Alpine Loop: the fruit of collaboration between Fukui craftsmanship and Apple
A family-run, “narrow-woven” company in Echizen City, Fukui Prefecture, made that orange band. What is the advanced production technology that sparked Tim Cook’s curiosity?
On the second floor of a factory. The doors of a large elevator slowly opened. A team of seven or eight Apple employees emerged from inside. Standing in the middle of them is CEO Tim Cook. Next to him stood Seiji Inoue of Inoue Ribbon Industry, who extended his hand out of the elevator and said, “Come in.” The eyes of Mr. Cook and the others twinkled and their faces began to fill with smiles and curiosity. This is a factory dedicated to Apple Inc. at Inoue Ribbon Industry, a 75-year-old manufacturer of “narrow woven fabrics” located in Echizen City, Fukui Prefecture. The factory was just completed in the spring of 2022. The 50-meter-wide space is lined with a dozen or so of 15-meter-long weaving machines, with hundreds of orange threads stretched from a huge drum and being sucked into a narrow weaving machine at the other end. At the end of the process, about six long, woven orange ribbon-like pieces hang overhead. These ribbons, upon closer inspection, appear to be two layers of machine-made fabric sewn together to form a single piece with one side puffed out like an arch in bridges, the “Alpine Loop” band that symbolizes the Apple Watch Ultra, which was just announced in the fall of 2022. The band is made of lightweight yet sturdy polyester fiber, the band is designed for outdoor activities by threading a metal hook through a hole in the fabric that expands in arch pattern, which prevents it from being pulled out in any direction. The fact that this intricate and delicate band is woven is astonishing.
As the Apple team exited the elevator, the weaving loom, which had been crisscrossing and threading the weft nearly 700 times per minute, stopped one by one.
“It is amazing,” said Tim Cook, followed by Inoue’s voice as he explained the process. How much can you produce per minute?”, “How long did it take you to arrive at this method?” Mr. Cook asked questions one after another, and Mr. Inoue answered each one in detail. Each time, Mr. Cook smiled faintly and replied in a calm voice with admiration. Inoue Ribbon Industry has made unique modifications to its machines to produce these bands. Even more difficult than the modifications, however, is a process called”threading,” which must be performed each time a new machine is installed. The “Alpine Loop” uses 520 warp threads, which is far more than the number of threads used in ordinary fabrics, and this first process alone takes about six full days even for experienced employees.
In addition to the “Alpine Loop,” the factory also produces the “Trail Loop,” a four-layer nylon band that is an evolution of the existing “Sport Loop” with improved comfort, also woven on Inoue Ribbon Industry’s own modified loom. What is interesting is that this product comes out of the machine in a form that is far from the final product. The final product is a flat band, but immediately after weaving, it is twisted. This band will go through a heat treatment process to become a flat cloth like the final product. The band is woven after calculating how much it will be deformed by the heat treatment.
After inspecting the heat treatment process on the first floor of the factory, I asked Tim Cook about his impressions of the company.
“I love the the ability to scale something that is so intricate, something that is so detailed. And you know they’re making a lot of these as you can, tell but they’re doing it in such a high quality way. And the yields are very high.”
Hearing Mr. Cook’s words reminded me of the word “Industrial Craftmanship” coined by a prominent Japanese product designer, Naoto Fukasawa. He used this word to describe Apple’s manufacturing. So I asked Mr. Cook how he sees it. and he agreed that manufacturing at Inoue Ribbon Industry has that same quality.
“it has the quality of handmade. And you see how much tinkering there is here. There’s a lot of human involvement in the process at scale. So you have the best of both. You have the scale but you also have the quality.”
Cook also analyzes the secret to Inoue Ribbon Industry’s ability to achieve both of these goals.
“They were very flexible, and willing to try new processes, new ways of doing things. This was the first time that this particular process was ever used. And so they have to be very nimble but that nimbleness has to be underpinned by great expertise. And they have that great expertise here. And I can’t stress enough the attention to detail and quality. These are the things that make the products look so great right out of the box.”
The building was completed in the spring of 2022 around the same time that the final proposal for the “Albine Loop” production process was made, and in the short six months since then, the company has established a method for mass-producing this complex band. On the other hand, Mr. Inoue attribute the accomplishment of high-quality production system to Apple.
By choice, Apple prefers to use the term “supplier” over alternatives such as “subcontractor” because they believe in equal business partnership.
Apple is famous for providing necessary education and financial support to decarbonize all their suppliers by 2030.
But many of their suppliers know, it is not just the decarbonization. Apple often give detailed advice on how to improve other aspects of their operations to its suppliers.
‘(The relation with the suppliers) has to be very much a partnership. And it has to be seamless in terms of people working together. And so ideally you would come out on the manufacturing floor and you couldn’t tell who worked for whom. Everybody’s just working for the same call and the same purpose. I think you see that here. They have this band that is very difficult to produce, as you can see the complexity of it but working together closely and collaborating. They were able to do that at a very, very high quality way” says Cook.
Jay Elliot, who worked at Apple in its early days and was called Steve Jobs’ business mentor, described this kind of relationship between Apple and its suppliers as more like “insourcing” than “outsourcing”. And I asked Mr. Cook for his opinion.
He replied. “It’s a way to view it. It’s a it’s a way to explain it. We definitely bring the partner inside. Instead of having a arm’s length relationship. We don’t believe in the arm’s length relationship. We believe in collaboration that’s the only way to achieve great innovation.”
