had made him one of the richest people in Japan at the age of 35, so we started to learn more about this dynamic ex-punk rocker turned entrepreneur.
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