Our Manufacturing History
Goriki Kogyo was founded in 1871. We started our business wholesaling cotton fiber and silk cocoons and then became involved in the munitions industry during World War II. Our turning point came just before the end of the war when we obtained by chance a machine that made split pins.
At that time there were no hair pin manufacturers in Japan of international standard and there was no manufacturing knowledge at all. It was necessary to first establish a manufacturing process.
Our first challenge was elasticity. If you merely bend the wire when it is heated it will warp outward during cooling. Therefore the hairpin can’t fulfill its role which is to hold hair. What’s the solution? After some trial and error we finally succeeded by improving the wire drawing process. By stretching the inside of the wire softly and the outside firmly, when the steel is heated it warps inward. With this discovery Goriki Kogyo’s hair pin gained more gripping strength.
We continued to pursue developments in every aspect of our machinery. The culmination of these efforts came in 1970 when Goriki developed the first fully automatic hairpin manufacturing machine in Japan. All that was required for this ground breaking machine was to set the wire and it would automatically handle everything from pressing, cutting, painting and baking.
Hairpin demand in Japan increased due to rapid economic growth and the dramatic increase in production efficiency afforded by this new machine greatly benefited our company.