Mikasa, Inc. - 1995 dated Specimen Stock Certificate

Specimen Stock printed by American Bank Note Company United States Banknote Corporation. Incorporated in 1994.

A fast-growing retailer and wholesaler, Mikasa, Inc. sells causal and formal dinnerware, displaying its greatest strength in the casual segment of the market (settings that retail for less than $130). Mikasa sold its dinnerware and decorative accessories through wholesale accounts in the United States and abroad and through a network of approximately 150 U.S.-based factory outlet stores. Unlike many of its competitors, the company did not own manufacturing facilities. Instead, Mikasa contracted out designs to approximately 175 factories in 25 countries. Production was concentrated in Germany and Austria, where 30 percent of the company’s merchandise was manufactured. The flexibility engendered by contracting out production enabled Mikasa to introduce numerous patterns into the market each year and quickly expand production of designs that proved popular. During the 1990s, the company increasingly broadened its product categories, experimenting with cookware, bath accessories, and other decorative accessories for the home—all patterned after its popular dinnerware designs. The company was partly controlled during the late 1990s by chairman emeritus George Aratani, the son of Mikasa’s founder.

Mikasa’s predecessor was a company named All Star Trading, founded in 1936. The ties that connected All Star Trading and Mikasa were familial—the business legacy of the Aratani family. Setsuo Aratani, a Japanese-American, started All Star Trading as an import-export enterprise specializing in trade with Japan. When hostilities between Aratani’s source country and his supply country erupted on December 7, 1941, the business abruptly closed, but following World War II, Setsuo’s son George and a partner named Alfred Funabashi revived the trading company. The younger Aratani and Funabashi sold flash-frozen tuna and developed the company into one of the largest importers of toys, distributing its merchandise through a half-dozen department store chains on the East Coast. Before the end of the 1950s, the pair began concentrating on importing china made in Japan, using the trademark they adopted in the 1950s—“Mikasa,� Japanese for “three umbrellas.� The gradual move into the chinaware business evolved into the company’s exclusive occupation by the early 1960s. In 1965, the company’s path crossed with a young department store merchandiser named Alfred Blake, who was impressed by the Mikasa designs he saw while working with Hudson’s Bay stores in Canada. Blake’s interest was sufficient to prompt a career move. He joined Mikasa as a commissioned sales representative for western Canada in 1965, when the California-based company was collecting $5 million a year in sales. Blake’s esteem for Mikasa’s merchandise translated into high sales, fueling his promotion within the company’s sales ranks. When Alfred Funabashi died in 1976, the impressive Blake was named president and began working alongside George Aratani. Read more at https://www.encyclopedia.com/books/politics-and-business-magazines/mikasa-inc

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