“What sets Apple apart [from other companies] is that they let us work as a team. If we have a problem, we spend time together to come up with a solution.” Seiji Inoue, managing director of Inoue Ribbon Industry, spoke from the opposite side of Cook’s statement.
Although Inoue Ribbon Industry has many other clients, mainly domestic companies, it often just makes the products it is instructed to make and delivers them in a subcontracted manner. In contrast, Apple often asks the company for ideas and suggestions.
In addition to bands for the Apple Watch, the company also produces handles made from woven paper for “Mac Pro” product packaging. Normally, nylon or other materials would be mixed into paper to give sturdiness, but Apple places importance on recyclability, so they need to make them from 100% paper. The team worked together with the Apple staff to find a way to meet these requirements, and when we introduced a manufacturer that could produce paper, they said, “Great,” and accompanied us to the manufacturer.
The relationship between the two companies began around 2012, shortly before the Apple Watch was shipped in 2015. The first product they worked on was a band for the Apple Watch called “Woven Nylon.” It took four years to develop. At first, Mr. Inoue was fed up with the high quality requirements. Compared to other industries, the textile industry is not very strict about size control.
Apple’s standard, however, is very strict. More than double the textile industry’s standard. Just making a straight tape is difficult with that precision.
You could produce a few samples that meet Apple’s strict requirement, but it would be hard to mass-produce at the level.
“I had never been asked to meet such strict requirements, and at first it was hard to get my head around the notion that this much would be enough. Apple staff was very patient with us.” says Inoue.
It was even more difficult to change the mindset of the frontline than that of the management team.
However, at some point the front-line workers became accustomed to Apple’s standards, and are now saying, “We have to do this much, don’t we?” and aiming for higher quality manufacturing. He added, “Apple taught me from scratch about quantification and other things. They taught me how to manage, how to make a table like this, how to do standard deviation like this, how to take data like this, and so on. You can’t learn so much even if you paid someone. But Apple shared all those knowledges sayin we are on the same team.”
Mr. Nobunari Sawanobori, the president of Teikoku Ink, which supplies white ink for the iPhone, once said, “The loss of learning through working with Apple is a bigger loss than the loss of orders from Apple.”
It seems that Inoue Ribbon Industry also gained something more valuable than money from its relationship with Apple.
After working for so long with Apple, recently Inoue Ribbon Industry began to make proposal or provide supplement data when they work with other clients, Most of those clients are surprised and delighted.
After the “Woven Nylon” loop, Inoue Ribbon Industry has also offered bands with motifs of flags of various countries called “International Collection” and “Sport Band” with added elasticity. This year, for the first time, the company took on the challenge of developing two bands simultaneously: the “Alpine Loop” and the “Trail Loop,” as mentioned at the beginning of this report.
“This is the first time we have launched two Apple products at the same time. The Trail Loop is a product born from the “Sport Loop”, so to some extent we can use our past know-how, but even so, it is difficult to maintain quality and mass-produce it.
On the other hand, Alpine Loop is completely new product. It is not that we have not made products with similar structures before, but usually two layers are woven separately and then sewn together later. However, this method eliminates the reproducibility of quality, so we had to make them as one piece from the beginning, and that was the biggest challenge,” says Inoue.
Inoue Ribbon Industry will celebrate its 75th anniversary next year. The company was founded in 1948, after the end of World War II, as a manufacturer of “hosohaba” (narrow fabrics) ranging in width from 2 mm to 100 mm, woven from yarn purchased in Kyoto and sold in Kyoto. The current president is the third generation, a grandson of the founder. In addition to standard ribbons, the company also manufactures line tape for underwear and sportswear.
The company motto is “Research and development” and they have been taking various challenges even before working with Apple. One famous example is the “Ribbon Project,” in which they collaborated with creators in different fields to pursue the possibilities of ribbons. Mr. Inoue believes that Apple like Inoue Ribbon Industry because of their attitude to keep challenging.
Tim Cook chose Inoue Ribbon Industry as the last company to visit during his five-days visit to Japan. He expressed his satisfaction with Inoue Ribbon Industry, a family-owned factory with 150 employees that continues to make the world’s most sought-after products, by referring it as “a great success story” among Apple’s suppliers. After Inoue Ribbon, Cook visited Eiheiji, “The Temple of Eternal Peace” in the same Fukui prefecture. It is one of the two head temples of Soto Zen and it is the place where Steve Jobs almost became a monk ( see my story on nippon.com for detail ).
Looking back the visit, Cook summed up “It has been fabulous. We have we’ve talked to partners that are very big like Sony, very small, like the one that we are visiting(Inoue Ribbon Industry). We’ve talked to developers that are very large like Konami, and developers that are very small like Qoncept. I got to visit with the Prime Minister. I got to go in a classroom in Kumamoto and visit with kids that go to third grade learning how to learn in a new way. So it was very, very inspiring. So it’s been a super trip!”
Finally, I asked if he enjoyed Japanese food. He grinned hit his stomach and said “I ate a little too much.”
This article was originally written in Japanese for ELLE DECOR Japan. If there is any request from affiliated media, I’d be happy to give rights to reprint this English version of the text. I am a tech journalist covering the industry for more than 30 years but these days, I also do a lot of coverage of art and product/industrial design; Please check my bi-lingual posts on instagram.
